Authorities say human remains found in the woods by a hunter 27 years ago have been identified as a New Hampshire man who had gone missing five years earlier.
The case dates back to June of 1991, when 78-year-old Benjamin Adams left his home in Canaan to go for a walk and never returned, the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office said. His family said he had dementia.
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Search efforts for Adams after his disappearance were unsuccessful, authorities said. Over five years later, in November of 1996, a hunter found skeletal remains in a wooded area of Hanover, several towns away from Canaan. A subsequent search of the area turned up additional human bones. Due the proximity to Adams' last known location, investigators suspected that the remains might be his.
In 1997, the remains were sent to an out-of-state forensic anthropologist, the attorney general's office said. That examination indicated that the biological characteristics were not inconsistent with those of Adams, but no positive identification could be made.
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Recently, the attorney general's office said forensic investigators with the chief medical examiner's office, the University of New Hampshire's forensic anthropology lab and state police decided to reexamine the Adams case using modern DNA testing technology. They obtained a DNA sample from Adams' son, and sent that and some of the skeletal remains found in 1996 to a private lab for DNA comparison testing.
The lab confirmed that the probability of relatedness was "at least 99.999998%," and the DNA evidence was "at least 42 million times" more likely to be from a biological parent.
The chief medical examiner's office is now in the process of returning Adams' remains to his family, according to the attorney general's office.
