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Las Vegas authorities have finally identified a decades-old murder victim whose remains were eventually stuffed into a rusted barrel and dumped in Lake Mead in 2022, police revealed Thursday.
Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse confirmed the victim was Edward Lelburian Jackson, an Arkansas man in his 50s who was executed by a single gunshot to the head.
Cops say the slaying remains a cold case, though advanced genealogy profiling finally cracked his identity after decades in the dark.
“We were able to confirm that the remains were in fact Edward Jackson,” said Rouse.
The grim discovery of his unidentified body was made in May 2022 by boaters, instantly reigniting dark tales of Sin City’s bloody mob era.
Las Vegas has an expansive history of organized crime and the fact Jackson was found in a barrel is known to be indicative of a mob killing.
Jackson was involved in criminal activity in Salt Lake City during the 1980s, but Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department homicide Lt. Robert Price says nothing yet points directly to a mob hit — though detectives haven’t ruled it out.
Jackson’s family told authorities that he loved to travel, but noted his presence in Vegas was an unexpected twist.
Police aren’t giving up just yet.
“It will never be closed until we solve it,” Price urged.
Investigators estimate Jackson was shot in the early 1980s before being stuffed into the drum.
When he was killed, he was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white sneakers.
At the time, Jackson’s family didn’t report him missing.
“They knew that he had traveled the country, would show up when he showed up, just to say hi,” said Price.
“But they didn’t think anything other than that. They just figured he was out and about.”
The Mob Museum in Las Vegas had speculated the body could be tied to notorious underworld figures — suggesting he might be George “Jay” Vandermark, a cheat gambler tasked with monitoring 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 vanished into thin air, their bodies never recovered.
The same genetic mapping method used to identify Jackson, called investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), helped identify a second victim of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in New York City this week — and was also used to catch the Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann.
IGG compares a victim’s genetic profile with publicly available ancestry databases.
Meanwhile, Lake Mead’s water level has plunged to historic lows from relentless overuse, severe drought and scorching temperatures, draining the 90-year-old reservoir and exposing hidden secrets.
Historians predict more bodies will emerge from the receding waters.
Several other finds surfaced at Lake Mead in 2022 — including a May discovery of skeletal remains later identified as a 2002 drowning victim.
Another set found in August of that year belonged to a 52-year-old Las Vegas man who vanished in 1998, while remains discovered in October 2022 were tied to a 1974 drowning accident, according to county officials.
And yet more human remains were uncovered as recently as this August.
Lake Mead and upstream Lake Powell stand as the largest man-made reservoirs in the US, anchoring a vast system that fuels Colorado River water to over 40 million people across eight states and into Mexico.
The plummeting waterline exposed Las Vegas’ 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.
With Post wires