Partial remains of a 59-year-old banker who vanished in 1999 have now been found twice on the Northern California coastline, approximately five miles and 23 years apart.
Not long after Walter Karl Kinney, a San Diego native who moved to Santa Rosa, disappeared in Aug. 1999, a leg washed up on Bodega Head in Sonoma County with a foot still inside a size 12 Rockport ProWalker shoe containing a custom orthopedic insert.
With little else to go on, investigators with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office were forced to shelf the case until a break came in 2003, SFGATE reported.
A woman living in Cleveland, Ohio called the sheriff’s department to report that her father, Walter Kinney, had lost contact with his family in 1990s, though she stated that it wasn’t unusual for him to fall out of touch, with his history of alcoholism and stints of jail time for alcohol-related crimes. This time, however, she said it had been several years since the family had last heard or seen him.
Walter Karl Kinney, 59, a banker who lived in Santa Rosa vanished in 1999, investigators said. (DNA Doe Project website)
After requesting his medical records and noting that he had foot problems, X-rays on Kinney’s file matched X-rays of the leg found at Bodega Head for a positive identification.
Some 19 years after he was initially identified, in June 2022, a family walking Salmon Creek Beach, approximately five miles north of Bodega Head, spotted a long leg bone with surgical hardware protruding from the sand.
Sheriff’s investigators were called out, but a search of the beach revealed no additional human remains. As the case grew cold over the next several years, investigators ultimately reached out for help.
In 2026, four years after the Salmon Creek Beach discovery, experts at the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit genetic genealogy investigative organization, helped investigators in Sonoma County develop a DNA profile from the bone, thought to be a tibia.
Partials remains of Walter Kinney were found approximately 5 miles and 23 years apart along the Sonoma County coastline. (Google Maps)
The partial remains of Walter Kinney were discovered at Bodega Head in Sonoma County in Aug. 1999. (Google Maps)
The partial remains of Walter Kinney were found on Salmon Creek Beach in June 2022. (Google Maps)
A team of volunteers began working the case and quickly found a thread.
“They zeroed in on a family who had moved from the East Coast to California, settling in the San Diego area,” according to the nonprofit. “As they began looking into the descendants of this family, the team came across Walter Karl Kinney, born in 1940. Though Kinney was born in San Diego, he had later moved to Santa Rosa, not far from Salmon Creek State Beach.”
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This led to the discovery of a news article about remains that had washed up in Aug. 1999 at Bodega Head. Just eight days after Kinney had been identified as a candidate, the Sonoma County Sherriff’s Office reviewed DNA Doe’s findings and confirmed that the remains formerly known as the Salmon Creek John Doe did in fact belong to Kinney.
“It’s not often we see someone end up as a John Doe twice,” DNA Doe team leader Traci Onders said. “Thanks to investigative genealogy, we were able to resolve this mystery and provide some answer to everyone involved in the case.”
Just exactly how Kinney died and whether foul play was involved is not known.
In 2003, his daughter described him to investigators as a man who was “smart, sensitive, almost to a fault,” and said, “This world was just too harsh a place for him.”
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