Editors Note: This article was originally published in the Nov. 15, 2023 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
Almost nothing is known about the bones.
Especially to whom they belong.
They were reportedly discovered in 1958, somewhere near Kanosh, but not on tribal land.
Who found them, in what conditions were they discovered, and what local authorities did to try to identify them remains unknown.
No police reports, no news accounts, no missing persons reports. Nothing.
No one even knows for sure where the bones were stored after 1958— only that by May 1979 the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner was notified of their existence and took delivery of the skeletal remains.
The bones lay in the medical examiner’s office until 1984, when they were given to the University of Utah’s Anthropology Department, where they sat in a locked cabinet, perhaps used periodically as a teaching tool for students of skeletal anatomy, until 2010, when they were reunited with the medical examiner’s office again.
A decade later the sheriff’s office was contacted about the bones—an anthropological study was completed on them in 2020—and, per a 2018 state law, a local deputy dutifully entered what little information was gleaned from the remains into multiple databases, including the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
That’s when a name popped up— an automatic comparison conducted by the database, a suggestion to whom the bones belong.
That name was Everett Ruess.
Ruess is at the center of an enduring mystery, one that has captivated lovers of Southwest art, literature and history since the 20-year-old poet vagabond went missing from his Davis Gulch campsite on the Escalante River in November 1934.
It would be a stunning development should Ruess be the man to whom the Kanosh bones belong— but not the first time in the modern forensic era a set of Utah remains were said to be his.
Everett Ruess, dog Curly and a burro on the West Rim Trail in Zion National Park in 1931.
DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES?
NamUs features this brief anthropological description: the bones belong to a white male, height 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet 2 inches tall, an age estimated between 25 and 35 years old.
The remains feature evidence of some pre-death trauma and disease that “suggests the decedent was a working cowboy or rodeo athlete, who may have been knock-kneed,” the database reports.
Skull fractures supposedly recorded from the remains portend a potentially nefarious end as well.
The Chronicle Progress attempted to obtain the anthropological report, but it is being withheld from the public, classified as only for law enforcement purposes for now.
An investigator with the state medical examiner’s office was contacted, but told the newspaper she could not answer any “case-specific” questions. A set of general questions were relayed, but the investigator was unable to provide comment by press deadline.
Capt. Pat Bennett at the Millard County Sheriff’s Office did provide some insight—but mostly about how little he could find out about the Kanosh bones.
The captain said he scoured old sheriff’s records from the time period, spoke to older, retired deputies and detectives and has had no luck piecing together the history of the bones.
He even researched a digital newspaper archive that includes old issues of the Delta Chronicle and Fillmore Progress, with no luck. A physical search of Fillmore Progress newspapers from 1958, conducted last week by the Chronicle Progress, also yielded zero clues as to whose bones were found in 1958, where and by whom.
“We don’t even know who transported them to the medical examiner’s office,” the sheriff’s captain said.
Bennett was the deputy who entered the bones into NamUs sometime in February 2020, after the medical examiner’s office first notified the sheriff’s office of their existence.
“That’s when I was made aware of these remains…I had no idea about any of them,” he recalled. “I entered them into NamUs after receiving that information and started rolling forward with trying to get these identified.”
Bennett is no stranger to the task— he led the identification effort on a 42-year-old Millard County cold case involving the remains of a woman once known only as Toothless Jane Doe, a murder victim dumped at an Interstate 15 interchange near Cove Fort in 1979.
In August 2021, successful DNA testing conducted by a lab at the University of North Texas provided Bennett a positive ID of the woman—her name was Sandra Louise Matott, a 37-year-old from Salt Lake City.
No one was ever charged with her slaying.
Another Texas lab is assisting with the effort to identify the Kanosh bones. A crowdfunding pitch that appeared online recently pointed the public’s attention to the forgotten case.
Bennett said he started communicating with the lab after taking the Kanosh bones case to the state’s cold case review board, a group of law enforcement investigators and others—one board member is even with NamUs—last October to seek out ideas for what to do next.
A board member suggested the captain contact a Houston-area testing company named Othram, which he did last December.
“They let me know they could do the crowdfunding avenue to help pay for testing,” he said.
Othram, it is hoped, will have better luck than a high-tech University of Colorado effort did on another set of old bones, also thought to have been the remains of Ruess.
That story started with an old Indian’s tale of murder in the desert.
A SOUTHWEST MURDER STORY
His name was Aneth Nez. He was a Navajo man who carried a secret for 37 years.
But he was ready to cleanse his conscience one day and asked his granddaughter to accompany him to a rocky crevice at Comb Ridge, near Bluff, Utah. He needed a lock of a dead man’s hair for a ceremony he wished to perform—and he explained to his granddaughter why he knew where a body was buried.
In the 1930s Nez was a young man. And he told his granddaughter that he had witnessed two Ute Indians kill a young white man on the desert, supposedly to steal his donkeys. After the murder, Nez took it upon himself to bury the victim, stuffing his body in the crevice above Chinle Wash.
That body was still there when another relative, Nez’s grandson, went in search of it in 2008.
By 2009, a strong suspicion developed that these could be the bones of Ruess, the missing poet vagabond.
Facial reconstruction followed by photographic comparisons and finally DNA samples from surviving Ruess relatives culminated in an astounding announcement—the bones above Chinle Wash were the long lost artist’s.
The announcement followed testing from a pair of University of Colorado researchers.
Using new genetic testing techniques at the time, the researchers compared DNA from the Chinle Wash bones to DNA from Ruess’ surviving nieces and nephews—there was a 25 percent match, the exact percentage one would expect when comparing an uncle to a nephew or niece.
A few Utah experts, however, were not convinced and urged a second set of tests by another lab—they noted the teeth on the Chinle Wash remains showed signs the person consumed a typical Native American diet, for example.
The second laboratory used for follow-up testing was the Maryland-based Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL). Scientists there tested the remains and in October 2009 came up with a totally different identification—the remains from Chinle Wash were indeed Native American.
In fact, by March 2010, the lab put a name to the bones, they were from a missing man named Joe Santistevan.
By that time the Colorado researchers had also realized a series of blunders led to a glitch in the software they had used for their own DNA testing. It had caused a false positive.
The Ruess mystery endured.
But maybe not for very much longer.
THE DEAD SPEAK THROUGH SCIENCE
Dr. David Mittelman called the Chronicle Progress within five minutes of receiving a message seeking comment. He is the founder and CEO of Othram. His lab has the DNA from the Kanosh bones.
And considering Othram’s track record, identification is imminent.
“We are the only folks in the U.S. that has this completely end-to-end, entirely in-house process; we’ve engineered it from scratch…We announced five case solves this week already, in the last four days,” he said.
Mittelman said his company, founded in 2018, uses a proprietary forensic-grade genome sequencing process that yields a robust set of data about a person’s DNA, which makes it much easier to narrow down a person’s identity from available genetic genealogy databases.
“So you’ve got this guy in the Utah mountains and it’s a pretty old case, not a problem. We recently identified a guy that had drowned off the coast of Australia and spent 95 years in the salt water and it was no problem,” the CEO scientist said. “We’ve been able to do some pretty wild stuff.”
Just a glance at Othram’s website, where a page is dedicated to the company’s casework, highlights its successes and shows the impact this one company is having in communities across the U.S. and Canada.
It lists dozens and dozens and dozens of people whose identities it was able to confirm or assist police in confirming—from accident victims to murder victims to murder suspects, even.
There’s 16-year-old murder victim Pauline Brazeau, whose body was found in 1976 near Calgary, Canada. Her identification was confirmed after material was submitted to Othram in 2022—it led to a suspect in her murder as well.
There’s Lonnie Raymond Thomas, whose remains were discovered in 1980 in California. He wasn’t positively identified until after Othram received DNA material for testing in 2022.
There’s Denise Gail Cruz, whose unidentified remains were found in California in 1980. She was later positively identified after Othram received material for testing in December 2022.
And the IDs keep coming and coming.
“It’s all we do. We don’t do medical testing or research or anything. It’s the only thing we do,” Mittelman said. “This is a method we developed. It’s just really sensitive, gets lots of data. And it works on evidence that repeatedly fails other methods. It’s a really robust way to get things to work… You may have evidence that’s considered unusable and it works for us.”
Of the Kanosh bones, Mittelman said he has a good DNA sample. He said Othram took the case knowing there was no funding for testing, but that crowdfunding tools could unlock the secrets just as well.
“Some of these older cases, that have historical interest, of course the family is still hoping for answers or whatever else can be gleaned. But they don’t necessarily have funding. So the cases that don’t have funding, we’ll stick them on (the website) DNA Solves. And on DNA Solves, we’ll crowdfund to raise the money to work the case. And that’s what we’re doing in this case,” he said. “I hate to see any case left behind…I know this case can be solved. I know the DNA is good. It drives me nuts to think the only reason it’s not going to be solved is there’s no funding. So we are crowdfunding it.”
A web page dedicated to funding the testing on the Kanosh bones is live on DNASolves.com (https://dnasolves.com/articles/millard-county-1958-john-doe/contribute). It has already raised $1,635 to cover the $7,500 cost of testing.
A few thousand dollars more and a near century-old mystery may finally be solved—or the lid to an altogether new mystery might blow wide open.
Houston-based Othram uses a proprietary technique to help authorities identify human remains. It solved five cases last week.
A CEASELESS SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
Ruess was born in Oakland, Calif., in March 1914 to parents Christopher and Stella Knight Ruess. He had an older brother named Waldo, who died in 2006.
The last letter the family received from Ruess recounted plans the young artist had to explore some ancient cliff dwellings, that he’d be out of communication for about 10 weeks.
Three months went by and eventually the family made a desperate plea for help.
A letter the family wrote to authorities reached a Garfield County commissioner whose wife happened to be the postmistress of the Escalante post office. The commissioner organized a search party in February 1935 and went looking for Ruess.
A campsite, a corral and the missing man’s donkeys were discovered at Davis Gulch on the Escalante River. An inscription carved nearby read simply, “NEMO Nov 1934.”
By the summer of 1935, after more searches, including one by plane, Ruess was believed to be lost forever, speculation mounting that he’d perished in a flash flood or fell from a cliff. His family was informed official efforts to find the young artist would cease.
Ruess reached cult status eventually, signifying a free spirit wandering the wilderness, escaping civilization’s rules and restraints, living his dream as only he could.
The LA Times described him in a May 2009 article as having roamed the “Southwest for four years, sending home elegant letters to his family, composing poems, and producing intricate wood carvings. Despite his young age, he was a confidant to Western artists, including Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams.”
A number of books have been written about Ruess and his mysterious disappearance. A list of those, along with lots of other information about the man, can be found online at a website dedicated to his memory: everettruess.net/
Whether Ruess will join Toothless Jane Doe in finally retrieving his name remains to be seen.
The Kanosh bones are among three sets of human remains from Millard County that don’t have a name.
The other two are more contemporary discoveries.
One is from 1983 and involves an unidentified 20- to 30-year-old white male. According to a NamUs entry regarding the person, officials report the man may have been a transient who was seen in June 1983 getting off a stalled freight train and attempting to cross a flooded Sevier River.
“The transient fell in the river and was washed away; the body was never found. A skull was found in the Sevier River in December 1983,” according to the NamUs entry for that case.
The second involves human remains discovered in December 2011 along the shore of Sevier Lake. The body was that of a white male age 40 to 60.
“Geologists working on a drilling rig found the decedent on the shore of Sevier Lake in a very remote part of Millard County,” the man’s NamUs entry reports. “How long the decedent has been dead is difficult to determine due to the unique environment he was found in. He could have been dead before the summer of 2011 or up to 15 years. The height range is 66 inches to 71 inches tall.”
Authorities detail the man’s clothing in the NamUs database, complete with photos.
Judging by a cap found alongside his bones, like Ruess, this person was likely from California.
