Associated Press

October, 2003

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) - A Kentucky family could be back in Vermont this week for the second time in an effort to retrieve the body of a relative murdered in the state nearly 20 years ago.

The family of Roger Jeffreys is waiting for a permit before they can return his remains to his home in Kentucky.

Relatives came in February to claim the body, but state officials held it for more DNA tests, which weren't completed until early this month, said Jeffreys' younger sister, Angie Herron, from Corydon, Ky.

"It's been such an ordeal," Herron said. "It's been over a year -- a long, hard year. I'm certainly grateful for everything everyone's done, though it would have been nice if it could have been expedited."

Jeffreys' was buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Burlington in 1986 after police were unable to identify his remains, which were found in a shallow grave in Glover in 1984. Jeffreys died of a fractured skull.

Jeffreys was 22 in 1984. He had left home a few days earlier, promising to stay in touch. His family expected him back in a week or two.

Jeffreys' family had no word of him through the years until "a horrible day" last October, Herron said, when they discovered a long-unidentified body in Vermont through a missing person Web site, www.doenetwork.org. The description of the dead man on the Web site, she said, matched her brother.

Vermont authorities agreed that the murder victim was Jeffreys.

But Vermont Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Paul Morrow said the state police crime laboratory needed to do more DNA testing before the remains could be released.

When the body was exhumed last winter the skull and an arm bone were missing. Morrow found the skull in his bones file. The arm bone was sent to Connecticut in 1985 and lost.

The state crime lab lacked the equipment to make a positive DNA identification, and the state sent bone samples to the FBI crime lab in Washington, D.C. That work was completed this month, confirming the remains were Jeffreys.

State Police Detective Lt. Leo Bachand in Derby said Jeffreys' homicide investigation has been reopened, but no arrests have been made.

The only remaining hurdles to the proper burial of her brother, Herron said, are for the formal amendment of the death certificate in Glover from "Unidentified White Male" to Roger Gene Jeffreys.