Police reveal identity of man found in a barrel in drought-stricken Lake Mead

After four years, a piece of the haunting mystery uncovered in the waning waters of drought-stricken Lake Mead has been solved.

Since the remains of an unknown homicide victim were discovered stuffed inside a barrel in 2022, Las Vegas investigators have been searching not for his killer – but for his identity. At a press conference on Thursday, Clark county coroner Melanie Rouse shared his name publicly for the first time: Edward Lelburian Jackson.

“He also went by the name ‘Buddy’,” Rouse said, as a grainy picture of a smiling and bearded man holding a baby flashed on a screen behind her. They believe he was in his mid to late-50s.

The decades-old murder sparked nationwide attention after the remains were discovered in the shallow waters by boaters in 2022 near Hemenway Harbor at Lake Mead National Recreation area. An initial autopsy revealed the man had been killed by a single shot to the head. Investigators determined he was likely killed in the mid-1970s to early 1980s – an era when organized crime ran rampant in Las Vegas – due to the style of his clothing.

In the years since he was found, authorities revealed he had been wearing a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes. They also released composite renderings of what he may have looked like, in the hopes that someone might come forward with information.

Behind the scenes though, they searched for his DNA in crime databases, uploaded his description into a national missing persons database, and sent bone samples to a lab to obtain a genealogy profile.

A break in the case didn’t come until this year, when a forensics team at Oklahoma State University, which had partnered with investigators, received a strong lead. With a DNA sample from Jackson and his believed family member, “we were able to confirm that the remains were, in fact, Mr. Jackson,” Rouse said.

Jackson was from Arkansas, Las Vegas Metropolitan police department Lt Robert Price said, adding that detectives have not yet found a single thing that would tie him to the Las Vegas area. His family last saw him in the early 80s and there are records of him in California, where he briefly lived with his wife, and in Utah, where he was charged with aggravated arson and a conspiracy fraud case.

“There has been speculation in the past that the homicide had ties to an organized criminal group,” Price said. “At this point of our investigation, we don’t have any information to support those theories.”

Now that he has been identified, Price added, the investigation into what happened – and who was responsible – for Jackson’s murder can continue.

Jackson’s remains weren’t the only ones uncovered from Lake Mead in recent years, as its water levels reached historic lows due to years of overuse, longstanding drought and increasing temperatures. The water level of the 90-year-old reservoir has continually dropped, exposing areas that were previously underwater and leading historians to predict more bodies will be found.

A few days after the barrel was discovered, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty. Shortly after that, paddleboarders discovered human remains on a newly surfaced sand bar, but officials found no evidence of foul play.

In August, more human remains were discovered and police again determined there was no evidence of foul play.

Lake Mead and the upstream Lake Powell are the largest human-made reservoirs in the US, part of a system that provides Colorado River water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.

The Associated Press and Uwa Ede-Osifo contributed reporting