Decades after it was discovered decayed, the body of a man found dead in a sealed wooden crate at the Lockport Lock in 1980 has been finally identified by DNA evidence, the Will County coroner’s office said.
The man found dead decades ago is Webster Fisher, the office of Will County Coroner Laurie Summers wrote in a news release Wednesday.
In 1980, the crate containing Fisher’s body had been pulled from a grate preventing debris from flowing into the Lockport Locks power plant. The 4-foot-long crate had been nailed shut with a 1.5-inch hole drilled into it, with the body of the unidentified man sealed inside, Summers’ office said.
The crate broke open as the debris was transported, and power plant employees found the body days later. But “advanced decomposition” made the man hard to identify, the news release said.
He was thought to be white, roughly 175 lbs., 5′11″ tall with light brown hair and somewhere between 30 and 40 years old. He wore blue work pants, a green shirt, wool socks and one house slipper. His eye color couldn’t be determined, the news release said.
An autopsy indicated that the victim had been shot several times and he had likely been in the water a couple of weeks, the release said.
Investigators recovered partial fingerprints from the man’s body. They didn’t match fingerprints in any federal or state databases. The investigators tried dental evidence, too. Those didn’t match any reported missing people. Will County sheriff’s investigators chased leads for four years, but the case grew cold.
In 2008, former Will County Coroner Patrick O’Neil sent samples of the dead man’s hair to a Texas lab in hopes that genetic information would turn up a match as part of an effort to solve cold cases, but the long shot effort turned up nothing.
But Summers’ office tried again nearly a decade later. Elected in 2020, she put more money into cold cases, hoping to “utilize new emerging technologies along with old-fashioned investigative techniques,” her office’s news release said. The endeavor has led the coroner’s office to solve five cold cases, the release added.
The unidentified man’s remains were disinterred last June. The coroner’s office shared parts of his skeleton with Othram, Inc., a company that specializes in solving cold cases with forensic genealogy.
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In February, Othram got a lead. They found a possible victim and identified his relatives, the company told the coroner’s office, the news release said. A close relative provided the researchers a DNA sample, and on March 15 the company confirmed their suspicion: The unidentified man was Webster Fisher.
Detective Sgt. Mike Earnest from the Will County sheriff’s office said Thursday that the office is “in the very, very beginning stages of investigation.”
Step one, he said, is checking for any ties Fisher might have had to Will County or Lockport.
“The hardest part is kind of trying to get a snapshot of what his life was like at the time,” he said, “finding out what friends of his are still alive.”
A decades-old case like this is bound to present challenges to the investigation, he added.
“We’re kind of working backward,” he said.
Chicago Tribune’s Adriana Perez contributed.
