Forty-five years after his body was found on the side of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the DNA Doe Project has identified Greenbelt John Doe as 24-year-old Edward “Eddie” Octavis Devone. Devone, a native of Baltimore, was last seen by his family in the late 1970s.
On Aug. 3, 1981, detectives with the U.S. Park Police recovered the remains of a young African-American man wrapped in a blanket alongside a Baltimore-Washington Parkway guardrail. Investigators determined that he was 15-25 years old, about 5’2” and weighed 106 pounds. The young man also had distinctive, severely deformed teeth with unusual lengths, odd angles, and gaps. His cause of death could not be determined.
Despite the continued efforts of the U.S. Park Police, the man’s identity remained unknown. In October 2024, after all traditional methods of human identification proved unsuccessful, the U.S. Park Police requested assistance from the DNA Doe Project, whose expert investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify John and Jane Does.
The unidentified man’s DNA matches indicated he had roots in North Carolina, and it wasn’t long before the team on the case homed in on a family from the Fayetteville area. “We identified a couple from North Carolina as great grandparents of the unidentified man, so we knew that one of their children had to be his grandparent,” said team leader Matthew Waterfield. “But when we couldn’t find him among their descendants, we realized that something didn’t add up – it was like a branch of their family was missing.”
U.S Park Police detectives travelled down to Fayetteville, where they met with members of the family. Those conversations led to a crucial discovery – a century prior, in the 1920s, a young girl was adopted out of the family. While she remained somewhat in contact with her biological relatives, she didn’t stay in North Carolina – she moved to Baltimore.
With Baltimore only a short drive from where the young man’s body was found, the DNA Doe Project team and U.S. Park Police detectives zeroed in on this newfound branch of the family. Before long, they found out that the woman who moved to Baltimore had a grandson called Eddie Devone, born in 1956. When investigators spoke with Devone’s siblings, they discovered that he hadn’t been seen in nearly 50 years.
The family provided a photo of him as a young child, which is the only photo they still had of him. Further DNA testing ensued and, in December 2025, investigators confirmed that the man formerly known as Greenbelt John Doe was in fact Eddie Devone.
“Eddie's story is heartbreaking, but it has been an honor to assist his family in finding answers,” said team co-leader Rhonda Kevorkian. “We were lucky to work with a law enforcement agency that went above and beyond to resolve this case.”
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the U.S. Park Police, who entrusted the case to the DNA Doe Project and worked with us along the way; the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for their support during the research stage; Bode Technology for DNA extraction; Genologue for sequencing; Astrea Forensics for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro, DNA Justice and FamilyTreeDNA for providing their databases; Audiochuck for the funding they provided for this case; our generous donors who joined our mission and contributed to this case; and the DNA Doe Project’s dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our John and Jane Does home.
Republished courtesy of DNA Doe Project