Contaminated DNA delays results in Harrison County missing person case

A contaminated DNA sample has temporarily delayed efforts to determine whether the body of an unidentified teen killed in Texas City, Texas, is that of a Harrison County teen missing for more than 40 years.

Officials had taken a DNA sample from the unidentified body exhumed in February in Texas to see if it matched that of Harrison County teenager James “Joey” Norman Spears. At age 17, Spears disappeared after he escaped from the Harrison County Youth Detention Center on July 31, 1973.

“The first sample they checked was mishandled,” Harrison County Investigator Bill Scarbrough said Wednesday. “Whoever packaged it didn’t do it correctly. Now they’ve got more samples from the body. We are now in a hurry up and wait scenario.”

Harrison County investigators are hoping to get the results of the second DNA sample as early as late August or early September to see if it’s a match.

Quest for an ID

Chelsea Davidson, an employee of Hayes Grace Memorial Park in Hitchcock, Texas, a town about 20 miles from Galveston where the body has been buried since 1973, started looking for the identity of the person after she learned about what had happened to him.

The unidentified teen died Aug. 23, 1973, after a vehicle hit him as he was crossing a freeway in Texas City. At the time of his death, he was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans with a white nylon rope holding them up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and had no form of identification.

Davidson became interested when she combed through newspaper clippings and learned how the Texas City community had come together when no one could identify the dead teen and donated a funeral service, a casket and small grave at the cemetery.

She wanted to identify the deceased so his family would finally know what happened to him.

She spent weeks combing through newspaper clippings and searching missing persons databases before she ran across information on Spears in the database for the National Center for Mississippi and Unidentified Persons Systems.

Harrison County Crime Scene Investigator Kristi Johnson had entered Spears’ information into Namus as part of an ongoing cold case investigation. She and Scarbrough had started taking a second look at the case after Spears’ sister called to check up on the investigation.

In December, Davidson called Johnson to say she thought she had found Spears.

Body exhumed

Soon after Davidson’s call, Texas authorities went before a judge to get the body of the unidentified person exhumed.

Davidson said she felt certain she had found a match in Spears because he had the same height and weight and shoulder-length hair as the unidentified teen and they looked alike, but that wasn’t enough to prompt her to alert authorities.

She called after she noticed Spears had a scar from cigarettes burns on his wrist that matched those found on the Texas body.

She showed friends what she had found to see if they agreed with her before she finally made the call to Harrison County authorities to share her suspicions.

Since then, some of the Spears family have told authorities they believe it was him.

“We actually sent them (the Spears family) pictures of the exhumed body,” Scarbrough said. “We also sent them pictures after the body was found in the traffic accident. His mother led us to believe it was him.”

David John Florence, chief investigator at the Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office, said the body was in great shape because the sealed vault the body was in at the gravesite didn’t leak and preserved the body really well.

“With a little makeup, you could have done another viewing,” Florence said. “He was really in perfect shape.”

DNA testing

Officials at the University of North Texas are in the process now of comparing the new DNA sample with samples collected from Spears’ mother and brother.

Harrison County investigators suspect they have found Spears, but Scarbrough said he won’t believe anything until the DNA evidence is in.

“There are a lot of things to support it,” Scarbrough said, adding the investigators are in constant contact with the Spears family. “We are as eager and as anxious as they are to find out.”

And if it’s not Spears, Scarbrough said, “it may still answer a question for another family” who is searching for a missing loved one.

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 5:14 AM with the headline "Contaminated DNA delays results in Harrison County missing person case."