(Tribune News Service) — More than four decades after a body was found partially buried in a Florida park, the man has been identified as a U.S. Marine, a Vietnam War veteran and a father.

In December 1980, a body was found in a partially dug hole in Pomona Park, Putnam County Sheriff H.D. “Gator” Deloach III said in a March 8 news conference.

The body, determined to be a white man with brown hair by a medical examiner, had blunt force trauma to his chest and there was a gunshot wound to his neck, the sheriff said.

The case was ruled a homicide, Deloach said, but the identity of the man was unknown.

He was wearing a shirt with “Dallas” on it, which a man who worked as a driver for a labor camp had seen before, the sheriff said.

The man told investigators he had picked up a white man wearing that shirt, along with three other men, from a Daily Bread in Orlando as transient workers and had brought them to his labor camp, according to the sheriff.

The man had worked at the camp for three days before disappearing, Deloach said.

With nothing else to go on, the case went cold, and the man was buried under the name John Doe 36, according to the sheriff.

Last year, Capt. Chris Stallings took on the cold case and sent the remains to Othram Labs, a Texas-based genetic sequencing company, in hopes of finding any living relatives, he said at the news conference.

The remains were in poor shape, the sheriff said, and investigators were not optimistic when the remains arrived in Texas in June.

But by September, the laboratory had started to create a genetic profile for the unidentified man and realized he had living relatives, Stallings said.

One of the suspected relatives provided a DNA sample that was used to confirm what the investigators believed — the man was his missing brother.

William Irving Monroe III was a former U.S. Marine, a veteran of the Vietnam War and the father of two who was last seen in 1979, the sheriff said.

His family had traveled around the country and moved around a lot, Stallings said, so members of the family had lost contact with each other over time.

This included Monroe, who was divorced from his wife and living on his own, the captain said.

He and his former wife had lived off and on in Pomona Park, Stallings said, and he was not a migrant worker like they previously thought.

“For years, (the Monroe family) was working on the assumption that their brother and father had been missing and perhaps had been murdered down in the ( U.S.) Virgin Islands,” Deloach said. “We now know unequivocally that that is not the case, and while this might just be another piece of the puzzle, it now gives them the peace to know that we have identified their brother.”

The sheriff said the family had hired a private investigator when Monroe first went missing, but since he moved around, nothing was ever found on his whereabouts.

Monroe was never formally reported as a missing person, the sheriff said.

Due to his veteran status, the sheriff’s office is working with veteran services to obtain a military headstone at Monroe’s grave, Deloach said.

©2024 The Charlotte Observer.

Visit charlotteobserver.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.