Las Vegas police have identified a man whose bullet-riddled remains were found stuffed in a barrel at Lake Mead in 2022, ending more than four decades of mystery.
Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse on Thursday named the victim as Edward Lelburian Jackson, an Arkansas man who was in his 50s when he was executed by a single gunshot to the head. Advanced investigative genetic genealogy finally cracked the cold case that had stumped authorities for decades.
“We were able to confirm that the remains were in fact Edward Jackson,” Rouse said.
Jackson’s family told investigators that he loved to travel and had a nomadic lifestyle that made his absence unremarkable. They never reported him missing.
“They knew that he had traveled the country, would show up when he showed up, just to say hi,” said Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department homicide Lt. Robert Price. “But they didn’t think anything other than that. They just figured he was out and about.”
When boaters discovered the rusted barrel in May 2022, the grisly find immediately revived speculation about Las Vegas’s bloody mob era. Jackson had been involved in criminal activity in Salt Lake City during the 1980s, and the barrel method of disposal is widely associated with organized crime killings.
Price, however, said detectives have not yet found any direct evidence linking the slaying to the mob, though they have not ruled it out either.
“It will never be closed until we solve it,” Price urged.
Investigators believe Jackson was shot in the early 1980s before being sealed inside the drum. At the time of his death, he was dressed in a short-sleeve button-down shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white sneakers.
Before the identification, The Mob Museum in Las Vegas had floated theories that the body might belong to one of three notorious underworld figures who vanished without trace: George “Jay” Vandermark, a cheat gambler who monitored slot machines at the Stardust casino; William Crespo, a drug runner turned federal informant; or Johnny Pappas, a casino insider who owned a boat on Lake Mead. All three disappeared and were never found.
The same genetic mapping technique that identified Jackson, called investigative genetic genealogy, has produced other high-profile breakthroughs this week alone. The method, which compares a victim’s genetic profile with publicly available ancestry databases, also helped identify a second victim of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in New York City. It was the same technology used to catch Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann.
The 2022 discovery came as Lake Mead’s water level plunged to historic lows due to relentless overuse, severe drought and scorching temperatures. The receding waters of the 90-year-old reservoir have been exposing long-submerged secrets, and historians predict more bodies will emerge.
Several other sets of human remains surfaced at Lake Mead in 2022. Skeletal remains found in May were later identified as a 2002 drowning victim. Remains discovered in August belonged to a 52-year-old Las Vegas man who disappeared in 1998, while bones found in October were tied to a 1974 drowning accident, according to county officials. More human remains were uncovered as recently as this August.
Lake Mead and upstream Lake Powell are the largest man-made reservoirs in the US, anchoring a vast system that delivers Colorado River water to more than 40 million people across eight states and into Mexico. The plummeting waterline exposed Las Vegas’s main drinking intake in 2022, forcing regional authorities to activate a deep-lake reservoir built in 2020 to supply the region’s 2.4 million residents, suburban sprawl and 40 million annual tourists.