After 40 years, the headless torso found in an Idaho cave has been identified through DNA records as that of an outlaw who killed his second wife with an ax and who was last seen after he escaped from jail in 1916.
Clark County Sheriff Bart May told CBS News Tuesday the cold case will likely remain open as it's not yet known who killed the outlaw, identified as Joseph Henry Loveless. Law enforcement officials were, however, able to notify one of the man's surviving relatives, an 87-year-old grandson.
The torso was found on Aug. 26, 1979, by a family looking for arrowheads in Buffalo Cave, located near Dubois, Idaho. Loveless' remains were found wrapped in burlap and buried in a shallow grave.
No more clues surfaced until 1991 when a girl found a mummified hand while she was exploring the cave. Investigators then started excavating and found an arm and two legs, also wrapped in burlap.
Anthropology students and staffers from Idaho State University worked on the case, along with experts from the Smithsonian Institution and the FBI. Earlier this year, ISU and Clark County turned to the DNA Doe Project, which uses DNA data to identify people.
Through testing, it was determined that the "Buffalo Cave John Doe" was a descendant of Mormon pioneers from Utah and that his likely grandfather had been a polygamist with four wives and his relatives numbered in the hundreds.
Through newspaper records and other archives, they learned that his gravestone was a cenotaph, or a stone whose grave does not contain a body.
It was determined that his second wife had been murdered, but the suspect was another man, Walt Cairns. But in another article about the funeral, one of her children said it was his father, Loveless, who was in jail for the murder, and that he would be escaping soon.
The project team eventually determined that the man was born on Dec. 3, 1870, in the Utah Territory to Mormon pioneers and was knowns as a criminal who used several aliases, including the one of Walt Cairns. He was also notorious for escaping from jails.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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