Knoxville Cold Case Victim Named After 38 Years, DNA Solves 1988 Homicide

Railway workers repairing track in Knoxville's Coster Rail Yard made a grim discovery on August 30, 1988: the remains of a young man whose identity would go unknown for nearly four decades. Forensic anthropologists determined the victim was a white male likely between 21 and 30 years old, and investigators ruled his death a homicide. With no name to attach to the case, he was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System as UP1562 and became known simply as Knoxville John Doe (1988).

The Knoxville Police Department announced on March 9, 2026, that those remains have been positively identified as James Robert Benson, a Knoxville native who was 22 years old when he was last seen near the end of March 1988. The gap between his disappearance and the discovery of his remains spans only months; the gap between discovery and identification stretched 38 years.

Early investigative work by KPD and the Knox County Regional Forensic Center exhausted the technology available at the time. The University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center later submitted a sample to the University of Texas Center for Human Identification, which developed a standard STR DNA profile and entered it into CODIS. No matches were returned.

The case broke open in May 2023, when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's Cold Case and Unidentified Human Remains DNA Initiative partnered with KPD and the Knox County Regional Forensic Center to submit a new sample to Othram, a private forensic laboratory headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. Othram applied its identity inference pipeline, a process that can generate investigative leads from DNA evidence even without an existing reference sample to compare against. Scientists identified possible relatives connected to the unidentified man. Agents and detectives then contacted one of those potential family members and obtained a familial DNA sample, which was submitted to Othram for direct comparison with the DNA from the remains. The comparison confirmed the victim was James Robert Benson. According to Othram, this is the 31st publicly announced Tennessee case in which investigators have used the company's identity inference pipeline.

Knowing Benson's name does not close the case. The homicide investigation remains active, and KPD is asking anyone with information about Benson or his associates in the period before his death to contact the Knoxville Police Department Homicide Unit at 865-215-7275.