The body of a teenage boy found in North Carolina in 1984 has been identified as that of former Streamwood High School student James Allen Reymer.
A reconstructed photo of the teenager set the boy’s identification in motion and ultimately closed the 33-year-old cold case, according to the North Carolina chief medical examiner’s office and the Jackson County sheriff’s office.
Reymer was 16 when he went missing from Memphis, Tennessee, in 1983. Police on Feb. 24, 1984, found a body below the Thorpe Reservoir Dam, about 70 miles southwest of Asheville, North Carolina. A friend of Reymer’s identified a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children facial reconstruction image after it ran in the Daily Herald in 2015.
The body was found under a quilt with a gunshot wound to the head and a rifle nearby. The death was ruled a suicide, but officers couldn’t locate the teen’s family because he had been using an alias.
Among the boy’s possessions was a McDonald’s place mat where he had written his job and education history. One of those bullet points was Streamwood High School, which led officials to believe he might have attended there.
“Through many exhausted leads throughout the years we are pleased for the Reymer family to finally have closure,” the Jackson County sheriff’s office said in a news release.
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