In 1998, someone riding a horse on Clam Beach found a chunk of bone and called the police. 

The sheriff’s office did what they could; an anthropologist determined it was human, that it was the top of a skull, and that it came from a man. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office sent a DNA sample to the Combined DNA Index System, a DNA database maintained by the FBI. It wasn’t a match with any DNA from any missing people in that database, and there the trail ended. 

But 30 years on, DNA technology has improved to the point where there’s a chance that person could be identified. 

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office has been working with Othram, a company that helps solve cold cases with DNA matching. Though this particular case is still currently in the works, Othram has helped HCSO solve six previous cases over the last two years, including identifying a victim of serial killer Wayne Adam Ford. 

One victim was in her mid-twenties when she was killed by Ford, dismembered and thrown into Ryan Slough in 1997. Her torso was found by a duck hunter in October of that year, and no one knew who she was until 2023. According to HCSO cold case investigator Mike Fridley, even Ford tried helping police identify her after he turned himself in in 1998.

But she had a cousin who had sent their DNA to 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer DNA testing company that analyzes DNA samples for genetic markers and estimates a customer’s ancestry, and Othram managed to find that link. 

Fridley reached out to the cousin and asked if he had any missing relatives. He said he had: One of his cousins, Kerry Ann Cummings, had been missing since the ‘90s, when police found the remains. Fridley found her sister, sent her DNA to the Department of Justice, and waited. 

“They never tell you that this is a direct relative,” Fridley said. “They give you odds. This one was something like a 360 million to one chance that it wasn’t a direct relative, which is basically 100 percent.”

Fridley has been one of HCSO’s cold case investigators for about four years. He worked for HCSO before this chapter of his life began for 30 years, retiring as a lieutenant. Retirement got a little stale, Fridley thought working on cold cases would be interesting, and he decided he’d come back. It’s a frustrating job with its own set of benefits. Identifying missing people can be “kind of a high,” Fridley said.

The Clam Beach remains aren’t nearly as simple a nut to crack. What Othram has managed to figure out is that the closest direct ancestor they can find to whoever that person was is a woman named Catherine Francis Prince, a member of the Bear River Tribe. Although Fridley would love to simply just ask her about any missing relatives she has, she was born in 1843, and although she lived a pretty long life, it wasn’t quite long enough to answer that question.

The process of finding these closest direct relatives is a long one. Researchers start with the DNA they’ve managed to extract from the dead, then compare it with their DNA databases, vast troves of data composed of DNA samples from millions of people. Some of that data is from companies like 23andMe, some of it from government indices. Hopefully, they find a relative. Sometimes it’s a close one, sometimes it’s a third or a fourth cousin a few steps removed. 

Investigators then move to looking at public records to find missing relatives of that match, and then try to get a DNA sample from the closest living family member of that person. If someone has long been deceased, there might be a grandchild or a niece around to test. Fridley is looking for anyone related to Prince to hopefully find a closer relative that might know of any missing relatives. 

There are no certainties in this game, no easy solutions. There’s a possibility that the remains from Clam Beach are from an burial site, or even washed up here from far away. According to Fridley, there are even times when people who jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge will wind up on Humboldt’s beaches, grisly gifts from the ocean’s currents and temperamental storm swells. 

Fridley said there had been a large amount of public interest in the Clam Beach case. Amateur genealogists have reached out to him offering help reconstructing family trees, and Prince’s relatives have offered their genetic codes. 

It wasn’t too difficult to find some of them. Fridley said that the person working for the Bear River Band he called to ask about Prince’s ancestry turned out to be her great-great-nephew. But no one on one side of the family can figure out anyone that’s missing. That means investigators have to go up a couple rungs on the genetic ladder to Prince’s grandparents, people born in the 18th century whose existence may never have generated any records, so they can figure out who the other side of the family is and ask them if anyone ever went missing. It’s a two-step dance that always ends in a backpedal. 

Even if the identity of the dead man from Clam Beach is ever discovered, Fridley probably won’t get to take it off of Humboldt County’s missing persons list if he’s on there. An intimidating document with over 150 people listed, it doesn’t do much to allay Humboldt’s reputation as a place where people wind up and then vanish. 

There are some factors that make that list so long. Humboldt has many millions of acres of forest and ocean and rivers, places where it’s easy to die and never reappear. Many were casualties of cannabis-related violence in the ‘80s. Some people move here, stop calling their family, and then get added to the list when their family files a missing persons report. But even when people do find identifiable human remains, they often stay on the list. If only a chunk of them is found, and their DNA is removed from the databases, then any of their body parts found in the future won’t turn up as a match.

“When I first started doing this, I had a case where they recovered the guy’s head,” Fridley said. “I’m, like, ‘Well, we could take him out of the system. He can’t live without a head. He’s dead.’ And the sergeant said [we] gotta leave him in there…There are cases that are never going to go away. They’re going to be there long after you and I are gone.”

Othram charges a hefty fee for their services (Fridley said they had looked at HCSO’s six cases for between $8,000 and $11,500 apiece), but he thinks it’s a worthy price to pay. When he managed to contact Kerry Ann Cumming’s sister, she was devastated at first.

“At the beginning, she was crying and sad, and then she was happy to find out what happened to her sister,” Fridley said. “If you had your mom go missing, you never hear from her, you’d always wonder what happened to her…When I called her she said, ‘I know exactly why you’re calling. That was my sister.’”

“It was bittersweet,” Fridley continued. “You’re thinking, ‘Maybe she’s living and she’s OK and she’s doing her own thing,’ and then you find out, ‘No, she’s dead.’ But then again, [at least] I know where she’s buried.”