Katharina Buczek
That’s because, after the 16-year-old arrived in Boise, he heard about how the logging and fishing industries on the Oregon coast were taking off. This pushed Winston to travel to Coos Bay, Oregon, telling Vicky that he was going to look for a job.
It remains unclear how Winston traveled there, but after he left Boise in the summer of 1971, his family lost track of him.
Not long afterward, the remains of a juvenile male were discovered in July of 1971. They were found face-up in Coos Bay’s Snedden Creek.
No identification was located with the body, and authorities could not determine the victim’s official cause of death. Additionally, investigators tried for years to match the unknown remains with missing people.
Still, for five decades, the deceased young man remained unidentified – and he became known as “frog boy.”
It wasn’t until 2017 that the young man’s remains were exhumed by the Coos County Sheriff’s Office in order to get a DNA sample for identification.
Four years later, in May of 2021, the Oregon State Medical Examiner, Dr. Nici Vance, sent a piece of the young man’s bone to a Virginia-based company named Parabon NanoLabs, Inc.
The young man’s DNA was extracted, enabling scientists to create a profile that included information about his ancestry, skin color, eye color, and hair color. Moreover, a composite photo showing what he may have looked like.
Equipped with this information, CeCe Moore, an Investigative Genetic Genealogist, began reviewing the young man’s case in August 2021. In the end, she constructed numerous family trees that led her to a woman named Lori Merriam.
Lori was Winston’s daughter, whom he never got to meet. This discovery finally ended the mystery of the unidentified remains, proving that they belonged to Winston Maxey.
Even so, his cause of death remains undetermined, and his daughter, Lori, suspects that foul play was involved.
