LAS VEGAS (AP) — The remains of a man who was shot in the head and stuffed into a rusted barrel found on the shore of Lake Mead after the water level dropped were identified Thursday as an Arkansas man whose decades-old killing remains unsolved.
Edward Lelburian Jackson was in his mid- to late 50s when he died, Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse said. Authorities are looking for people to come forward to help solve Jackson’s killing.
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There was no evidence directly linking the killing to organized crime in nearby Las Vegas despite longstanding speculation, although a connection hasn't been ruled out, police said. An expert on mob activity in the city said the case bears the “earmarks” of a mob hit and that questions still linger.
Jackson was identified with the help of a bone sample sent for genealogy profiling, along with three angles of a composite face and clothing Jackson was wearing when he died, Rouse said.
“We were able to confirm that the remains were in fact Edward Jackson,” she said.
The discovery of the barrel by boaters in May 2022 sparked memories of the city’s mob era, which lasted from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. Organized crime helped build up Las Vegas, and a body stuffed in a barrel was known to signify a mob killing.
Jackson, believed to be from Hot Springs, Arkansas, had a brief criminal history in the early 1980s in Salt Lake City, Utah, which included one charge of aggravated arson and conspiracy to commit fraud, said Robert Price, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department homicide lieutenant.
Price said there is nothing to tie the killing to organized crime. He added, however, that it hasn’t been ruled out.
Jackson's family told investigators that he liked to travel and detectives found records of him in California, where he lived with his wife in the early ’70s. His family said they last saw him in Arkansas in the early ’80s, and it is unclear why he was in Las Vegas. Homicide detectives will continue working to figure out what happened to him, said Price.
"It will never be closed until we solve it,” he said.
Authorities had already said the man was shot, and they estimate he was killed in the early 1980s.
The man had been wearing a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes.
Price said the family didn’t report him missing.
“They knew that he had traveled the country, would show up when he showed up, just to say hi. But they didn’t think anything other than that. They just figured he was out and about,” he said.
Jackson was married for a short period of time and had no known children, Price said.
Geoff Schumacher, vice president of research, collections and programs at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said there are still many questions about who Jackson was and what he was involved in that “earned him a trip in a barrel into the lake.”
Members of organized crime were involved in the Las Vegas casino industry from the 1940s to the mid-1980s, both behind the scenes and through shadow ownerships of casinos, Schumacher said.
He said the case had all the “earmarks of a mob hit,” mirroring another case from 1976 when Italian mobster John Roselli was killed and stuffed in a barrel and dumped into a bay outside of Miami Beach.
Schumacher said he and Mob Museum staff will comb their records to try to help solve the case.
“I think this story is not over,” he said.
Las Vegas historian Michael Green said whoever committed the crime probably thought the body would “never come near the surface.” In the early 1980s, the lake levels were so high that the spillways flooded at Hoover Dam, he said.
Now, Lake Mead is at a historic low due to years of overuse, longstanding drought and increasing temperatures. The water level of the 90-year-old reservoir has dropped, exposing areas that were previously underwater.
Several other sets of remains were found at Lake Mead in 2022. Another set of skeletal remains was discovered that May, and they were identified as a drowning victim from 2002. Skeletal remains found in August were identified as a 52-year-old Las Vegas resident who disappeared in 1998. A set of remains found in October 2022 were determined to be an accidental drowning from 1974, according to Clark County.
In August 2026, more human remains were discovered.
Lake Mead and the upstream Lake Powell are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides Colorado River water to people across the U.S. Southwest and Mexico.
In 2022, Lake Mead's dropping level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake. That forced authorities to switch to a deeper intake to keep serving the city’s 2.4 million residents.
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Golden reported from Seattle.
