While Alabama investigators have unlocked one big mystery surrounding a body found more than 30 years ago, several questions remain about what led up to the man’s death.

On Friday, the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office announced that forensic testing had identified a body found in 1991 in a remote area as Rainbow Canyon King, who was 22 at the time of his death.

King’s partially decomposed body was found by hunters in a wooded area near the intersection of County Road 51 and Alabama 227 on Dec. 21, 1991. The body was dressed in black Levi 501 jeans, a black dress shirt, and white LA Gear athletic shoes.

According to the Doe Network, a non-profit organization focusing on missing person cases, the man apparently committed suicide by standing on stacked logs, hanging himself by a rope from a tree in a wooded area near the Etowah County line.

But there were other, more tantalizing clues. Just three months earlier, in September 1991, an abandoned, blue 1982 Ford Escort with North Dakota license plates was located in a chert pit near where King’s body was found.

The car was towed to a garage in Collinsville but was not initially searched because it was not reported stolen. Once the body was discovered, investigators, sensing a connection, searched the car.

Inside, they found a Pizza Hut receipt from Cullman, dated Aug. 27; a ticket stub from Smith Lake; a piece of paper with a phone number of St. Benedictine’s Abbey in Cullman, and a notebook.

They also found a forged birth certificate from Washington state in the name of Damon Hunter, and a blank birth certificate from the same state.

There was also a note: “I have a gun. If the cops come, I will kill everyone in here, then myself. Put all the fifties, twenties and tens in a large envelope with this note quickly and calmly.”

The car was eventually traced to the Donaldson Hotel in Fargo, N.D.

Investigators later learned a man using the name Damon Hunter had bought the Ford Escort there, and checked into the hotel on Aug 5, paying $17.20 for one night. The following day, he paid an additional $53.75 for another week’s accommodations.

When investigators contacted the abbey, they were told that in the late summer of 1991, a man approached the staff saying he was in “serious financial trouble,” and that he owed money. Because of this, he had been assaulted and his parents threatened. He told them he was considering staging a robbery to pay his debts.

Despite all these pieces of information, investigators were never able to piece together whether the body, and the trail accompanying the automobile, were related.

More than a year ago, in late 2022, Olivia McCarter, a genealogy analyst with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, contacted DeKalb County about using genetic genealogy to identify the remains. McCarter has been involved in several identification cases, including the Delta Dawn investigation.

Last year, DNA samples extracted from the remains were sent to Intermountain Forensics, a non-profit laboratory in Salt Lake City, for analysis and whole-genome sequencing. The DNA data was then uploaded to GEDMatch by McCarter and her team at Moxxy Forensic Investigations.

McCarter said King was identified using one of the smallest samples she has ever used – six human cells extracted from two wisdom teeth, which had been waiting for thirty years in a morgue.

The sample was then submitted to a database. Within six hours, there was a match to King’s half-sister.

McCarver, who is the same age as King was at the time of his death, said she paid for half of his testing with her college graduation money.

“This one just seemed perfect,” she said. “I was waiting for the right one. Intermountain donated the other half.”

Though some aspects of the case will remain mysterious, there was one other confirmation – on the Damon Hunter birth certificate discovered in the car back in 1991, was a birthdate with the day and month matching King’s.

“He left us some hints,” McCarver said.