DNA identifies Arkansas man found dead at West Point Lake in 1990

A son’s private DNA upload did what 36 years of police work could not: it gave a name to the man found dead on the shore of West Point Lake in Troup County, Georgia. Investigators identified the remains as Craig Alexander Maddox, a 26-year-old from Arkansas, turning a long-unresolved set of human remains into an active homicide case with a family story attached at last.

The body was discovered on March 11, 1990, in an advanced state of decomposition. Deputies and later investigators noted faded tattoos and recovered personal belongings at the scene, details that preserved some of Maddox’s identity long before technology could catch up. For decades, though, those clues were not enough to tell law enforcement who he was, how he got to the lake, or who left him there.

The case shifted in 2025 when it was reassigned to Investigator Clay Bryant. From there, the work moved through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab, where DNA samples were sent to a private laboratory for extraction before a profile was forwarded to the FBI for identification. That process produced the match that finally connected Maddox’s remains to his relatives in Arkansas and ended the silence around an unidentified man who had been lying in a cold-case file since 1990.

The identification has reopened the hardest questions rather than closed them. The Troup County Sheriff’s Office says the case remains an active homicide investigation, but no cause of death, suspects or motive have been publicly released. Authorities still have not said why Maddox was in the Troup County area or what led to his death before his body was found near West Point Lake. With his name restored, investigators are now working with Maddox’s family to reconstruct the final chapter of his life, hoping memories, documents or witnesses from 1990 can fill in the gaps that kept this mystery frozen for more than three decades. The DNA match solved the identity. It did not yet explain the crime.