The 1979 & 1991 Buffalo Cave Discoveries
In 1979, family members hunting for arrowheads and civil war relics inside Buffalo Cave—a remote volcanic lava tube located near Dubois in Clark County, Idaho—discovered human remains wrapped in a decaying burlap sack stuffed inside an alcove. The remains consisted solely of a headless, limbless human torso.
Twelve years later, in 1991, an 11-year-old girl exploring the same cave system discovered a partially mummified human hand and arm protruding from a rock crevice. Clark County Sheriff's deputies and anthropologists excavated the area, discovering two legs and the matching arm wrapped in burlap sacks and decaying burlap cloth. The skull was never found.
Anthropological Examination & The Century-Old Mystery
Forensic anthropologists from Idaho State University, led by Dr. Samantha Blatt, and the Smithsonian Institution examined the remains. The decedent was a White male of European descent, standing approximately 5 feet 11 inches tall, with reddish-brown hair flecked with gray.
Skeletal analysis revealed that the decedent had been dismembered with an axe, saw, and heavy butcher's knife shortly after death. The clothing consisted of a dark wool suit coat, white collared shirt, and denim overalls. While investigators initially believed the body was a 20th-century homicide, radiocarbon dating and garment construction placed the death around 1916. He was cataloged in NamUs as UP8046.
The Oldest Forensic Genealogy Solve in History
In 2019, the Clark County Sheriff's Office partnered with Anthony Redgrave, Lee Bingham Redgrave, and the DNA Doe Project to attempt genetic genealogy on century-old bone fragments. Despite extreme taphonomic degradation, modern extraction protocols yielded a functional SNP profile.
Genealogists traced candidate trees back through 19th-century pioneer lines in Utah and Idaho. In December 2019, authorities announced that Buffalo Cave John Doe was Joseph Henry Loveless, an outlaw, bootlegger, and counterfeit artist born in Payson, Utah Territory, on December 3, 1870. The case established a world record as the oldest unidentified forensic homicide victim ever resolved via investigative genetic genealogy.