Las Vegas officials release the ID of a man whose body was found in a barrel in Lake Mead

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Las Vegas authorities have identified a homicide victim whose remains were found in a rusted barrel on a Lake Mead shore after the lake’s level was depleted amid drought, officials announced Thursday.

Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse identified the victim, who was shot once in the head, as Edward Lelburian Jackson. He was from Arkansas and was in his mid to late 50s when he died. Authorities said Jackson’s killing is unsolved and that they are investigating.

Jackson was identified with the help of a bone sample sent for genealogy profiling, along with three angles of a composite face and clothing Jackson was wearing when he died, she said.

“We were able to confirm that the remains were in fact Edward Jackson,” she said.

The discovery of the barrel by boaters in 2022 sparked memories of the city’s mob era, which ended in the mid-1980s. Organized crime helped build up Las Vegas, and a body stuffed in a barrel was known to signify a mob killing.

But while Jackson had a brief criminal history in the early 1980s in Salt Lake City, Utah, which included one charge of aggravated arson and conspiracy of fraud, Robert Price, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department homicide lieutenant, said there is nothing to tie the killing to the mob and organized crime. He added, however, that it hasn’t been ruled out.

Jackson’s family told investigators that he liked to travel, but it is unclear why he was in Las Vegas. And homicide detectives are going to continue to work to figure out what happened to him, said Price.

“It will never be closed until we solve it,” he said.

Authorities had already said the man was shot, and they estimate he was killed in the early 1980s.

The man had been wearing a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes.

Price said the 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. But they didn’t think anything other than that. They just figured he was out and about,” he said.

The Mob Museum in Las Vegas had suggested the victim could be connected to the mob. speculating it could be George “Jay” Vandermark, a gambling machine cheater trusted by the mob to oversee slot machine operations at the Stardust casino; William Crespo, a drug-runner who became a federal informant; or Johnny Pappas, who owned a boat at Lake Mead and worked in the casino industry.

All three disappeared and their bodies were never found.

Lake Mead is at a historic low due to years of overuse, longstanding drought and increasing temperatures. The water level of the 90-year-old reservoir has dropped, exposing areas that were previously underwater. Historians predict more bodies could be found.

Several other sets of remains were found at Lake Mead in 2022. That May, another set of skeletal remains was discovered, and they were identified as a drowning victim from 2002. Skeletal remains found in August were identified as a 52-year-old Las Vegas resident who disappeared in 1998. A set of remains found in October 2022 were determined to be an accidental drowning from 1974, according to Clark County.

In August 2026, more human remains were discovered.

Lake Mead and the upstream Lake Powell are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides Colorado River water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.

In 2022, the dropping lake level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake, forcing the regional water authority to switch to a deep-lake intake it completed in 2020 to keep serving the city’s 2.4 million residents and visitors, casinos and suburbs. Las Vegas attracts around 40 million tourists per year.

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Golden reported from Seattle.

Jessica Hill And Hallie Golden, The Associated Press