ST. LOUIS — Tymon “T.J.” Emily’s family laid his body to rest this month, just over 32 years after he disappeared while living in a halfway house in the city’s ӣƵ Place neighborhood.
Tymon’s mother, Vera Emily, reported the 17-year-old missing in March 1990 in Montgomery County, where he grew up and where his family lived.
Just two years later, in March 1992, skeletal remains for a “John Doe” — a teen who had been stabbed to death, a medical examiner determined — were found in a vacant Central West End building.
They wouldn’t be identified as the missing Montgomery County teen for three decades.
Tymon Emily, seen here in an undated photo, disappeared from a ӣƵ halfway house in March 1990 when he was 17. While his body was found in a vacant building in the city just two years later, those remains were not identified until this year after a genealogical investigator was asked to help identify the remains. Photo provided by Beverly Henry
“It was kind of a weird deal because he was a missing person from Montgomery County and he was an absconder from the Missouri Department of Corrections, so they were looking for somebody who was alive — they were never going to find him,” said Sgt. Brian McGlynn, ӣƵ Metropolitan Police Department homicide investigation supervisor.
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The break in his case came within the last year, thanks to forensic genealogy, an investigative technique that uses DNA profiles and ancestry records to put names to unidentified DNA evidence.
‘She kept waiting,’ but Tymon was gone
At the time he disappeared, Tymon had been living in ӣƵ at a halfway home for youth on Rauschenbach Avenue. He had just spent about a year in jail for burglary, according to his sister Beverly Henry.
Henry, Tymon’s older sister by just 11 months, said the teen was last seen by his aunt, who looked out her window and saw him walking on the sidewalk toward her house in ӣƵ on Thanksgiving in 1989.
“She kept waiting, but he never came to the door and then she looked outside again and he was gone,” she told the Post-Dispatch.
It wasn’t unusual for Tymon to fall off the radar on occasion, Henry said, adding that he had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
His mother, Vera Emily, drove to ӣƵ to look for him and was told by the halfway house that Tymon left and never came back, according to Henry. In an odd twist, Henry said the family hired a private investigator who was told by the same halfway house that they had no records of Tymon ever living there.
The halfway house has since closed and records that may have existed are long gone.
A cold case gets back on the radar
Ten years ago, ӣƵ police Detective Heather Sabin picked up the Central West End John Doe cold case. She was unaware of any connections between her John Doe and the missing Montgomery County teen who had spent time in ӣƵ.
“He was never reported missing in ӣƵ; he was never on our radar,” Sabin said of Tymon. “So any tips that came in would have gone to Montgomery County because that’s where he was reported missing from.”
It’s unclear why ӣƵ police were not contacted about Tymon’s disappearance, given he was last known to be living in the city. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on how a missing person case might have been handled in 1990, saying it would be pure speculation.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System reports that over 600,000 people go missing annually. And while most of them are quickly found alive and well, there are tens of thousands who remain missing for more than a year — the threshold for most police agencies to deem a case cold.
In addition to those tens of thousands of missing people, the national group says 4,400 unidentified bodies are found each year; about 1,000 remain unidentified a year after their discovery.
The DNA Doe Project is a nonprofit volunteer organization working to put names to those unidentified bodies using forensic genealogy. Sabin began working with the organization last year. It helped her crowdfund the several thousand dollars needed to extract a DNA profile in hopes of identifying her John Doe.
Investigative genetic genealogist Tracie Boyle led the team who identified the remains within a week of receiving John Doe DNA profile from Sabin’s case — a fast turnaround she attributed to unusually close familial matches.
“We don’t usually present it to the detectives unless we’re very sure,” Boyle said.
Tymon Emily, seen here in an undated photo, disappeared from a ӣƵ halfway house in March 1990 when he was 17. While his body was found in a vacant building in the city just two years later, those remains were not identified until this year after a genealogical investigator was asked to help identify the remains. Photo provided by Beverly Henry
Tymon’s genetic profile produced one second cousin-once-removed and three third cousins. Boyle said a second cousin-once-removed will share great-grandparents and a third cousin will share great-great-grandparents.
Exactly 32 years to the day that Tymon was reported missing, Sabin said, she received final confirmation that the body was his.
‘It’s a lot harder than it sounds’
Tymon’s case marked the first time the ӣƵ Metropolitan Police Department successfully identified remains using forensic genealogy.
It was not for a lack of trying.
Sabin is one of seven ӣƵ city detectives who meet once a month to work on cold cases, on top of their regular duties as detectives. McGlynn, the homicide supervisor, said the team has been using genealogical forensics on certain cases since about 2016.
A national spotlight fell on forensic genealogy with high-profile cases like the Golden State Killer, when the 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. became the first public arrest obtained through genetic genealogy. That same year, Ohio authorities identified a woman’s body found in 1981 as Marcia L. King of Arkansas. Her body had long been referred to as the Buckskin Girl because she was found wearing a fringed buckskin jacket.
Shortly after, in 2020, forensic genealogist CeCe Moore put out one season of the show “The Genetic Detective,” which followed her endeavors in trying to solve various cold cases throughout the country using genetics.
Boyle said contrary to what most people think, forensic genealogists don’t have access to all of the DNA ancestry information stored by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry. Instead, they work from two programs, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, which are open-source databases containing DNA profiles.
Both of those companies host databases containing DNA profiles of people who have uploaded their information voluntarily and explicitly agreed to giving law enforcement access for specific kinds of cases (violent crime, missing persons, etc.). Often, families of missing people will submit their DNA in hopes of finding their lost loved one.
Boyle said the approximately 3 million DNA profiles in those databases represent a tiny fraction of the DNA profiles stores by commercial genealogy companies.
“I’ll tell you what, it’s a lot harder than it sounds,” Sabin said. “I have so much respect for these genealogists and the women who worked on this case because it is difficult.”
More agencies turn to forensic genealogy
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office recently announced a similar cold case achievement involving unidentified remains found in the Cuivre River State Park near Highway KK in March of 2006.
The department last year partnered with Jennifer Bengtson, an anthropology professor at Southeast Missouri State University. With the help of forensic DNA lab Othram, she was able to identify those remains within a few months.
The family has asked police not to release their names or the name of their relative, according to Lincoln County’s Cpt. David Hill.
Hill also said Bengtson is now assisting in a 1984 homicide case in which an “exceptionally well-dressed” man was found with a gunshot wound to the back of the head inside a pump house near Highway F in rural Lincoln County.
The media attention given to these cold cases can be exactly what police need to produce a lead, Sabin noted. It can jog someone’s memory or bring up other tidbits of information that did not reach police when the case was active.
Before Sabin took on Tymon’s case and tapped into the power of DNA forensic science, Tymon’s remains were exhumed in 2004 so that staff at the University of North Texas could produce a DNA profile (a different kind of profile from the one Sabin sought in 2021). That profile was entered into the CODIS system, an FBI program established in 1998 that stores information from federal, state and local forensic laboratories in an effort to identify both victims and suspects.
His DNA profile received few hits and no matches. All Sabin knew was the man had been dead for two to three years when the remains were found and that they belonged to someone who was at least 15 but younger than 30.
A grieving family gets closure at last
Tymon was the fourth of six children — he had an older half brother, two older sisters and two younger brothers. Henry said he acted as a protective big brother to all of them, sticking up for them on the school bus.
Not surprisingly, his disappearance took a toll on the family, she said.
“It was worse during holidays. It was so empty,” she said. “We always thought about him, talked about him. We were a close family.”
Tymon also had a son whom he never met, Henry said, noting that while they knew of his existence, they never knew how to contact him. That son, who lives in Florida and is now a father of two, learned in 2008 that Tymon was missing when he got in touch with Vera Emily.
Throughout the years Tymon’s family would get calls of possible leads, but they were always let down in the end.
When Sabin knocked on Tymon’s father’s door for a DNA sample earlier this year to confirm the identification, the detective said Alfred Emily was astonished that someone was still working on his missing son’s case.
Sabin said he told her his wife just wanted to know what happened to their son before she died and he believed burying him next to her would mean the world to Vera Emily.
Vera Emily was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2007 accident and died in March 2010.
“I think she would be very happy, just being at ease that he’s in heaven,” Henry, who now lives in Arkansas, said. “You should never have to bury your child.”
Alfred Emily, now in his 80s, had Tymon’s remains blessed at a church and buried at Hawk Point Cemetery in Lincoln County next to his mother’s grave.
