Credit: DDP
Four years after human remains were found on a beach in California, the DNA Doe Project and their agency partners have identified Salmon Creek John Doe as 59-year-old Walter Karl Kinney. Kinney, a former banker who lived in nearby Santa Rosa, was known to have disappeared in 1999, twenty three years before one of his bones was discovered on Salmon Creek State Beach.
On June 17, 2022, a family looking for sea shells on Salmon Creek Beach in Sonoma County, California came across a long bone sticking out of the sand. The bone contained surgical hardware and a later pathology examination revealed it was possibly a tibia. A search of the discovery area did not reveal any further remains, and there was no indication of who the bone could belong to.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office later brought this case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify John and Jane Does. A DNA profile was developed for the unidentified man and uploaded to the GEDmatch database in January 2026. Shortly afterwards, a team of volunteers began working on this case and immediately began making headway.
They zeroed in on a family who had moved from the East Coast to California, settling in the San Diego area. As they began looking into the descendants of this family, the team came across Walter Karl Kinney, born in 1940. Though Kinney was born in San Diego, he had later moved to Santa Rosa, not far from Salmon Creek State Beach.
The critical breakthrough came when team members found an article about human remains that had washed ashore in 1999, just a couple miles south in Bodega Bay. In 2003, a woman got in touch with investigators regarding her father, who had last been seen on 10 August 1999. Shortly afterwards, investigators confirmed that the partial remains found in 1999 belonged to her father, Walter Karl Kinney, using X-ray records to confirm the ID. Kinney’s daughter described him as “smart, sensitive, almost to a fault”, stating that “this world was just too harsh a place for him”.
After identifying Kinney as a candidate in just eight days, the DNA Doe Project presented this lead to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Shortly afterwards, investigators confirmed that the man formerly known only as Salmon Creek John Doe was indeed Walter Kinney.
“This case was unusual - it’s not often we see someone end up as a John Doe twice,” said team leader Traci Onders. “But thanks to investigative genetic genealogy, we were able to resolve this mystery and provide some answers to everyone involved in this case.”
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups who we worked with to solve this case: the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, who entrusted this case to us; Genologue for sequencing; Astrea Forensics for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro for providing their database; 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