Washington remains identified as Hawaii man missing since 1998

A sleeping bag in Olympic National Park held an unidentified man for 26 years before investigators finally named him as Joseph Louis Serrao Jr., a Hawaii native who vanished in 1998. The remains were found in the park’s Sol Duc River drainage, a remote stretch of Clallam County that turned a death scene into a cold-case puzzle for decades.

A researcher discovered the skeletal remains in July 2000 inside a tent, wrapped in a sleeping bag and surrounded by binoculars, a day hiker pack, a shoulder bag, a folding saw, a blanket, a space blanket, a green-black bivy-style tent and winter gear. At the time, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office could only estimate that the decedent was a man between about 30 and 50 years old and had likely been dead for six months to four years. That narrow profile was not enough to identify him, and the lack of usable latent fingerprints left the case stalled.

Items recovered from the tent were processed by the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory, but investigators still could not develop fingerprints strong enough to move the case forward. The remains were entered into NamUs as UP11888, yet the combination of remote terrain, sparse records and limited forensic technology meant the man in the sleeping bag stayed nameless while the file sat open for years.

The breakthrough came in 2024, when a forensic anthropologist with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office submitted DNA evidence to Othram in The Woodlands, Texas. That step mattered because the case could finally lean on methods that did not exist when the remains were found: advanced DNA testing, forensic genealogy and identity inference from partial genetic matches. By 2025, Othram had identified possible family connections, and investigators began contacting relatives in several states, including Hawaii, to collect reference DNA samples for comparison.

The National Park Service announced the identification on June 10, 2026, saying the case was resolved through genetic, genealogical and circumstantial evidence. Serrao was born December 3, 1960, and Othram said the identification was its 49th publicly announced Washington case using its identity inference pipeline. For the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office and Othram, the answer finally came not from the backcountry scene itself, but from DNA that could reach back across 26 years and give the man in the sleeping bag his name again.