The partial remains were identified as those of Walter Karl Kinney, 59, who vanished over 25 years ago.

Salmon Creek beach in northern California.Getty Images / iStockphoto

A family was looking for seashells on the Salmon Creek Beach in Sonoma County in June 2022 when they came across a long bone that contained surgical hardware, the DNA Doe Project said in a news release.

The agency and its partners worked for years on the case and identified the remains as those of Walter Karl Kinney, 59, a former banker who lived nearby in Santa Rosa.

“Thank you to the DNA Doe Project for helping us put a name to the human remains found at Salmon Creek Beach,” the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post last week. “We value this partnership as we continue working together to identify remains found in Sonoma County.”

The DNA Doe Project said that after the bone was found, a DNA profile was developed for the then-unidentified man. In January, the profile was uploaded to the GEDmatch database, a DNA site built for genetic genealogy research.

A team working on the case began to make headway shortly afterward, the DNA Doe Project said, and they found a family that had moved from the East Coast to the San Diego area. As the team looked into the family, they came across Kinney’s name.

The DNA Doe Project said there was a “critical breakthrough” in the case when the team found an article about human remains that had washed ashore in 1999, south of Bodega Bay. The team had also learned that in 2003, a woman got in touch with investigators about her father, who had been missing since August 1999.

Shortly after the woman contacted police in 2003, the remains found in 1999 were identified using x-ray records as her father. This information helped the team connect both sets of remains to Kinney.

DNA Doe team lead Traci Onders said the case is one of the most “unusual” that she’s worked on.

“It’s not often we see someone end up as a John Doe twice,” Onders said in a statement. “But thanks to investigative genetic genealogy, we were able to resolve this mystery and provide some answers to everyone involved in this case.”

Kinney’s daughter remembered her father as “smart, sensitive, almost to a fault”, and said that “this world was just too harsh a place for him,” the DNA Doe Project said.