Human remains found on a beach in northern California in 2022 have been identified as those of a former banker who disappeared in 1999. The DNA Doe Project (DDP) announced on Thursday that bones discovered at Salmon Creek State Beach belonged to Walter Karl Kinney, 59, who lived in nearby Santa Rosa.
The remains were found in June 2022 by a family searching for seashells. The bone contained surgical hardware and was later identified as a tibia, but a search of the surrounding area found no additional remains, leaving investigators unable to determine its identity.
The Sonoma County sheriff's office brought the case to the DDP, whose genealogists worked pro bono to identify the remains. They developed a DNA profile and uploaded it to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database, in January 2026.
The team traced a family that had moved from the east coast to California, eventually linking the DNA to Kinney, who was born in 1940. A critical breakthrough came when they found an article about human remains that had washed ashore in Bodega Bay in 1999, just a few miles from Salmon Creek. In 2003, a woman contacted investigators about her father, last seen on 10 August 1999, and X-ray records confirmed the remains were his.
Kinney's daughter described him as 'smart, sensitive, almost to a fault' and added that 'this world was just too harsh a place for him'. Traci Onders, a DDP team leader, said: 'It's not often we see someone end up as a John Doe twice.' The Sonoma County sheriff's office thanked the DDP for helping put a name to the remains.
