Victim in Lake Mead barrel identified as Edward Lelburian Jackson after four years

Clark County coroner names the man found stuffed in a barrel in Lake Mead in 2022 as Edward Lelburian Jackson, shot dead decades earlier.

Lake Mead barrel victim identified as Edward 'Buddy' Jackson, killed in the 1970s or 80s

Four years after human remains were found stuffed inside a barrel in the receding waters of Lake Mead, investigators have named the victim. According to theguardian.com, Clark County coroner Melanie Rouse identified the man at a press conference on Thursday as Edward Lelburian Jackson, known to those around him as "Buddy."

"He also went by the name 'Buddy'," Rouse said, as a grainy photograph of a smiling, bearded man holding a baby was displayed behind her. Investigators believe he was in his mid to late 50s at the time of his death.

The case drew national attention in May 2022, when boaters discovered the barrel in shallow water near Hemenway Harbor at Lake Mead National Recreation Area. A subsequent autopsy determined Jackson had been killed by a single gunshot to the head. Based on the style of his clothing — a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes — investigators concluded he was likely murdered somewhere between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, a period during which organised crime had a significant foothold in Las Vegas.

In the years that followed, authorities released composite renderings of the victim's possible appearance and entered his description into a national missing persons database. They also searched crime databases for matching DNA and sent bone samples to a laboratory for genealogical analysis.

The breakthrough came this year, when a forensics team at Oklahoma State University, which had been working alongside investigators, obtained a strong DNA lead. Matching a sample from Jackson with one from a believed family member allowed the team to confirm his identity. "We were able to confirm that the remains were, in fact, Mr Jackson," Rouse said.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Lieutenant Robert Price said Jackson was originally from Arkansas and that detectives have found no connection linking him to the Las Vegas area. His family last saw him in the early 1980s. Records place him briefly in California, where he lived with his wife, and in Utah, where he faced charges of aggravated arson and a conspiracy fraud case.

Price addressed earlier speculation about organised crime ties directly. "There has been speculation in the past that the homicide had ties to an organised criminal group," he said. "At this point of our investigation, we don't have any information to support those theories." With the identification now confirmed, Price added, the investigation into who killed Jackson and why can move forward.

Jackson's remains were not the only ones to surface from Lake Mead in recent years. Falling water levels — driven by prolonged drought, overuse and rising temperatures — have progressively exposed areas of the reservoir that had been submerged for decades. A few days after the barrel was found in 2022, a television news crew from KLAS-TV located a second barrel nearby; it was empty. Shortly afterwards, paddleboarders came across human remains on a newly exposed sandbar, though officials found no evidence of foul play in that case. Additional remains discovered in August of the same year were also deemed to show no signs of foul play.

Historians and officials have cautioned that further discoveries are likely as water levels continue to fall. Lake Mead and the upstream Lake Powell are the two largest human-made reservoirs in the United States, supplying Colorado River water to more than 40 million people, as well as tribal communities, agriculture and industry across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and into Mexico.

Source: Google News IE — Crime (en)