Drought has exposed additional remains at Lake Mead since 2022
Las Vegas investigators on Thursday publicly named the man whose remains were discovered stuffed inside a barrel in the shallow waters of Lake Mead four years ago, ending the identity half of one of the reservoir’s most widely watched cold cases while leaving his killer still unknown.
At a Thursday press conference, Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse identified the victim as Edward Lelburian Jackson, also known as “Buddy.” Rouse displayed a grainy photograph of a smiling, bearded man holding a baby and said investigators believed Jackson had been in his mid to late 50s at the time of his death.
The remains surfaced in 2022 when boaters spotted the barrel near Hemenway Harbor in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, drawing national attention to a case authorities quickly linked to a much older killing. An initial autopsy determined Jackson had been killed by a single gunshot to the head. Based on the style of his clothing — a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes — investigators concluded he was most likely killed in the mid-1970s to early 1980s, a period widely associated with organized crime activity in Las Vegas.
For years afterward, investigators worked the identity rather than the killer. They uploaded his description to a national missing persons database, searched his DNA in crime databases, released composite renderings of what he might have looked like, and submitted genetic material to a lab for a genealogy profile. The breakthrough came only this year, when a forensics team at Oklahoma State University — partnering on the case — received a strong lead that allowed them to match a DNA sample from Jackson with one from a believed family member. “We were able to confirm that the remains were, in fact, Mr. Jackson,” Rouse said.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Robert Price filled in what little is known of Jackson’s life. Jackson was from Arkansas, Price told the press conference, and his family last saw him in the early 1980s. Records show he briefly lived in California with his wife and was charged in Utah with aggravated arson and conspiracy fraud. Detectives have not found a single record tying him to the Las Vegas area.
Price directly addressed the organized-crime speculation that has followed the case since the barrel was pulled from the reservoir. “There has been speculation in the past that the homicide had ties to an organized criminal group,” Price said. “At this point of our investigation, we don’t have any information to support those theories.” Now that Jackson has been identified, Price added, the investigation into what happened to him — and who was responsible — can continue in earnest.
Jackson’s discovery was the first in a series of grim finds at Lake Mead as its water levels dropped to historic lows, driven by years of overuse, a longstanding drought and rising temperatures. Within days of the 2022 barrel discovery, a KLAS-TV news crew found a second barrel not far from the first; it was empty. Paddleboarders later found human remains on a newly surfaced sandbar, with no evidence of foul play. In August, more human remains surfaced at the reservoir and police again found no evidence of foul play. Historians have predicted additional discoveries as the water continues to recede.
Lake Mead, along with the upstream Lake Powell, forms the largest human-made reservoir system in the United States. Together, the two impound the Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million people, tribes, farms and industry across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Mexico.
The 90-year-old reservoir’s decline has made its basin an unlikely archive of old crimes — and, in Jackson’s case, a long-delayed path to putting a name to a victim who had waited decades for one.