The remains of a man who was shot in the head and stuffed into a rusty barrel found on the shore of Lake Mead after the water level receded were identified Thursday as an Arkansas man whose decades-old murder remains unsolved. Edward Lelburian Jackson was in his mid-50s when he died, Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse said. Authorities are looking for people to come forward to help solve Jackson’s murder. There was no evidence directly linking the murder to organized crime in nearby Las Vegas despite long-standing speculation, although a connection has not been ruled out, police said. An expert on mafia activity in the city said the case has the “marks” of a mob attack and that questions still remain. The discovery sparked memories of the mafia era of Las Vegas. Jackson was identified with the help of a bone sample submitted for a genealogical profile, along with three angles of a composite face and the clothing Jackson was wearing when he died, Rouse said. “We were able to confirm that the remains were actually Edward Jackson,” he said. Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse speaks at a news conference next to a projected image of Edward Lelburian Jackson during a news conference at Las Vegas Metropolitan Police headquarters Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, in Las Vegas. DJ Cabanlong/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP The discovery of the barrel by boaters in May 2022 stirred memories of the city’s mob era, which lasted from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. Organized crime helped build Las Vegas, and a body stuffed in a barrel was known to mean a mob murder. Jackson, believed to be from Hot Springs, Arkansas, had a brief criminal history in the early 1980s in Salt Lake City, Utah, that included a charge of aggravated arson and conspiracy to commit fraud, said Robert Price, a homicide lieutenant with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Police said Jackson was married for a short time and had no known children, CBS affiliate KLAS-TV reported. It is unclear why Jackson was in Las Vegas. Price said there is nothing linking the murder to organized crime. However, he added that it has not been ruled out. Jackson’s family told investigators that he liked to travel and detectives found records of him in California, where he lived with his wife in the early 1970s. His family said they last saw him in Arkansas in the early 1980s and it is unclear why he was in Las Vegas. Homicide detectives will continue working to find out what happened to him, Price said. This undated image provided by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, shows the remains of Edward Lelburian Jackson found inside a barrel recovered from Lake Mead, near Las Vegas. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police via AP “It’s a cold case. It’s never going to be closed until we solve it,” Price said Thursday. “I would say this is one piece of the puzzle and as we get more and more pieces, we can keep digging deeper.” Authorities had already said the man was shot and estimate he was murdered in the early 1980s. Jackson had not been reported missing. The man was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt and light blue jeans, “They knew there were traveled the country and would show up when he showed up, just to say hello. But they didn’t think about anything more than that. They just realized he was away from home,” he said. The investigator says the case has all the “marks of a mob hit,” said Geoff Schumacher, vice president of research, collections and programs at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. Many questions remain about who Jackson was and what he was involved in, which “earned him a barrel trip to the lake.” Members of organized crime were involved in the case. The Las Vegas casino industry from the 1940s to the mid-1980s, both behind the scenes and through shadow casino properties, Schumacher said. He said the case had all the “marks of a mafia hit,” mirroring another case from 1976 when Italian mobster John Roselli was murdered and stuffed in a barrel and dumped in a bay off Miami Beach. Lelburian Jackson, the victim whose body was found in a barrel in the waters of Lake Mead in 2022, is shown during a news conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026. DJ Cabanlong/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP Schumacher said he and Mob Museum staff will review their records to try to help solve the case “Other bodies discovered as Lake Mead recedes. Las Vegas historian Michael. Green said whoever committed the crime probably thought the body would “never get close to the surface.” In the early 1980s, lake levels were so high that the Hoover Dam spillways flooded, he said. Now, Lake Mead is at a record low due to years of overuse, prolonged drought and rising temperatures. The water level of the 90-year-old reservoir has dropped, exposing areas that were previously underwater in August. fell to 1,039.77 feet above sea level, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, well below the previous record low set in July 2022. Several other sets of remains were found in Lake Mead in 2022. Another set of skeletal remains were discovered in May, and were identified as a drowning victim in 2002. The skeletal remains found in August were identified as a 52-year-old Las Vegas. resident who disappeared in 1998. The remains of another drowning victim, Donald Smith, believed to have drowned in 1974, were found in October 2022. Its receding waters are leaving behind the usual remains of a lake well-traveled by weekend boaters, and are even exposing a boat dating back to World War II. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, upstream, are the largest man-made reservoirs in the US. part of a system that supplies the Colorado River with water to people throughout the southwestern U.S. and Mexico In 2022, falling Lake Mead levels exposed Las Vegas’ highest drinking water intake, forcing officials to shift to a deeper intake to continue serving the city’s 2.4 million residents More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press in:
