Investigators say they’ve solved a 40-year-old mystery in Ventura County.
In May of 1984, someone found a human jawbone on Oxnard’s Silver Strand beach. At the time, the Ventura County Medical Examiner determined that it belonged to a man who was somewhere between 19 and 99 years old.
The man couldn’t be identified and became known as a John Doe.
The Medical Examiner’s Office recently reviewed the case. It provided Sheriff’s Office detectives with forensic evidence for advanced DNA testing at a Texas lab.
The suspicion was that the remains were those of a man who died in a 1978 boating accident off the Ventura County coast. The man’s body was recovered about a month after the accident, but it was missing the jawbone.
The DNA extracted from the forensic evidence matched that of a relative of the man who died in the boating accident.
He’s been identified as Donald Scott Reich. The 33-year-old man had married and moved to Ventura County just before his death.
