The victim, Keith Lavell Bibbs. Credit: Newton County Coroner.
Investigators and genealogists with the DNA Doe Project have identified another victim of serial killer Larry Eyler, also known as the Highway Killer.
“Adam Doe,” whose body was discovered with three other young men in an abandoned farm in rural Lake Village, Indiana, has now been identified as 16-year-old Keith Lavell Bibbs. All four victims found on Oct. 18, 1983 have now been identified. Michael Bauer and John Bartlett were identified early in the investigation, while the DNA Doe Project identified Brad Doe as John Brandenburg, Jr., two years ago.
Now, the non-profit has identified another victim of Eyler, who is believed to have murdered a minimum of 21 teenage boys and young men in the Midwest between 1982 and 1984.
Convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection for the 1984 kidnapping and murder of 16-year-old Daniel Bridges, Eyler later voluntarily confessed to the 1982 murder of 23-year-old Steven Agan, offering to also confess to his culpability in 20 further unsolved homicides if the state of Illinois would commute his sentence to life imprisonment without parole. But in 1994, while still on death row for Bridges’ murder, Eyler died of AIDS-related complications. Before his death, he confessed to his defense attorney to the murders of 20 additional young men and boys.
Eyler’s confessions included all four boys found at the abandoned farm in 1983.
Degraded DNA and underrepresented databases
In 2020, Scott McCord, Newton County Coroner, brought the Adam Doe case to the DNA Doe Project (DDP) in hopes that forensic genetic genealogy could give the victim back his name after nearly 40 years.
The submitted DNA, however, was highly degraded. According to McCord, the DNA was sent to two forensic labs that were unable to generate a profile. In September 2022, the degraded sample was sent to Othram. In about three months’ time, Othram was able to generate a workable DNA profile that could be uploaded to GEDmatch Pro and FTDNA.
In January 2023, the DDP team started to get some traction on the complex family tree.
“We needed to stay focused, committed and consistent in our work,” said team leader Elias Chan. “It was a complicated family structure involving many name changes. We were able to find a DNA cousin’s public family tree that helped point us in the right direction.”
Like many cases of Black Jane and John Does, Bibbs’ identification was hampered by the underrepresentation of Black persons in genealogical databases. According to DDP’s statement, researchers were met with some reluctance while outlining the tree. They had to work back many generations to find a common thread among DNA relatives, and some in the community were hesitant to share their oral family history, let alone their genetic history.
Once a potential match for “Adam Doe” was found, investigators obtained a family reference sample from the victim’s potential brother. The sample was sent to the Indiana State Police Lab in Indianapolis for kinship testing. This testing came back conclusive—confirming the victim as 16-year-old Keith Bibbs, giving him back his name after nearly 40 years.