Gregory Allan Woodford, 30, was a U.S. Navy veteran living in Colorado Springs who went missing in June 2019. Park County Coroner David Kintz Jr. said he died that same week.
“One of our biggest responsibilities is to make sure that the unidentified get a name, that their story is told, their families know what happened to them,” Kintz said during
a press conference Monday.
Woodford’s identity was confirmed through genetic technology that connected his DNA to that of his sister. Kintz said some of Woodford’s family members still live in Roanoke.
On June 19, 2020, some teenagers hiking in the Lost Creek Wilderness southeast of Denver found Woodford’s remains.
At 6 a.m. the next day, the sheriff’s office launched a search and recovery mission. The teens directed authorities to the site of the remains.
With a signifcant weather system on the way, the recovery team had just a few hours to complete its search.
“Every time weather came into this area, this area was slightly altered,” Kintz said. “It was very critical to process this scene as thorough and quickly as possible.”
The coroner said the search began with forensic canines.
“They located almost all the human remains within a short period of time in an area from about 100 to 150 yards long down the slope,” Kintz said.
The slope was dangerously steep with lots of rock outcroppings and trees, Kintz said. But after completing a grid search and gathering all of Woodford’s personal affects, the recovery team had successfully cleared the scene by sundown.
“However, we knew very quickly that this individual was going to be very difficult to identify,” Kintz said. “In this case, all personal effects had no identifying markers of any kind. No initials, no wallet, no ID, nothing that had a name for us to begin with.”
The coroner said his office couldn’t rely on fingerprints or dental identification for an ID, either, so he called on an anthropologist to perform a forensic analysis of the remains.
Woodford’s
case information features several photos of the personal affects that were found with his body. Among them were “a backpack, hiking poles, a star of life knife, Atlanta Braves cap, Size 10.5 shoes, a Samsung S4 phone and a shotgun.” Woodford’s DNA was uploaded into CODIS and again compared to other cases, but there were still “no hits,” Kintz said. “None whatsoever.”
With other options exhausted, the coroner’s office turned to
United Data Connect, Inc., a forensic genealogy company based in Colorado.
Gregory Allan Woodford, 30, was a U.S. Navy veteran living in Colorado Springs. He went missing in June 2019. He died that same week, but his remains weren't found until
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