Carkeek Park John Doe: A Case Study in Not Going All the Way
At approximately 9:20 in the morning on Tuesday, October 9th, 1984, two men walking their dogs in Seattle’s Carkeek Park made a grisly discovery: a young white male hanging in a tree.
Two Seattle police officers, an Officer Cameron and an Officer Jorgensen, were the first to respond to the scene. According to a report documenting the discovery of this deceased person, this unidentified man was found hanging from the large limb of a maple tree. The limb the man was hanging from was some 18 feet in the air, and the man’s feet, clad in white tennis shoes, were recorded to have been dangling some 5 feet from the park grounds.
Officers Cameron and Jorgensen called for a unit from the Seattle Fire Department, which responded to the scene and cut the man down. The man was fully clothed, and described as wearing the following: a black leather jacket with a fur collar, faded blue jeans, a medium sized purple pullover with red stripes, and white tennis shoes. The man was cut down from the tree, placed face-up on the ground and covered with a paper sheet.
After the discovery of the body and the dispatch of the police and the fire unit, two supervisors of the medical examiner’s office named VanZant and Losey were dispatched to document the scene and remove the body.
King County Medical Examiner Supervisor VanZant described his and Losey’s arrival this way:
“On our arrival to the scene, we were directed up a hill into the woods for approx. 50 yards. There we observed the deceased lying on the ground fully clad and covered with a paper sheet. On closer inspection of the remains it was noted that there was a (?) inch knotted rope tied around the deceased’s neck. Lividity was present and noted to be fixed and consistent with the way the body was found. There was no other signs of any external trauma”
It was, according to a report filed by VanZant just after noon on that same Tuesday, an “apparent suicide” and a “hanging — no note.”
Fingerprints were taken and sent off to the FBI in December of 1984. After some months the body was released from storage in January of 1985 and buried in a graveyard in the Crown Hill area of Ballard, stacked in a burial lot with numerous other people directly below him.
The time between the sad discovery of this man in Carkeek Park in October of 1984, to his burial in the Crown Hill cemetery in January 1985, was some three months. His identification wouldn’t come until some 30 years after his burial.
From 1985 to 2020, he remained: a Seattle unknown.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I suppose it does bear mentioning again, as it is related to what I am about to discuss. Some years ago now, as a hobby, I became intrigued in efforts to identify unknown people. There’s a number of terms for this, and if you spend any time on Reddit or on Websleuths, you’ll quickly become subsumed by the lingo: “web-sleuthing” or “crowd-sourced digital labor” or a multitude of other words and phrases which simply describe people with newfangled technologies being enamored with something as old as time: mysteries.
The way I became interested in this is a bit of a circuitous story. At first, I paid no notice to the dead or unidentified. I became fascinated with the idea that wanted criminals would have the gall, the temerity, to live openly online if there were to have some sort of bounty on their head.
Sitting alone, snowed-in inside of my tiny Soviet-era flat near the border with Armenia, I began to wonder: “how many criminals can I find living openly online?”
It turns out, a lot! Especially in those heady early days of 2011/2012, when it seemed as if a significant portion of America’s criminal class couldn’t seemingly understand how privacy worked on Facebook’s mobile apps.
Local, state and federal agencies began posting a regular rogue’s gallery of criminals, just as social media began to really take off. I was never sure if any of my tips helped, but there were a couple of instances where I suspected that they did.
There was that suspect wanted by the NCIS for breaking the ribs of an infant, there was that wanted domestic violence suspect down in the deep South, and the wire-fraud suspect who basically broadcast his location (just had to zoom in the backwards reflection in the glass, dude). Oh, and who can forget the wife of the arson suspect parading her pomeranians? These criminals were all over the place online. And more often than not, they were hilarious.
It was fun, for a while. Then you begin to wonder if it’s worth it.
There was one case, listed prominently online by a federal law enforcement agency, that I became absolutely obsessed with. The death of a family member inspired me to just dive deeper and deeper into one particular mystery. A mystery which had both a dearth of information online on one side, and seemingly everything possible needed to solve it on the other.
Certainty in myself, and my abilities, turned into endless hours of searching through real estate records, unclaimed property, old college yearbooks and finally….. public records requests!
At the same time that I became interested in searching for criminals online, I also started becoming interested in filing public records and FOIA requests. With the help of MuckRock.com I was able to file a number of requests. Eventually, as my interests drifted from live criminals to the deceased and unidentified, a light bulb went off.
Is there any way that public records requests could be used to help pry loose any sort of information which might help solve these cases? I knew that government agencies, especially law enforcement agencies, have a lot of leeway in denying a request for information if the information requested is related to an open or active investigation.
I won’t get into here, but there were two cases, those being the Lyle Stevik and Lori Ruff cases, where I was able to file a handful of public record requests that actually resulted in some small pieces of information being released. These requests were filed with the full intention of sharing the information online — on Websleuths and Reddit — in places where there was a ravenous interest in two cases of unidentified decedents.
Could I continue this method? Could I file a request about a long lost John or Jane Doe with the expectation (or hope, really) that a government agency would grant the request? Wouldn’t the request itself necessitate an agency to do their “due diligence” to search and see that whatever records they did have were digitized and easily accessible?
I decided to look for a case that might fit the criteria. I decided to search for a case in my old stomping grounds of Seattle.
In the NamUs database I came across NamUs Unidentified Person case 10814: the Carkeek Park John Doe.
— — -
I found a case that fit my criteria. And, interestingly enough, it was in Carkeek. If you haven’t been to Seattle, Carkeek is a park on the shore of Puget Sound in North Seattle. Located off of Holman Road in North Seattle, I used to use brief jaunts around Carkeek Park as the midway point of long-ish evening walks.
I was fond of Carkeek Park, especially the Puget Sound side, but I could easily picture a suicide in the dense forest trails at the entrance. The specifics of this case, the circumstances of Carkeek Park John Doe’s death and discovery, were instantly understandable to me.
Using Muckrock.com, and under the auspices of the Revised Code Washington, I filed a public records request with the Seattle Police Department on June 2nd of 2017 for the following information:
“This is a request for all documents, reports or photographs or a “case file” related to the suicide of an unidentified decedent discovered in Carkeek Park on October 9th of 1984.”
A basic request, and considering that the case wasn’t an active criminal investigation, I believe that information related to it was eligible to be released under the RCW.
I filed my request, I paid my fee of $1.95, and, as one has to do after filing a public records request, I waited…
The reply came quickly: within about a month.
The Seattle Police Department granted my request and released some seven pages of documents. Two of which were simply notes from 2005 saying that the subject had not been identified at that time.
The other pages (from which I quoted above) were reports from the King County Medical Examiner’s office on the day of the discovery, and a follow-up from when the man was buried in Crown Hill.
There wasn’t much exactly new in the documents. My grand idea of finding something new in these documents wasn’t likely to come true, based upon what I read in the documents. Something like a name or surname or a place of origin, derived from a clothing label, a matchbook, a t-shirt, or a scrap of paper — it wasn’t going to happen with this John Doe.
I did see a blurry written mention that the John Doe’s fingerprints had been sent off to the FBI:
So, just maybe somewhere there were digitized prints? Fingerprints weren’t digitized in most local jurisdictions until the early 1990s. If there were prints of file for this Doe, it might make identification easier.
The NamUs entry stated that “fingerprints available elsewhere” — which is something that no one seems to understand.
Unfortunately, and now, much to my chagrin, I didn’t do very much with the information I received.
I did send off a single message to a member of the Seattle news media who I had had limited contact with in 2009/2010.
Here’s a copy of the message I sent, with the identity of the person obscured:
Dear ██ ████████
Hello. I am not sure if this would interest you or not, but I’ve got a story idea for you. I have been researching missing and unidentified persons cold cases for several years now. I have long been interested in an old cold case from October of 1984 from the Ballard area. Back in 1984 an unknown person (a male John Doe) who was discovered in Carkeek Park. You can read a limited entry about the case from the NamUs website:
https://identifyus.org/en/cases/10814
This incident occurred on October 9th of 1984. I was intrigued that there has been very little news coverage about the case over the years. I decided to use MuckRock to file a FOIA act request about the case. Due to RCW regulations, photographs and autopsy information is not information that one can receive via a FOIA request. I was, however, able to receive copies of the original incident report.
You can read the old files here:
As I have said, there has been little written on this case. I found this surprising since other John Doe cases (namely a case out of Amanda Park) have received considerable news coverage. There is one old article from 1997 that I found, that points out a number of discrepancies between what is listed in the NamUs file and what officers wrote at the time of discovery. The original police report, for example, lists the man as being in either his late teens or early 20s. This contradicts information in the NamUs listing which describes the man as being in his 30s.
Here is a link to the old news article:
http://wahmee.com/misc_kcmeo.pdf
There are also some interesting tidbits from the old news article that aren’t mentioned in the NamUs report. The decedent had one tanned arm, and evidence that he was wearing a watch that wasn’t found at the scene.
I know that it is a little morbid, and I know that this isn’t the type of story that ██ ███████usually covers, but I do notice that you will cover the occasional crime reports. What interested me about this particular case was the following things:
There is no DNA on file for the John Doe — meaning that matching him via the CODIS database for missing people is impossible.
Fingerprint information is listed as being available “elsewhere” — which leads me to suspect fingerprint records have never been digitized and run through the government’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint System
There is incredibly (considering that photographs were taken immediately post mortem) no forensic drawing made of this person. Without DNA, a forensic drawing would probably be the only thing that could help identify the decedent
As I said, I know that this isn’t the type of story that you usually run. However, I believe that a single article by ██ ███████ would probably compel King County Medical Examiner to commission a forensic drawing of the victim. It is also possible that someone in the Carkeek Park area knows who the person is. I also know from Websleuths and Reddit that the few articles published each year about cases like this draw significant traffic on the internet, and have led to the occasional identification of John and Jane Does.
Considering that the 33rd anniversary of this case is coming up soon, it might make for an interesting story. █ ██ ███████ ████ ██ ██████ █████ ████ █████████ ██ ████████ ███ ███ ████ ████████ ████████ ████████ ███ ███ ███████ ██████ ███████████He’s indicated that he would do a forensic drawing for any jurisdiction that asks. It would be wonderful if ██ ████████ could help solve this old mystery!
Just an idea!
-Robby Delaware
Offhandedly inquiring if the media is interested in covering an old story is not exactly getting that involved. To my regret I wasn’t more involved in this case. This, the request, and a single email, was the extent of my involvement.
But, what happened next, and my history with this case, got me thinking.
Flash forward to February 2020, just before the Pandemic. I was, once again, inside a Soviet-era flat. Errantly I decided to run one of my periodic searches of “John Doe identified” on Google News.
Bingo! I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Carkeek Park John Doe had been identified. I was extremely happy to read that the case had been solved. I won’t name the young man, you can easily read about it in news articles that I will link to here and here.
There’s a fantastic episode of the Washed Away podcast about the case, which I encourage you to listen to.
A young family member of the man gives specifics of how the man was identified, and discusses the difficulties of exhuming a body from a “shared” burial plot in a Crown Hill cemetery. There are obviously some mysteries about the man’s final days — but the identification of the man is gratifying.
From my experience with other cases, I believe that there might be a Seattle case where a public records request does help in the identification of an unidentified decedent. And as I go forward, I hope to file public record requests and make them accessible for those who try to contribute to the solving of these cases.
Thank you for reading, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that I am gratified that there is one less… Seattle Unknown.
