Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson! In this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I’m diving into one of the most unusual and haunting cases I’ve come across in years, a case where one man was identified not once… but twice. It starts with a simple walk along a Northern California beach, where a family discovers a human bone in the sand. What follows is a forensic journey that stretches back decades, connecting that bone to Walter Carl Kenney, a man who disappeared in 1999 and had already been identified years earlier from different remains. As a forensic death investigator, I walk you through the timeline, the science, and the unsettling reality of how this case unfolded. From partial remains and surgical hardware to the incredible role of forensic genealogy, this story challenges everything we think we know about identification, closure, and what it means to truly “solve” a case. But even with a name… we’re still left with the biggest question of all: what actually happened to him? This episode discusses partial remains, unresolved loss, and the complexities of cases shaped by time, distance, and the unpredictable power of the ocean. It’s not just a mystery, it’s a reminder that sometimes, even when we find answers, they come in fragments. * Listener discretion is advised.
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00:06
Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
00:24
Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Matson, and I am starting to get my voice back, but I'm still super squeaky.
00:42
I had to go to the doctor today, and I have a sinus infection. It's weird because everybody got this crap from me, and then they're all well now, and I'm still hanging on to it. So it's been about three weeks.
00:55
Now I'm on Augmentin and Flonase, and then I had to get some of my shots for school. So yeah, not a fun day for me. Trying to get over it. A little short of breath when I start coughing, but I feel fine.
01:10
It's so weird. I think a big part of it is allergies. I can't even tell you how excited I am to be going to be on the crumb next weekend. Or actually, it's the 10th. So I've got 10 days. But I'm so excited.
01:27
I'm starting to get my merch in. I ordered t-shirts, hoodies. I have tumblers. I have tote bags. I have lapel pins. It's so fun. And I'm just looking forward to meeting a lot of true crime lovers there.
01:46
So if you're going, give me a shout out. Definitely like to meet you. I wanted to talk this week about a different kind of story, Twice a John Doe. And this is kind of one that I'm excited to kind of input what I have to offer as a forensic death investigator because there's a lot of things with this story that are super interesting.
02:14
You'll see what I'm talking about. But just imagine a family is walking a Northern California beach doing something that's pretty ordinary, looking for shells, watching the surf, letting the afternoon move slow.
02:29
And then they see a long bone sticking out of the sand. It's not driftwood. It's not a branch. It's a human bone. And attached to it is surgical hardware. The beach is Salmon Creek. It's in Sonoma County, California.
02:47
And we're looking at June 17th, 2022. At first, of course, there's no name attached to this leg bone. It's just another entry in the ledger of unidentified dead people. But nearly four years later, forensic genealogy actually gives that bone a name.
03:07
And that is Walter Carl Kenney. He is a former banker from Santa Rosa who had been missing since 1999. Now, what makes this story even stranger is that this is not the first time that Walter Kinney had become a John Doe.
03:25
It was the second. This is twice John Doe. The story of a man who disappeared, the ocean that returned him in pieces, and the forensic science that finally linked two mysteries into one. This is kind of interesting because, you know, in the death investigation world, when bones are found, no one really gets to make the decision as to whether or not they're human except our forensic anthropologists at the medical examiner's office.
03:59
Many times when I worked there, we would send them pictures of bones if bones were found, and the doctor had to determine whether or not they were human. And many times they weren't, but many times they were.
04:14
And sometimes to the normal person like you and I, it wouldn't be obvious. I mean, unless it's like a skull or something like that. So today's episode is about one of the strangest cold case identifications I've come across in years.
04:31
It has all the elements of a classic unsolved mystery. Missing man, dangerous coastline, partial remains, family distance, years of uncertainty, and eventual breakthrough through DNA. But what sets us apart is the shape of the timeline.
04:51
Because in this case, the man at the center of the story appears to be, to have been identified and then identified again. And it's not because investigators made a mistake the first time. It's not because there were two different men, but because the Pacific Ocean kept giving the case back.
05:12
Now, before I go further, this episode discusses partial human remains, disappearance, alcoholism, incarceration, estrangement, and the long emotional aftermath of unresolved loss. I'm also going to stay very careful about what is known and what is not known because there are still a lot of major unanswered questions in this case.
05:35
There is no publicly established cause of death in anything that I reviewed, and there is no verified public evidence establishing homicide, suicide, accident, or natural death. So today, I'm not here to invent a conclusion.
05:52
I'm here to kind of walk through the record, reconstruct the timeline, and sit with the unsettling fact that sometimes a mystery gets solved only partially. And sometimes a name is returned, but the full story isn't.
06:08
And in some cases, that may be the most haunting outcome of all. To understand this case, you really have to understand the setting. The Sonoma County coast is beautiful in the way dangerous places often are.
06:23
Cold water, heavy surf, winds that cut through layers, cliffs, bluffs, tide zones, shifting sands, strong currents. This is not a postcard version of the Pacific. This is a coastline that actually feels alive, muscular, and indifferent.
06:41
Salmon Creek Beach sits near Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco. And I personally love San Francisco, y'all. I don't know if y'all have ever been. I loved Alcatraz. But it's in a region where land and water don't really meet gently.
06:56
They collide. And that matters because the geography of this case is not just backdrop. It's an active participant. In June of 2022, a family is walking along that Salmon Creek beach looking for shields when they found a long bone protruding from the sand.
07:16
Now, according to later reporting and the DNA DOE project summary, the bone still had surgical hardware attached, and many times that has serial numbers on it, as do breast implants and pacemakers and other things that are implanted during surgery.
07:36
A pathology review actually suggested that it may have been a tibia. But just imagine that moment. One second, you're just having an ordinary day at the beach with your family, and the next, you're in direct contact with someone's unfinished story.
07:51
Authorities responded, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office searched the shoreline, and there were no additional remains found at that time. And the person behind the bone could not be identified. The case became known as Salmon Creek John Doe.
08:08
That phrase always lands hard because a John Doe is a practical designation. It's necessary. It's not disrespectful, but it also means something terrible and simple. A human being has been found and nobody can say who they are.
08:26
A life has been reduced to evidence. A body part, a location, a date, an inventory number, maybe a pathology note, maybe a forensic report, but there's no name, no story, no easy next step. And for years, this is where this new fragment of this mystery remained, unnamed.
08:50
But this was not the beginning of the case. To get there, we have to go back to the summer of 1999. So Walter Carl Kinney was, according to reports, a former banker living in Santa Rosa, California. He was born in 1940.
09:08
He was 59 years old in the summer of 99. And the date most often attached to his disappearance is August 10th. Now, this is the last date repeated across the coverage. But after that, Walter Kenney vanished.
09:24
Now, already the record becomes thinner than anyone would like. There's no widely published, detailed reconstruction of his final day. And there's no real clear public account of where he was headed, who he last spoke with, whether he left behind possessions, whether his car was found, whether there was a note, whether there had been a recent crisis, or whether anyone saw him near the water.
09:52
But all we have is fragments. And one of the most important fragments comes not from police, but from his daughter. Now, in later reports, Walter's daughter said he was intelligent, sensitive, and also described him as an alcoholic.
10:09
And she said he had a life shaped by incarceration. Now, these details matter, but they matter in a very careful way. They don't explain what happened to him, and they definitely don't justify assumptions.
10:24
But they do explain why some disappearances unfold differently than others. Not every missing person starts with immediate urgency. Not every missing person has a tight connection with their family and a support system.
10:43
So when you don't have that connection, your disappearance doesn't instantly trigger a search. And estrangement blurs those timelines. And addiction can also complicate things. Now, the family distance can create silence that sometimes lasts longer than it should.
11:04
And that time makes it difficult. Sometimes the people who love someone are carrying so much pain and uncertainty that the difference between out of contact and truly gone is not immediately visible.
11:22
So that seems important here because some reporting suggests that Walter was not officially reported missing until 2003. And that gap is easy to judge from the outside. But real families don't live on clean timelines, especially when a parent or child has spent years cycling through instability.
11:44
And a lot of families are that way. Not everybody stays in touch all the time. Not everyone is missed instantly. Sometimes the calendar keeps moving while the people involved are really still trying to figure out what kind of absence they're dealing with.
12:01
And by the time a disappearance is actually recognized as permanent, the earliest and the best chances to reconstruct the truth may already be gone. So that possibility hangs over everything in this case, because even as Walter disappeared in August of 1999, another development was already about to happen.
12:22
And this is one that no one at that time could connect to him with certainty. So later in 99, partial remains were found near Bodega Head, roughly five miles from where the 2022 bone would turn up. The remains consisted of a severed leg.
12:42
The severed leg had on a shoe, and the shoe was one of the strangest and most important clues in this entire case. It was a size 12 Rockport walking shoe, and inside of it, there was a custom orthopedic insert.
12:58
Now, that detail is going to tell us a lot. It's a shoe with an insert. Not enough to identify a person immediately, but definitely enough to suggest that whoever this was had some sort of medical issue involving his feet, right?
13:15
I mean, that's obvious. So at that time, though, there was still no name. So the remains were treated as unidentified, just another John Doe. And this is one of the brutal truths of forensic work. In the area before widespread DNA databases and genetic genealogy became common tools, even when investigators had a clue that seemed pretty distinctive, like this custom orthopedic piece of equipment, connecting it to the right person can actually be really difficult without the right records and the right reports and the right family member coming forward.
13:54
And that's where this case stalled, because the leg found in 99 remained unidentified for years. So think about that. Walter disappears. A severed leg washes ashore the same year in the same coastal region.
14:10
And yet the system is unable to connect those dots right away. And that's not because detectives did a bad job or were careless, but it's because missing person identification, especially with partial remains, often depends on a chain of chance.
14:30
Someone reporting the person missing, locating the medical records, noticing the comparison, and then asking the right questions at the right time. But in this case, that link would come from Walter's daughter.
14:43
So in 03, a tip from Walter Kinney's daughter in Ohio led investigators towards his medical records. These records actually had the key, and we go through medical records a lot, but x-rays of Walter's feet were compared with the remains found in the shoe, and the comparison matched.
15:02
So the earlier leg found in 99 was identified as belonging to Walter Carl Kinney. And with that, he was officially declared deceased. Now, pause there for a second and imagine what that means for the family.
15:17
It's not exactly closure and it's not understanding, but it's a shift from uncertainty into a different kind of pain. Because for years, Walter had been missing. Now there's actually confirmation that he was dead.
15:33
And there was still no answer to those deeper questions. How did he die? When did he die? Where did he go into the water at? Was the water even involved? Was there an accident? Was it a suicide? Was there any violence?
15:48
Was it a medical emergency? Did he fall? None of that appears to have been resolved publicly. So even though Walter was identified in 03, the case didn't really become emotionally complete. We had his name, but the narrative was still really fractured.
16:07
And for more than two decades, that might have been the final shape of the story. There was a disappearance, a partial recovery, a delayed identification, an unanswered ending, except it wasn't the ending.
16:21
Because in June of 2022, the ocean gave Walter back again. This is a part of the story that almost kind of seems impossible. So he disappears in 99. Some of his remains are found later that year and they weren't identified till 2003.
16:37
And then in 2022, more remains were found. And they were found along that same general stretch of coastline. And nobody really realizes at first that it belongs to the same man. That means Walter Kinney became John Doe twice.
16:54
So once in 99 and again in 2022. The second unidentified case remained open for years. The 2022 bone was examined, the hardware was identified. Investigators searched, but they really didn't have enough to immediately tie the evidence to the known identity of Walter Kinney.
17:18
And that raises one of the most interesting forensic questions in this case. Why didn't they? Why didn't the presence of a prior surgical hardware automatically point back to a disease that had already been identified?
17:32
Well, there are a lot of several reasons, and I want to be careful here because this is analysis rather than public fact. But first, partial remains are handled within the constraints of the information available at the time.
17:47
If records are incomplete or not easily cross-indexed or not directly connected, an apparent obvious link may not be obvious inside the system. Second, identifying one set of remains doesn't necessarily create a fully integrated profile that actually makes future discoveries instantly recognizable, especially when the discoveries are decades apart.
18:15
So the second fragment remained unsolved. There was another John Doe, another file, another mystery, and until investigators partnered with one of the organizations that has changed cold case work more than almost anything in the past decade, the DNA DOE Project.
18:36
So as you follow cold cases, you've probably heard the phrase investigative genetic genealogy. It's one of the most significant shifts in forensic identification in modern history. The basic idea is that instead of trying to match a DNA profile directly against the law enforcement's database, investigators can sometimes use genealogical DNA methods to identify relatives, build out family trees, and work backward.
19:08
So it is very patient work. It's very technical. And it's also really deeply human. It involves records and a lot of data and reconnecting generations of family. So in the Walter Kinney case, the DNA DOE Project worked with Sonoma County Sheriff's Office on the remains from the Salmon Creek Beach.
19:32
According to the public summary, researchers used DNA profiles and research that traced back connections to San Diego. And by March of 2026, they had a breakthrough. So this is all new, this breakthrough, that the 2022 bone from Salmon Creek actually matched Walter Kenney, the same Walter Kinney who had already been identified from remains that were found back in 99.
19:59
And now this is the moment that this case left the category of a tragic cult case and entered something stranger because now the mystery wasn't simply who was Salmon Creek John Doe. The mystery became how did the same person become identified twice across decades on the same stretch of coastline?
20:22
A team leader with the DNA Doe Project summed up the unusual nature of this case, saying that it's not often that someone ends up a John Doe twice. It's probably never. But at this point, it's worth stepping back and talking about the coastline.
20:41
You got to understand that cases that involve open water can remain unsolved for a long time. The ocean doesn't preserve stories. It scatters them. Water is going to move the remains around, separate them.
20:57
Tides are going to bury and unbury them. The sand is going to shift. There's going to be marine activity or animal interference. Storms are going to rearrange the shorelines and bones can remain hidden and then reappear years later and then even decades later.
21:18
So it doesn't mean that every coastal case follows the same pattern, but it means that the discovery of remains years apart isn't impossible. So what's extraordinary here is not just that another bone surfaced later, but it's that it surfaced long after Walter had already been identified.
21:37
And unfortunately, because there was no connection, the bone still had to undergo a whole second process of not knowing who it belonged to and having to be reconnected back to him. You know, they don't know what happened.
21:54
Maybe fell, maybe drowned. Maybe there was foul play. Maybe he voluntarily entered the water. Maybe never meant to be by the water, but we don't know. That's the honest answer. We don't know. It has to be the conclusion.
22:10
It's not satisfying, but it's true. And we hate those cases, those undetermined cases. But bone, hardware, x-rays, all of that matters. But eventually the case circles back to who was he? Not just medically or legally, not just as remains, but who was he in life?
22:34
I mean, all we know is glimpses. He was a banker. He was from San Diego. He lived in Santa Rosa. He was a father. He was intelligent, sensitive. His life was shaped, at least in part, by alcoholism and incarceration.
22:51
There wasn't enough details to really get a full biography on him. Walter wasn't born a case file. He wasn't born missing. He wasn't born John Doe. He had a full life long before this public record narrowed him into evidence.
23:07
And that matters in stories involving estrangement and addiction because these are the cases most likely to be flattened. People start talking as if instability explains everything and as if a difficult life makes a difficult ending inevitable.
23:29
As if someone is known to struggle, any uncertainty around their death becomes less urgent. But the opposite is true. A hard life should make us more careful, more compassionate, more committed to naming the person.
23:45
Walter Kenney's story is sad enough without turning him into a stereotype. There are many cases involving unidentified people, and we've talked about a lot of them. There are many cases involving forensic genealogy and disappearance and an emotionally impossible timeline.
24:06
But it's strange that part of him was found, identified years later, and then another part of him is found decades after. And that had to be identified all over again. So even though this file is solved, it's not solved for the family.
24:25
It's not solved for the imagination. And it's not solved for anyone who wants to know how Walter died. If Walter had been like close to his family, his disappearance may have been more rapidly reported.
24:44
But that wasn't the case. And that's what kind of stays with me. Not just that Walter died, not just that parts of him were found, but that his name had to travel such a long way back to him. And twice in 2003, after a tip from Walter's daughter led investigators to medical records, x-rays of his feet were used again to identify remains.
25:09
And then when that long bone was found with surgical hardware, they were actually able to identify those. And now, again, we don't know anything about whether a crime occurred. We don't know if this was accidental or intentional or forced or, I mean, we know there are additional remains.
25:32
There's only a small amount of his body that's been found. And that's also frustrating. Some cases are just never really fully coherent. Some are recovered in pieces and remembered in pieces and solved in the narrowest sense.
25:48
And you know, this may be one of them. We may not ever really know what happened to him. We've only found parts of his body. It's easy to frame this case as a triumph of modern forensic science. And it is, but the fact that that bone could be traced back through DNA and family tree reconstruction to a man who disappeared in 1999 is really remarkable.
26:16
Behind every one of those announcements is a family. And for families, answers don't always arrive in emotionally usable form. There's confirmation, but there's not really explanation. There's not a lot of peace with the family in cases like this.
26:34
Sometimes family don't really get closure. It's just recognition and validation and the end of one particular uncertainty. And even that can matter because his name matters and his identification matters.
26:53
And he shouldn't remain a John Doe, not in 99, not in 22. But there's something almost philosophical about cases like this. For most of human history, if someone disappeared under the wrong circumstances, especially near water, they could simply vanish from the record forever.
27:12
There may not be a digital trail. There's no national databases, no genealogy, no technology, no circulation of missing person bulletins, just absence. But modern forensic identification has changed that.
27:28
Now it's not perfect, but it definitely has made a huge difference. Science can identify the bone and connect the family tree and can tell us that Salmon Creek John Doe was Walter Kidney, but it cannot by itself restore the final moments of life when the context is gone.
27:48
And it can't reconstruct every decision and every moment and every hour between the last signing and the first recovery. And so that guilt remains. It's a triumph and a failure. It's a triumph of identification and a failure of recovery.
28:08
I keep coming back to the image of the family on the beach in 2022, how they were just looking for shells. And then all of a sudden they find this leg. There's something really profound in that. It's not mystical.
28:22
It's just human. I just wish we kind of still knew what happened to him. But at least he was identified and at least parts of him were found. And at least even though it's not really closure, it is somewhat closure for the family because they do know that he's deceased.
28:39
Two John Doe cases, one man, one coastline, and still, even now, the deepest question remains unanswered. What happened to him? And we'll never know. But in a case built on fragment after fragment, one thing is no longer missing, and that's his name, Walter Carl Kenney.
29:00
But, you know, I talk about parts missing, you know, many years and years I worked for the medical examiner's office. If someone found a bone, it always had to be looked at and examined by the anthropologist.
29:14
That's what they're trained to do. They're trained to look at bones. They're trained to know, is it human or is it not? And sometimes you don't have enough. You don't have a lot. You don't have a lot to go on.
29:25
It's not a long bone. It's a small fragment. It could be part of a finger. And we know if we find that, the rest of the body is somewhere. I know we had a case years ago where someone had had, I think, a coffin and it had a plastic skeleton in it and they had used it for Halloween, for a decoration.
29:49
It was found and no one knew if it was a real person or not. No one really wanted to touch it and get close enough to see that it was plastic and not bone. But when it was found, you know, we were called because it appeared to be a person.
30:06
And so our anthropologist looked at it and said, yeah, this is a Halloween decoration, basically. But you have to take it seriously because if there is a bone, the rest of the body is somewhere. And so that's exactly the case here.
30:23
Unfortunate part is because we don't have all the bones to look at, we can't really determine how he died. But the fact that the family has a little bit of closure in knowing that he is deceased, and you know, maybe because of his history, they can assume that it was natural that he wandered into the water and that he drowned, that he was intoxicated, and take a little bit of that possibility of homicide away from it.
30:51
Made it a little bit easier, but you never know. So this story is just a different one because, you know, we've had many cases where parts of their body were separated from other parts during an accident.
31:05
And even though you know, okay, this is a finger and this person's missing a finger, you want to assume they go together, but they don't always go together. So every little piece matters. And that's why when we did auto pedestrian accidents and people were hit multiple times by cars and there were parts of bodies and bones and teeth and skull scattered on the roadway.
31:30
We did our best to pick up all of it. Super interesting story. Not many people are John Doe twice, but this guy had been missing for a long time. So I'm glad the family kind of got some form of closure in knowing that more of his body was found.
31:47
Sorry, I'm so like, oh, I just got to get over this cough. I'm going to start these antibiotics tonight and hopefully get over this. I just can't even say how excited I am about CrimeCon and all the things coming up.
32:01
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32:20
We will have a lot of the new merch listed so that you can purchase it and we will ship. So I hope y'all have a great week. Take care of yourselves and stay well. And I'll talk to you soon. Bye, y'all.
32:33
Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies. If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast. This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
32:48
Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.