On the Job 

For the second time in seven months, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Stark County Sheriff’s Office, the Stark County Coroner’s Office and the DNA Doe Project have identified the skeletal remains of a man who for years had remained anonymous.

In mid-March, Attorney General Dave Yost and Stark County Sheriff Eric Weisburn announced that remains found more than 23 years ago in Stark County were those of 24-year-old Anthony Bernard Gulley. He was reported missing in Pontiac, Michigan, on Sept. 11, 1994.

“The answer to this mystery may have remained lost in time if not for the tenacity of investigators and the groundbreaking power of genetic genealogy,” Yost said.

Police thought that a Michigan man with childhood ties to Akron — a suspect in two rapes and an armed robbery — was connected to Gulley’s disappearance and might have returned to the area to dispose of his body. On Sept. 30, 1994, as Akron police attempted to arrest the man, he killed himself.

Skeletal remains were found in Canton seven years later, in December 2001, but decades passed and investigators were still unable to identify the victim.

In September 2023, BCI and the Stark County Sheriff’s Office released a clay facial reconstruction and digital images, seeking the public’s help in identifying the John Doe. BCI’s  forensic scientists, meanwhile, were able to develop a DNA profile from the remains, but it didn’t match any identities in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, commonly called CODIS.

Investigators then turned to the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit that identifies remains using genetic genealogy, a process through which Gulley was eventually identified.

Seven months earlier, in July 2024, a similar identification success story played out.

The same investigative partners using the same process identified the remains of Michael Leach, found in March 2020 in rural Canton. Leach was thought to have died in 2018, at age 62.

Like Gulley’s, Leach’s case is being treated as an unsolved homicide.