Half-brother the prime suspect in the murder of Ronald Cole
Geneseo, IL - Sixty years after his body was discovered, the DNA Doe Project has identified Geneseo John Doe as Ronald Joe Cole. Cole was only 19 years old when he vanished from Fillmore, California in 1965, with his remains being found thousands of miles away in Illinois the next year. His half-brother, David LaFever, was previously named by investigators as the prime suspect in both Cole’s disappearance and the murder of his brother-in-law.
On October 27, 1966, a postman discovered a human skull near a creek southeast of Geneseo, Illinois. The FBI determined that a bullet hole at the base of the skull was the cause of death and that the man had died 1-5 years earlier. After a search of the area, investigators located further skeletal remains, and it was determined that they belonged to a 16-30 year old man.
In 2024, the Henry County Sheriff’s Office brought the case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert volunteer investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify Jane and John Does. A DNA profile was generated from the man’s remains and uploaded to GEDmatch, which revealed a number of DNA matches in the 2nd to 3rd cousin range.
“We are very grateful for the relatives who chose to upload their DNA results to GEDmatch,” said team leader Gwen Knapp. “Unusually, our team had good matches on both the father’s side and the mother’s side to work with.”
After just a few days of research, the team began to home in on the family of the unidentified man. That was when they found information online about a member of this family, Ronald Joe Cole, which stated that he was a murder victim whose body had never been discovered. Further research revealed that he was a long-standing missing person who had last been seen six decades ago, and further DNA testing later confirmed that Geneseo John Doe was in fact Cole.
Cole was living with his half-brother, David LaFever, at the time of his disappearance. LaFever and his wife Margaret were arrested in 1983 on other charges, after which it emerged that LaFever had previously confessed to murdering his brother. Furthermore, Margaret’s brother had gone missing in 1977, and in 1984 his body was found in a shallow grave near the LaFevers’ former home. The police named LaFever as the prime suspect in both cases, but he was never charged with either crime.
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, who entrusted the case to the DNA Doe Project; Astrea Forensics for DNA extraction; Azenta Life Sciences for sequencing; Kevin Lord for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro for providing their database; our generous donors who joined our mission and contributed to this case; and the DNA Doe Project’s dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our John and Jane Does home.