Connecticut and Vermont cold case solved, skull identified as missing boater Brian Canfield

Nearly 24 years after a boating accident on the Connecticut River system, a skull recovered in East Haddam, Connecticut, has finally been identified as Brian Canfield, the Vermont man who vanished after a fishing trip in 2001. The match gives Canfield’s family a name for remains that sat unidentified for years, and it closes a case that began as a water rescue search and ended as a cold-case DNA identification.

Canfield was fishing with Terry Brinegar at Sumner Falls in Hartland, Vermont, on April 9, 2001, when their boat overturned. Brinegar’s body was recovered later that month, on April 24, near the Bellows Falls Dam. Canfield was never found. For years, the accident left one of the two men accounted for and the other reduced to a missing-person file, with no recovered body to explain what happened after the boat went over.

The break came in October 2006, when two bow hunters reported finding what appeared to be a human skull in a densely wooded area between the Connecticut River and the Salmon River in Haddam Neck, near the Salmon River Boat Launch. Connecticut State Police logged the report shortly after 3:30 p.m. on October 9, 2006. The remains were entered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System as UP8907, but the case stalled for years because investigators could not put a name to the skull.

That changed after the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner submitted the evidence to Othram in 2022. Scientists there developed a DNA extract, used forensic-grade genome sequencing to build a profile, and then turned to investigative genetic genealogy to narrow the field of possible relatives. A sample from Canfield’s brother was compared through KinSNP Rapid Relationship Testing, and the match confirmed the remains were Brian Canfield, born December 1, 1962. Connecticut State Police then notified Vermont State Police of the identification.

Officials said the case is not suspicious and is now closed. The identification was crowdfunded through DNASolves, and it was the ninth publicly announced Connecticut case to use Othram’s identity inference pipeline. It also lands against a wider backdrop in Vermont, where state police still list more than 80 unsolved homicides and missing-person cases, even as DNA keeps bringing long-idle files back into focus. For Canfield’s family, the man who disappeared when the boat went over finally has his name back.