John Doe- UPDATE
On 11/15/87 the Tom Green County Sheriff's Office was notified that several individuals were walking when they stumbled upon the remains of the man near the North Pool of Twin Buttes. There was no identification, nor any other item present to help investigators determine the man's identity. The remains were still clothed and white socks were on the feet. Thereafter John Doe was known as "white socks". The remains were described as white, possibly Hispanic, male, estimated age 17-27 years, dark brown hair, 5' 8" - 5' 11" and the estimated time of death was 5-6 months. No signs of foul play were discovered on autopsy.
Throughout the years ongoing efforts were made to identify White Socks which culminated in a facial reconstruction completed by a DPS forensic artist. The reconstruction was distributed via press release and internet options with no solid clues offered. The Tom Green County Sheriff's Office has continued its efforts to identify this person and notify his family.
In November of 2017 DNA was obtained and entered into Codis with no success at identification. The Sheriff's Office then began the process of trying to identify the individual through a familial DNA search. This method has recently been used to identify remains from other cold cases.
Recently the Sheriff's Office was notified that the ethnicity breakdown from FTDNA shows a large European portion (mostly Spain) likely comes from those that colonized and settled in Central and South America. His mtDNA haplogroup also most closely represented a Columbian sample, so it's probably a good bet that he was from somewhere in this area.
Looking at the DNA matches the shared segments are all pretty small which indicates very distant shared ancestors. Right now the plan is to keep checking back in on the matches regularly on GEDmatch and FTDNA in hopes that a closer match pops up.
The Tom Green County Sheriff's Office will continue to monitor any new information with the hope that this individual's family can someday be notified of his death.
