GREENWOOD, Ind. -- Kids playing in a field off I-65 and Main Street in Greenwood in the early 1990s came upon bones that were first thought to be animal remains until investigators and forensic anthropologists arrived to determine the youngsters had discovered the body of a woman.
Off and on for more than 30 years, and through several rounds of DNA testing, the identity of the remains were unknown.
Until this summer.
Laurie Pineda guesses her cousin Michael Benjamin Davis would have been in his mid-to-late 20s when he was found dead in an Indiana farmer’s field three decades ago.
”We may not know what Michael’s last days were or how he came to his demise, but we know its him now and our family can rest assured, we’re not searching or worrying anymore.”
The Johnson County Coroners Office along with a team of forensic anthropologists from the University of Indianapolis, backed by funding from Crime Junkie Podcast Founder and CEO Ashley Flowers, tracked Davis’ relatives from Canada to South Carolina.
”Undoubtedly forensic genealogy and tree building, things like that solved this case,” said Deputy Johnson County Coroner Derrick Wilson. ”Michael spent a lot of years all across the country. We can put him as far out as Los Angeles, California, in 1988, so, how he ended up here in the Midwest in Greenwood, Indiana, two years later.”
Davis’ family called him Bennie and said he moved around a lot, dogged by mental health issues.
”Everybody really cares about this,” said Pineda. ”I think that just as an adult as time went on he struggled as an adult to find where he belonged and so it didn’t surprise any of us that he was working with a traveling carnival then.”
That nomad lifestyle and the unaccountability that accompanied it make it difficult for investigators to determine how Davis arrived in Indiana.
”And we have done some follow up to see if he has worked for any of those carnivals but we haven’t had any luck with that yet just because the time frame that we’re dealing with,” said Johnson County Coroner Mike Pruitt. “A lot of the people that are running the carnivals right now weren’t the same people that were owning them then or maybe documents have been discarded since then as far as pay documents and such.”
At first, detectives thought they were dealing with an unsolved homicide, but now, they’re not so sure.
“Unfortunately, because of where it was found in a field that had been harvested and planted and reharvested, there’s more than likely a lot of potential evidence that was lost during those years,” said Greenwood Police Deputy Chief Aaron Hagist.
Two rare cold case successes announced in one week as IMPD revealed the arrest of a Missouri man tied to an unsolved 1993 killing of a woman on the city’s northside highlight the potential and the challenge of DNA genealogy tracing.
”But we do have long term unidentified cases,” said Krista Latham of UIndy, “and we have a lot of them in the state of Indiana and part of that has to do with limitations in technology, part of that has to do with the condition of the remains that we’re trying to analyze and identify.”
Latham said she was working with the Identify Indiana Initiative and the Indiana State Police Cold Case squad to develop a data base of unknown remains recovered in the state and offered her facilities to house those remains until identities are confirmed.
Investigators said they had to overcome the fears of Davis’ relatives that the family was being scammed during their inquiries after all these years.
”It was all very challenging because we were, ‘Could he be in jail? Could he be dead? Could he just not want anything to do with any of us anymore?’” speculated Pineda. ”So from our family to look back at all the people through all these years that were involved in bringing this to us being here today is none other than a miracle to us and answered a prayer.”
Pineda has visited the property, now a golf course, where Davis’ remains were found and will return her cousin back to South Carolina to be buried with family.
The Davis case was the last set of unknown remains on file in Johnson County.
Anyone with details related to this investigation is urged to call Greenwood Police at (317) 882-9191.