Editors Note: This article was originally published in the Jan. 3, 2024 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
DNA sample from daughter, age 90, confirms match to long lost father
A mix of shock and gratitude met with news Christmas Eve that a set of remains discovered in Millard County in 1958 were officially identified as belonging to a long-missing North Carolina man.
A Houston-area forensic lab announced it had made a positive DNA match for Robert Holman Trent, a Reidsville, Rockingham County native whose family hadn’t heard from since 1946.
The positive ID was secured after Othram, the lab in The Woodlands, Texas, compared DNA taken from Trent’s remains to a sample from his 90-year-old daughter, Peggy Trent Elmore, acquired by the lab several weeks ago.
The confirmation raises more questions than it answers.
Trent’s remains already have traveled a strange, twisted route from a field near Kanosh in 1958 to the state’s medical examiner’s office 21 years later in 1979. The bones were even stored at the University of Utah, used ostensibly as a learning aid for anatomy students, for about 26 years, until 2010.
A 2018 state law mandated law enforcement agencies across the state upload data from any cold cases or unidentified remains from their jurisdictions into state and national databases. It wasn’t until a few years after the law was passed the Millard County Sheriff’s Office even learned of the existence of the Kanosh bones. No one knows who found them, exactly where they were found, who delivered them to the medical examiner, and where they were stored before that.
When Trent’s data was uploaded to a national database of missing and unidentified people, the only hit local police got from the raw anthropological description was that the bones could be from Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old California naturalist and artist who disappeared from an area near Davis Gulch on the Escalante River in 1935.
That mystery endures now that the Kanosh bones have a name—but a new mystery emerges.
His Last Letter
Curiously, Trent was an artist, too, according to his family. He was a talented sign-painter who never lacked for work painting roadside billboards.
He traveled for work, too, sometimes far from home. Still, his living daughter and granddaughter were shocked to learn he was found in Utah.
They shared with the Chronicle Progress some of the documentation Peggy collected over the years and decades—people she called, government agencies she wrote, a literal lifetime spent searching for a father who simply one day disappeared.
She was only 13.
His last letter to her was postmarked March 9, 1946, 8 p.m. from Louisville, Kentucky. The last phone call she received from her dad, he told her he was coming home.
Trent’s brother even wired him some money. But Trent never picked it up.
By the time she was in high school, Peggy says she got serious about tracking her father down. She called anyone she could think of and kept notes about anything she could find.
On the bottom of one worn, handwritten list of places she contacted, an almost imperceptible clue, the single word—“Utah.”
Cindy Joseph, Peggy’s daughter, said someone must have mentioned Utah to her mother at some point for that word to hang like a loosened button at the bottom of Peggy’s notes.
“That was the only reference to Utah in everything I had,” Cindy recalled. “Somebody that she talked to told her he quite possibly could be in Utah.”
Another family story has it that he complained of a whack on the head before he disappeared, though no one seems to know from what, an accident, an assault?
“He did tell my mother that he did have a pretty bad lick on the head,” Cindy said during a recent interview.
A 2019 anthropological study of Trent’s remains was conducted by Dr. Derinna Kopp for the Utah State Office of the Medical Examiner. Kopp was attached at the time to the Antiquities Section of the Division of State History, according to a report of her findings provided to Trent’s family. The anthropologist noted in her report that Trent’s bones showed the types of injuries typically seen in working cowboys or rodeo athletes.
“[T]he injuries exhibited by this individual specifically, hallux valgus, spondylolysis, wedge fracture of lower vertebra, rib fractures, rotator cuff disease, and long bone fractures are all among the most commonly seen pathologies and injuries in the aforementioned occupations,” the doctor noted.
Peggy and Cindy, however, said they are at a loss to explain the injuries described. Trent was not a cowboy.
And if 1946 was the last year anyone ever heard from Trent, it probably means he languished in a field near Kanosh for an awfully long time.
Picking Up the Puzzle Pieces
It’s now up to Capt. Pat Bennett, the Millard Sheriff’s official leading the Kanosh bones investigation, to begin the hard work of piecing together Trent’s history.
He said he plans to fly out to North Carolina and speak directly with family members in person.
“My next steps, obviously I want to know, or see if I can find out, number one what brought him to the state of Utah,” he told the Chronicle Progress.
Bennett said he wasn’t surprised Othram made a positive identification of the Kanosh bones, but was “pleased” and hopes to witness similar outcomes someday with two other sets of unidentified remains collected inside the county.
One is from 1983 and involves an unidentified 20- to 30-year-old white male. The man may have been a transient who officials reported was seen in June 1983 getting off a stalled freight train and attempting to cross a flooded Sevier River.
A second set of remains was discovered in December 2011 along the shore of Sevier Lake. That body was reported to be that of a white male age 40 to 60.
“It’s outstanding that you can have resolution to some of these things. Some of these more recent cases… that shouldn’t be too far off for finding a resolution to those either,” Bennett said.
The captain agreed Trent’s family was shocked when he contacted them initially. In fact, the Chronicle Progress was made aware of the possibility Othram had narrowed its search to one man after Cindy called the newspaper several weeks ago wondering if Bennett was a real person.
“It was me, because I was like my mother is 90 years old and I have to be very, very careful with scams and you know,” she said, adding the family had done its due diligence after they were contacted for a DNA sample, but are still mystified that Trent was finally found.
“It’s just too real to be true.”
Cindy’s husband, Phillip Joseph, said the family couldn’t wrap their heads around the technology used to track down their family. He said no one knew anyone in the family to have volunteered their DNA.
Even Peggy was skeptical at first, Cindy said.
“Well, she just cried and cried and cried. And then she didn’t believe it,” Cindy responded when asked how her mother first reacted to the news.
At one point, family members considered seeking a second opinion, simply double checking Othram’s identification.
Othram uses a signature genetic genealogy process that uses giant DNA datasets to cull down comparisons until narrowing a sample down to a single family or a likely match. Cindy says her mother’s half brother was contacted first, for example. The testing was crowdfunded, the results released on the website DNASolves. com.
“I was trying to figure out what the world was going on, why is someone calling my mother about her father… that’s how it all started,” she said. “It is a very, very bizarre story.”
As for Peggy, she is coming around to the fact her father is coming home, at long last.
The last letter Peggy Trent Elmore ever received from her father, Robert Holman Trent, whose skeletal remains were found near Kanosh in 1958.
A Lifetime of Prayers
He adored her.
When she wanted a bicycle, he sent one home by train. It was used, and a boy’s bike, but Peggy cherished it.
She knew something was wrong when the letters and phone calls stopped.
“I had no idea he’d go away and not come back,” she said Sunday during a phone interview from the Greensboro retirement community where she lives.
Peggy never gave up looking for him. Even after the family declared him dead in 1964—a gravestone sits in the Trent family graveyard with his name, date of birth and the date Aug. 25, 1964 carved into it.
Peggy said she couldn’t remember why he was declared dead on that date, but believes it may have something to do with her mother getting remarried. Peggy’s mother and father were divorced when he went missing.
“He was a good man. But he had a hard time. He and mama didn’t get along,” Peggy remembered.
According to the family’s records, Peggy was still writing letters searching for Trent even into the 1990s. One example shared with the Chronicle Progress was a 1996 letter she wrote to a federal agency seeking information about her dad.
“I‘ve looked for him myself. Since…I was in high school,” she said. “I’ve never given up. It’s good just to know something…There’s not a day going by that I don’t think about him.”
Peggy will be able to soon lay her father to rest. His remains will be interred at the family graveyard, Cindy said, perhaps a small memorial service will accompany the burial.
Olpin Stevens, the funeral home in Fillmore, will handle Trent’s remains once they are released by the medical examiner’s office, Cindy said.
Peggy says she tells people she feels both good and bad about her father’s homecoming. Good because a lifetime of prayers were finally answered. Bad because of the lingering questions, the rekindled pain of her loss, the not knowing what really happened all those years ago.
A headstone at the Trent family cemetery was dedicated to Robert Holman Trent, whose remains will now return to the family.
