Duck hunter finds human remains 43 years ago in WA, officials say. DNA identifies them
UPDATE: This article has been updated after Snohomish County officials corrected the date in which they officially identified the remains. They identified him on Feb. 10, 2023.
The corrected article appears below:
A duck hunter in 1979 found skeletal remains tangled in a fishing line near a Washington island, officials said.
The case went unsolved for 43 years until DNA testing identified the remains as 29-year-old Gary Lee Haynie, the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office said in a March 2 news release.
His remains were first discovered Jan. 3, 1979, on tide flats near Spencer Island, south of Marysville.
At the time, Snohomish County deputies didn’t find any suspicious circumstances around the remains, and the county medical examiner ruled the cause of death as undetermined.
The remains were not identified, so they were buried as a “John Doe” at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Everett, officials said.
Case reopens, investigation continues
Decades later, officials with the Snohomish sheriff’s office went digging in unsolved cases. In 2015, the remains were exhumed from the cemetery and given to the county medical examiner.
A forensic odontologist took dental radiographs and uploaded them to the National Crime Information Center database to see if the records would match any missing persons.
But no matches turned up.
The case was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a federal database.
By 2016, the remains were also looked at Washington State Forensic Anthropologist at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The doctor released some information about the remains, including that they were believed to belong to a white man who was between 27 and 61 years old and estimated to be between 5 feet, 2 inches and 5 feet, 6 inches tall.
In 2018, the right femur was extracted for DNA and added to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, officials said. But a match wasn’t made in that system either.
Private lab uses genome sequencing
Then in 2021, an advanced DNA profile was taken by Othram, a private lab.
A DNA profile was created using forensic-grade genome sequencing and then added to genealogical databases. It got several matches through GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, officials said.
One of the top matches included Haynie, who had been missing from Everett since the late 1970s though “the circumstances of his disappearance are not known.”
DNA testing of his half-sister led investigators to confirm the remains belonged to Haynie.
A medical examiner officially identified the remains Feb. 10, 2023.
Haynie was from Topeka, Kansas. He liked to play piano and listen to the Beatles. He also had traveled the world with his mother and adoptive father, officials said.
This story was originally published March 6, 2023 at 10:56 AM with the headline "Duck hunter finds human remains 43 years ago in WA, officials say. DNA identifies them."
