Remains in Lake Mead barrel identified as Arkansas man by Las Vegas police

Remains in Lake Mead barrel identified as Arkansas man by Las Vegas police

Man determined to have been fatally shot in '70s or '80s

Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026 | 5:37 p.m.

The murder victim found in a barrel revealed four years ago by the receding waters of Lake Mead has been identified as an Arkansas man whose family last saw him in the early 1980s.

The man was Edward “Buddy” Lelburian Jackson, and he was in his mid- to late 50s when he died, Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse said today at a press conference announcing the identification. He had been shot once in the head.

Homicide Lt. Robert Price of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said investigators have not found Jackson to have any ties to the Las Vegas area. Relatives in Arkansas said he traveled widely about the country and last visited them in the early 1980s. The timeline of his death is an estimate.

Rouse said that to her knowledge, his family never reported him missing. Price said Jackson’s family didn't have many details on how the man they knew as “Uncle Buddy” lived his life.

“He would show up when he showed up, and that was just to say hi,” Price said. “They didn't think anything other than that. They just figured that he was just out and about.”

A boater found Jackson’s mostly skeletonized remains, fully clothed, inside a corroded 55-gallon drum partially sunk in the mud of newly revealed lakebed west of the Hemenway Harbor launch ramp in May 2022. His clothing, shoes and watch suggested he died in the late 1970s to early 1980s.

The circumstances of his death that came out shortly after his remains were discovered — shot, stuffed in a barrel that was dumped into a deep lake outside of Las Vegas, possibly at a time when organized crime was still prevalent here — fueled heavy speculation that Jackson’s death was a mob hit.

However, much of his murder remains a mystery. Price said the case is unsolved, and Jackson’s identity is only one piece of the puzzle. Investigators don’t have proof that his death was tied to organized crime or information on him being a gambler.

Pressed by reporters at Thursday’s press conference on potential mob ties — the method of his killing and disposal, or whether police had proof that it wasn’t mob-related — Price said, “we're not saying it’s not.”

“All’s we can say is at this point of our investigation, with the information we have through speaking with family and with the loose criminal history that we have, there's nothing to point us in that direction at this point in time,” Price said.

Price said Jackson lived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s with his wife when he was briefly married, but had no known children. He had a criminal history from the early 1980s in Utah — charges of arson and conspiracy to commit fraud.

Initially, authorities described the man in the barrel with broad adjectives. According to the federally maintained National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a clearinghouse for missing people and unidentified remains, his body could have belonged to a man anywhere from 27 to 61 years old and between 5 feet, 6 inches and 6 feet, 1 inch tall.

His jeans had a 46-inch waist and his shirt had a size 2X tag, suggesting a large build. His blue and white Velcro sneakers came from Kmart. An entry on the Clark County Coroner’s online listing of unidentified remains said a plastic bag and rope were found alongside his skull.

Investigators released photos of his personal effects and an FBI-created facial reconstruction over the years, but it was forensic genealogy that allowed investigators to give him his name back.

Rouse said that authorities sent a bone sample to a laboratory for genealogy profiling in 2024 and got a lead to a relative, but not a close enough family member to consider it a “compelling match.”

Investigators then sent the case to the forensic science department at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. Earlier this year, scientists and detectives had a strong enough lead to a living relative to contact the family member for further testing. This was a compelling match, and the coroner’s office confirmed Jackson’s identity.

Dr. Jason Beaman, chair of the school of forensic sciences at Oklahoma State, said his school partners with agencies across the country to identify the unknown dead. He said the university has a longstanding relationship with Clark County.

The confirmed match was gleaned from information found through a special law enforcement section of a website called GEDmatch, which allows people to upload and compare their DNA test results from popular consumer services like 23andMe and Ancestry. The genealogy investigation showed that Jackson had origins in the Hot Springs area of western Arkansas, Beaman said.

Rouse said that her office has hundreds of cases of unidentified remains. She encouraged people to report their missing family members to “give us an opportunity to try to solve these cases that would otherwise just remain unidentified.”

Several times throughout 2022, drought turned up human remains that had previously been lost to Lake Mead’s depths. Investigators determined that the remains belonged to four people.

Jackson was the last to be identified. The others belonged to men who disappeared in 1974, 1998 and 2002.

Jackson’s murder remains an open investigation.