A dead Biloxian was in possession of a severed foot. Did he dismember a Louisiana man?
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The St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office has identified the victim of a 2016 homicide, a man whose partially dismembered, badly decomposed body was found on Highway 90 in St. Tammany Parish near the Rigolets.
The identity of the victim, Kleanthis Konstantinidis, was established through DNA analysis, the Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Friday morning.
The Sheriff’s Office also said it has a suspect in the homicide — a man found dead of natural causes in Biloxi in 2019 who had a human foot in a bucket. DNA connected that foot to Konstantinidis, the Sheriff’s Office said.
During the course of the investigation, the Sheriff’s Office said detectives established that Phillip Pointer, the man in Biloxi, whose body who was the deceased individual in Biloxi Police’s 2019 death investigation, was the primary suspect in Konstantinidis’ death.
“I applaud our investigators who worked this very complicated case and sought out available resources and technology to identify the victim,” St. Tammany Sheriff Randy Smith said in a news release. “I am thankful for the cooperation between our detectives, the St. Tammany Coroner’s Office DNA Lab, the LSU FACES Lab, the DNA Doe Project, Parabon NanoLabs and the Biloxi Police Department. They all played a role in identifying our victim and locating his next of kin.”
At the time Konstantinidis’ body was found in July 2016 — both arms were missing and one leg had been cut off at the knee -- authorities said the level of decomposition made determining an age and race impossible. But the autopsy did determine the victim was a male, around 65 years old and 5’10”, and that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.
The Coroner’s Office provided a DNA profile, and the data was sent to Parabon NanoLabs, which specializes in DNA phenotyping. A sketch of the victim was developed, based on the advanced DNA testing, and that sketch was disseminated to the media in 2016.
But over the next several years, none of the leads chased down by St. Tammany detectives turned anything up.
The case got a jolt in 2019 when police in Biloxi conducted a natural death investigation there. Biloxi detectives found a bucket containing a human foot on the dead man’s property.
That foot turned out to be a big break.
A DNA check found a match with the body found in 2016 in St. Tammany Parish and the Biloxi detectives contacted St. Tammany investigators with the new development.
St. Tammany detectives found a relative who lived in the northern U.S., who provided a DNA sample. The St. Tammany Coroner’s Office’s DNA lab concluded the relative’s DNA and the St. Tammany victim’s DNA were a match.
Armed with that match, authorities were able to make a positive identification of Konstantinidis’ body, the Sheriff’s Office said.