Body found in 1986 identified as man who left home to travel 4 years earlier, cops say
A body has been identified after remaining a mystery for almost four decades, Tennessee officials said.
On Aug. 24, 1986, hunters were walking along an isolated and abandoned trail in Caney Valley, according to a June 7 news release from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
They stumbled upon skeletal remains, thought to be between six months and a year old. State officials identified them as belonging to a white male, between 30 and 40 years old.
Officials also discovered that he had been shot, and classified the body as a homicide.
Law enforcement followed the leads it had, but after hitting dead ends, the case went cold and the body remained a “John Doe.”
In 2015, the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center submitted DNA from the unidentified man to a human identification center that created a DNA profile, officials said. The profile was uploaded into the Combined DNA Index System and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
No results came back, officials said.
Not wanting to give up, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents got a sample of the remains and sent them to Othram Inc., a private Texas company, for genealogical DNA testing.
The testing looked for potential living relatives of the unidentified man, officials said.
“A TBI intelligence analyst used that information to locate potential family members in Arkansas,” according to the release. “Agents made contact with two of those individuals and confirmed they had a brother they had not heard from in more than four decades.”
They finally had a match.
The human identification center used the genealogy and DNA profile to positively identify the body as Jerry Harrison, who was born in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, officials said.
Harrison’s family said he last contacted them in 1982 when he left to travel around the country. They never knew what happened to him.
“Now, TBI special agents are hoping the public can help provide information that may help solve the murder of Jerry Harrison,” officials said in the release.
Law enforcement is asking anyone who may have known who Harrison was with before his death to call 1-800-TBI-FIND.
Harrison’s body was found in Claiborne County, about 50 miles north of Knoxville.
This story was originally published June 7, 2023 at 3:43 PM with the headline "Body found in 1986 identified as man who left home to travel 4 years earlier, cops say."
