Californian found dead in 1982 is ID’d

For more than 40 years, Arizona officials have been trying to identify human remains found in a desert in 1982. Now new technology has given them an answer: a Humboldt County man who went missing while searching for gold.

In September 1982, human remains were found in a rural desert near Kingman, Ariz., just off Route 66, according to the Mohave County Sheriff ’s Office. An autopsy performed at the time determined that they belonged to a man who had been dead for at least a year, though an official cause of death was never determined.

The sheriff’s office made multiple attempts to identify the man, but was unsuccessful. Now, officials say breakthroughs in DNA testing have identified the remains as Virgil R. Renner, a Humboldt County man who was born around 1910.

In February, investigators had sent samples of Renner’s remains to a forensic lab located just outside Houston, which used advanced DNA testing to identify them, according to the sheriff ’s office. Though Renner had no children, he was identified through the DNA of distant relatives, officials said.

Renner left California in the early 1970s to search for gold in Nevada, according to the sheriff’s office. At the time, Nevada was on the brink of a new gold rush due to higher prices and the discovery of a new way to mine gold, according to a report by the Nevada Mining Association. Data from the National Mining Association shows gold was selling for as much as five times what it had in the decade prior.

The sheriff’s office said it wasn’t sure why Renner would have been near Kingman, just south of Nevada and close to the California border.

Though officials now know what became of Renner, how he got to Arizona and how he died remain unknown.