Montrose - Daily Press

MONTROSE — The Montrose County coroner said the body of an unidentified man in his morgue was being kept as a courtesy to Ouray County since 1987.

“I knew I had this body for years,” Dr. Thomas Canfield said in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “It was not a surprise.”

The John Doe was being kept in a storage freezer at the Montrose Memorial Hospital pathology department.

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News of his presence came to light recently after Ouray County Coroner Gary Miller told his commissioners he would be paying for the man’s burial out of his budget. He said he was surprised to learn of the John Doe, but, as was previously reported, the situation was “not impossible.”

Ouray John Doe came into the Montrose morgue more than 20 years ago after having been found at a small campsite near the Golden Crystal mining claim outside Ouray.

Though foul play was not suspected, no ID was located.

Ouray County Sheriff Dominic “Junior” Mattivi said he now has a few leads on the case. He reported a man contacted him Thursday morning to “follow up on a hunch” and that a recent obituary for a Grand Junction man also mentioned a son missing for about 20 years.

“That’s a possible lead also,” Mattivi said, stressing it could take some time to confirm identity. “We don’t want to get somebody’s hopes up and find we went down the wrong road.”

Canfield said a new law allows morgues to turn over unidentified bodies to the appropriate investigatory authorities, which in this case is the Ouray County coroner. Under older rules, he had to keep the bodies for identification, and Canfield had done so in hopes more information would come in on Ouray John Doe.

“The Legislature passed a new law saying this (releases) had to be done,” Canfield said. “We took DNA and turned it back to the (Ouray) coroner because it was his responsibility to meet the new law.”

Canfield is on vacation. He was not reachable for comment on Thursday’s story about Ouray John Doe. Other pathologists in his lab did not return phone calls Wednesday, but issued an explanatory statement through Montrose Memorial Hospital Thursday.

Canfield said Thursday he felt it was appropriate to return Ouray John Doe, considering the length of time the man’s remains had been at the morgue.

He also said a second set of human remains that came into the morgue last November as a John Doe were quickly identified as those of Raymond Walter Wiggs III.

Wiggs, 19, of Michigan, had been missing for four years from San Miguel County. His remains were found in remote Montrose County. Canfield transferred jurisdiction to the San Miguel County coroner.

He said Thursday he is also working with the state’s anthropological association on another set of remains.

“This is all standard,” he said. “There are no mysteries. They’re unknown because we didn’t know who they were when we got them. (John Doe) was returned by statute to the Ouray County Coroner’s office. ... There’s now a law that authorizes us to dispose of the remains.”

Anyone with information about Ouray John Doe is asked to call the Ouray County Sheriff’s Office at 325-7272.

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