Thanks to small-town cops and DNA sleuths, a murder case linked to Baltimore cracks wide open

WEST MANCHESTER TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Detective Sean Conway was first to the scene, and he instantly knew the report was dead wrong.

The caller that day in November 2013 guessed it was likely discarded Halloween decorations in the roadside embankment. But Conway knew better. He was looking at the bones of a man. An autopsy later confirmed he had been killed.

West Manchester doesn’t get many of those. Spanning 20 square miles and home to 19,200 residents, the township has only occasional violence. Detectives in the 30-member department cover everything from bad checks to shootings.

Before police could pursue the killer, however, they needed to know who their victim was. And that seemingly perfunctory task would stretch for more than a decade.

The remains would be sent to labs around the country, with the victim traveling more in death than in life: from Erie, Pennsylvania, to the Carolinas to South Florida to Texas, Arizona and Oklahoma.

But it was a team of volunteer genealogy sleuths, using a sliver of DNA, that this year finally helped police determine that their victim was a man who went missing from Baltimore in 2006.

Twenty years after the victim went missing, might these relentless small-town detectives find his killer too?

‘Definitely not Black’

In a small police department, officers wear many hats. Lance Krout, a patrol sergeant who is also the department’s fire investigator and forensic specialist, was asked after the discovery of the body to identify their John Doe.

The first piece of information he received would set the case back years.

An anthropologist at a college in Erie estimated that the victim had been dead for three to 10 years, but that he could have been dead for as many as 20 years. That would stretch the pool of possible cases back to the early 1990s.

But even more significant, the anthropologist told Krout the victim was white or Hispanic — and “definitely not Black.”

So for years, Krout toiled in the wrong direction.

When he had time at work or even during his off hours, Krout would look into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, typing in different characteristics and learning what he could about different missing people. He’d print out those profiles and place them into three-ring binders.

“I contacted police departments in every state east of the Mississippi and up and down the East Coast,” Krout recalled.

He started to ask himself: Could the lack of DNA hits mean the victim was not born here?

Nearby Adams County has a large migrant population. A state trooper suggested a lab at the University of South Florida that could do isotope testing of a ground-up tooth to reveal a decedent’s likely diet and water consumption and thereby where the person might have hailed from.

Those tests indicated that the victim was born in the U.S., grew up in the Southeast and spent his last decade in or around Pennsylvania. And he probably died within 10 years of his body being found, Krout was told.

Next, carbon dating of bones and teeth at the University of Arizona suggested the victim was born around 1962.

Like the classic game Guess Who?, Krout was gathering partial descriptors that helped cull the pool of possible victims.

“I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket for any of this,” Krout said. And in April 2020, he learned from a new project by DNA-driven crime sleuths that almost all of his work had been for naught.

The presumed race of the victim, they told him, was all wrong.

Investigative genealogy

The breakthrough had come after linking up with the California-based DNA Doe Project.

Founded in 2017, the nonprofit helps law enforcement solve identity mysteries in cases that seem especially daunting and time-consuming. Its volunteer sleuths from around the world include many who already use genetic genealogy in their day jobs. They’ve helped resolve more than 160 cases of unidentified human remains.

The project’s investigators, who work on cases in their extra time, found sufficient DNA to put the victim into two genetic databases. As a result, the hobbyists also determined that the victim was Black, correcting a misidentification that had led Krout down countless dead ends.

“Six years of all that work I did, and have to throw it out and start over,” he said. “But it was good in a way. Now we had a definitive answer.”

A key member of the team was Traci Onders, who joined the DNA Doe Project in 2023 after her experience tracking down her birth parents led to a broader interest in genealogy.

“What we’re looking for when we are doing investigative genetic genealogies is common ancestors, and to find those common ancestors, we build trees,” Onders said of the project’s teams. “And when we get far enough back in time, we might find that common ancestor and then be able to build forward in time.”

Ancestry.com and 23andMe have tens of millions of users’ self-reported information, but DNA Doe Project investigators aren’t allowed to use those databases. Instead, they use much smaller databases like GEDmatch and Family Tree Pro, where users have opted in to allow searches by law enforcement.

The closest match they could find was someone in North Carolina who only shared 1.7% of the victim’s DNA. In addition to North Carolina, ancestors were found in Virginia and Louisiana.

Then they used public records to build family trees. But it can be a challenge for Black victims because records prior to 1870, just after slavery was outlawed, can be difficult to find.

“It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it takes a lot more legwork,” Onders said. “We’re digging through historical records like probate records, estate records, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and having to do deep historical dives back in time and really seeing what the legacy of slavery is still today.”

In late 2025, they struck gold: a branch of the family that had moved to Baltimore. And on Christmas Eve 2025, Onders called Krout with the news: The researchers believed they had found the family of John Doe.

Within days, Onders’ team spoke with the family about one of its members who had gone missing years earlier: David Anthony Queen. Subsequent forensic testing would confirm the match.

Naming a John Doe

“They found Duke.”

That’s how Darlena Queen recalled learning that the remains of her stepson, David “Duke” Queen, had been discovered.

For years, her husband, Raymond, had held out hope that his son was still alive. He took that belief to his grave when he died in 2019, she said.

David was last seen in November 2006 on Violet Avenue in Northwest Baltimore before heading to his job at a McDonald’s on Falls Road.

He had been home from prison for just a few months after serving several years for a drug conviction. He wasn’t in the state’s DNA database because his crime predated the requirement for people convicted of felonies.

After he was last seen, he wasn’t reported missing for another month. Initially, his family had no indication that something bad had happened. He was just gone.

“It’s not like him that he doesn’t call or we’ve [not] seen him, ’cause he’d come here every day, basically,” Darlena Queen said. “I was like, something’s not right.”

“He was truly missed.”

She spoke cryptically when asked what he was up to or if anyone might have wanted to hurt him.

“Every young man out here want to do their thing, you know. All you got to do is just be safe and be careful, and I’m going to leave it right there,” she said.

Searching for a killer

Finding out who may have killed Queen now falls to West Manchester Township’s Sean Conway, who’s already swamped.

“It’s been 13 years of trying to identify the victim, and closer to 20 years since he was actually killed,” Conway said. “And it’s now getting stacked on top of a pile of open shootings, rapes, sexual assault cases.”

No one yet knows why Queen might have been where his body was found in West Manchester. Asked if Baltimore Police had been helpful, Chief John Snyder hedged.

“They have a lot more stuff going on than we do. The missing person report was less than wonderful. We’ll do what we can, and we hope they help us. I think they will.”

In response, Lindsey Eldridge, Baltimore Police’s chief spokesperson, said the department “stands ready to assist the West Manchester Township Police Department in any way possible in their investigation.”

It’s possible that Queen was killed in Baltimore and dumped in West Manchester. As much as they would love to make this Baltimore’s case to investigate, the township police find that hard to believe. There are many more inconspicuous places in between where it would seem to make more sense to discard a body.

So what, then — and who — brought him this way?

“We’re dealing with a lot of people who consider us outsiders and don’t necessarily want to talk and cooperate,” Conway said. “You do your best to navigate those barriers.”

While Baltimore Police offer cash rewards for just about every crime, there’s nothing offered right now for information on Queen’s killing.

“Mr. Queen is a member of the Baltimore community, and it is important for us in York County to provide these solutions and this truth and pursue justice for everyone who is a part of the Baltimore community,” York County District Attorney Timothy Barker said at a press conference seeking tips in the case on Aug. 26.

Conway wants that, too. But he was more measured. The reality, he said, “is 20 years after the fact, we’ll do what we can do, we’ll talk to who we can talk to.”

“But we’ll need a lucky break.”