A 25-year-long investigation has identified the remains of a man found at a national park in Washington State.
A body was discovered inside a sleeping bag in Olympic National Park in 2000. The National Park Service announced Wednesday that the remains had been identified by a forensic genealogy lab called Othram. They belonged to a Joseph Louis Serrao, Jr., a Hawaiian man who had gone missing some time earlier.
Authorities transported the remains to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where they were determined to have come from a man aged 30-50 who had been deceased for between six months and four years. But the M.E. was not able to establish a positive ID, and the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory was unable to lift latent fingerprints from the other items.
In November 2024, the King County Medical Examiner and the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch turned over forensic evidence to Othram's facility in The Woodlands, Texas. By 2025, Othram's team was able to extract DNA from the skeleton and were able to sequence a genetic profile. This genetic profile was returned to the authorities, who then contacted potential relatives in several states and collected DNA samples for testing. The subsequent investigation identified the remains as one Joseph Louis Serrao, Jr., born Dec. 3, 1960.
Family members told authorities that Serrao was originally from Hawaii and was last known to have been in Washington before he went missing. The family last heard from him in 1998.
The case was Othram's 49th publicized case in the State of Washington alone.
Nuria Columbina Rodriguez, 25, was identified as the woman whose skull a farmer stumbled upon in a freshly plowed field in Windsor Township, Berks County, on June 3, 1992, the Berks County Coroner's Office said Thursday. The confirmation came on April 14, 2026—34 years after her remains were found—following a forensic genetic genealogy investigation that traced her DNA to a family in the Bronx that had never stopped searching for her.