He was a famous explorer, artist and writer

May 4, 2009 14:53 GMT  ·  By
UCB Anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven (center), and Navajo Nation Archaeologist Ron Maldano (right), at the Utah site where the remains of Everett Ruess were discovered in 2008
   UCB Anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven (center), and Navajo Nation Archaeologist Ron Maldano (right), at the Utah site where the remains of Everett Ruess were discovered in 2008

Experts from the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) and the National Geographic Society have finally succeeded in breaking a 75-year-old enigma, which surrounded folktale artist, writer and footloose explorer Everett Ruess. The explorer, aged at about 20, disappeared in the 1930s, as he roamed the US Southwest on the back of a burro. He was last seen in 1934, when he left the town of Escalante, Utah, but was never again heard of since.

The only lead the researchers had to go on was a flimsy one, provided by a woman named Daisy Johnson. In 1971, her grandfather, Navajo man Aneth Nez, told her that he had witnessed the murder of a young white man by Ute Indians, near Bluff, Utah. He also told the woman that the body had been buried in a crevasse on nearby Comb Ridge.

In May 2008, the burial site was located by Denny Belson, grandson of Nez and brother of Johnson, who called in FBI investigators. They took pictures of the site, but found inconclusive pieces of evidence, and left the scene alone. However, the pictures were inserted in databases, where they were found by David Roberts, an investigating journalist for the National Geographic Adventure magazine. After Googling key phrases such as “missing persons,” “1930s,” and “Arizona/Utah,” he finally managed to identify the place, after several years of reporting on Ruess' case.

After DNA matching to some of Ruess' family members proved inconclusive, Roberts enlisted the help of Dennis Van Gerven, a renowned anthropology professor at UCB. Gerven came to the scene with doctoral student Paul Sandberg, and, together, the two took all remains out of the ground, and transported them back to their lab at the university, under permission from the explorer's family.

Hints such as wisdom tooth eruption, pelvic structure, bone growth markers and femur length were all analyzed and cross-referenced to known data of Ruess. The study revealed that the remains belonged to a male who was approximately 20 years old and about 5 feet 8 inches tall at the time of death. The anthropologists then began a very complex reconstructive operation, in which they carefully placed all of the bone remains on a clay ball, in an attempt to reconstruct the man's face. They only had a couple of 75-year-old photos to go on at the beginning, but worked with those in a very professional manner.

“The next step was to match two points on the photos of the bones to their respective positions on the portraits. If the other anatomical points did not match, we could exclude Ruess. But all the points fell into place. The jaw fit, the curve of the nasal bones fit, the rim of the eye orbit fit and the bridge of the nose fit,” Sandberg said after the reconstruction was done. “Once a single tooth was scaled into position, the size and shape of the other teeth, as well as the morphology of the face above the teeth, matched the portrait. The correspondence was striking.”

“We spent a lot of time making certain that the skeletal images superimposed on the Lange photos remained anatomically exact and were in no way altered by the technique. But we wound up with a constellation of evidence that was a remarkable match to Ruess. We had a male about 20 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall with facial bones that precisely matched the photographs. We concluded it was very, very unlikely that this was not Everett Ruess. But we also knew the final arbiter in this case would be genetic testing,” Gerven added.

“It was almost exactly what geneticists would expect when comparing DNA between nieces and nephews and an uncle or an aunt. This is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that the bones are those of Everett Ruess, and make it virtually impossible that the bones are from an unrelated individual. The combination of the forensic analysis and the genetic analysis makes it an open and shut case. I believe it would hold up in any court in the country,” DNA analysis expert Kenneth Krauter, who is also a UCB molecular, cellular and developmental biology professor, concluded.