He was murdered 42 years ago in the northern Michigan backwoods -- a young man shot five times and left by his killer, at the base of a pine tree near the town of Trout Lake, to be found months later by a party of deer hunters.
The Canadian coins found in the victim's pocket led investigators to suspect the unidentified man was from the Ontario side of the border. A type of key ring more common in Canada reinforced the theory.
Now, a determined Michigan State Police detective -- frustrated by what he calls the "mishandling" of the case and the destruction of vital evidence in an office cleanout 20 years ago -- has pulled together the handful of clues that remain and revived the probe into the 1966 killing, hoping at least to find out who the dead man was.
"I don't want to pass up the opportunity of connecting this person to his family," Sgt. Robin Sexton told Canwest News Service on Monday. "I'm sure they want to know what happened to their son or brother."
Sexton has a simple philosophy about cold cases.
"As far as I'm concerned, every case is solvable," he says. "Detectives -- we collect everything. We're pack rats. We just don't get rid of things. Other people charged with administrative matters say we've got to get rid of things."
And in 1989, that's what happened. Evidence gathered at the scene of the crime when the body was found in November 1966 -- including the victim's clothing and his scanty personal possessions -- were hauled out of a police storage area and tossed in the garbage.
"I'll be real candid about it," said Sexton, describing how he came across a file indicating the case had been closed and the evidence trashed. "It was not handled properly. It was closed and it shouldn't have been."
But what he discovered next was worse.
"We can't find the body," he said. "We have no idea where the body disappeared to. It was sent down to the University of Michigan, and they don't know what happened to it -- and now we're going back 40 some years."
He added: "With DNA, we probably could have solved this. But now we don't have that either."
Undeterred, Sexton contacted a forensics expert who had worked on the case four decades earlier.
"I was fortunate to be able to track down the professor who did the anatomical study of it. He said, 'Yeah, I vaguely remember the case'."
Then, finally, a bit of luck: "He'd taken a picture of the remains," said the detective. "And he sent me a box of slides."
From the photographs, a police artist was able to produce sketches of the victim's face and profile.