Officials from Las Vegas on Thursday revealed the name of a homicide victim whose body was found in a barrel that surfaced from Lake Mead in 2022.
The Clark County commissioner, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the county coroner’s office took turns at a news conference to announce the discovery, which they said was made possible by four years of collaboration between the agencies and the forensic science department at Oklahoma State University.
The authorities say the man who was found was killed in the 1980s, and was in his mid- to late 50s. On Thursday they put a name to that outline: Edward Jackson, who also went by “Buddy” and was from Arkansas.
His DNA was collected from the barrel in 2022, but there wasn’t anything to cross-reference it with to confirm his identity, according to Melanie Rouse, the Clark County coroner.
The DNA was sent to an F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Va., according to Ms. Rouse, and a 3-D composite image was made of the man’s face. The images were publicized in 2023 and uploaded to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Database along with images of the clothing the man was wearing when he was killed.
According to Ms. Rouse, the coroner’s office asked for help from the Forensic Science Department at Oklahoma State University for genealogy profiling. With an assist from the Las Vegas Police, a family member was found last year and provided a DNA sample that confirmed Mr. Jackson’s identity.
Lt. Robert Price, a Las Vegas homicide detective, said the only information available at the beginning of the investigation had been that the victim, wearing clothing from the early 1980s, had a single bullet wound to the head.
Because of the genealogy work at O.S.U., it was determined Mr. Jackson was from Arkansas, and members of his family were contacted.
Family members told law enforcement officials that Mr. Jackson was known for traveling widely, and with his frequent travels and distance from family, no one reported him missing. Mr. Price said that the last time the family remembered seeing Mr. Jackson was in Arkansas in the early 1980s.
With the new information, homicide detectives will continue to investigate and “work diligently” to solve the crime, Mr. Price said. He called upon the public and anyone who may have known Edward Jackson to come forward with any information.
The number of human remains found at Lake Mead, the country’s largest man-made reservoir, increased dramatically in 2022 after the reservoir’s waters receded during a drought.
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