For nearly half a century, a family clung to the painful belief that their father had simply walked away. They celebrated birthdays without him, imagined him starting a new life in a distant country, and even bought him Father’s Day gifts they stored in a closet, never to be given. Then the DNA results came back, shattering that narrative and revealing a truth far more chilling: William Thomas “Tommy” Green never abandoned his children.
He was murdered, his remains left to decay in a remote Tennessee forest, and it took cutting-edge forensic genealogy to finally give him a name.
The revelation came as a bombshell to investigators and to Green’s daughter, Angela, who had spent decades wrestling with the ghost of a father she adored. “I did think for a long time that he ran off to a different country,” she said, her voice heavy with the weight of a lifetime of uncertainty.
Now, she knows differently. “At least we know he just didn’t leave us,” she told law enforcement, a mix of closure and grief flooding through her words.
It was a spring day in 1981 when two hunters stumbled upon bone fragments in an isolated area of Walland, Tennessee, roughly two miles from the local middle school.
The remains, heavily scavenged and fragmentary, were immediately suspected to be human. Deputies from the Blount County Sheriff’s Office responded, and the bones were sent to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center in Knoxville for analysis.
Forensic anthropologist Dr.
Lee Meadows Jantz examined the fragmented skeleton. “I’m surprised that somebody recognized them as possibly human because they’re fragmentary, they’re heavily scavenged,” she recalled. The condition of the remains made a traditional identification nearly impossible.
There was no dental bone for comparison, no fingerprints survived, and the technology of the era was painfully limited. Investigators could only determine the victim was an adult male.
The case quickly went cold.
Investigators spent years shaking bushes, talking to anyone who might have information, checking missing persons reports across the region. Nothing matched. The bones were preserved at the university, a silent testament to a life cut short.
“Law enforcement entities at that time were seeking any help from the public to try to identify who this person might be,” said Detective Daniel Stroop of the Blount County Sheriff’s Office.
Decades passed. The case file moved from one investigator to another, each carrying the frustration of a dead end.
“All investigators, all detectives have hope to identify someone that’s unknown, to give that person back to the family, to give them some type of information, possibly closure,” Stroop said. But year after year, the mystery endured.
The turning point came in 2022 when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation launched its Unidentified Human Remains Initiative.
Funded by state and federal grants, the program aimed to apply the latest DNA technology to cold cases. “We explained that all traditional means of investigation had been exhausted,” said TBI Public Affairs Officer Leslie Earhart. The legislature saw the value, providing initial funding of $100,000.
Agent Brandon Elkins, who oversees the initiative, immediately thought of the Blount County case. He contacted the sheriff’s office in March 2025. “We wanted to know if you wanted to link together and work this particular case due to genealogy DNA,” Elkins said.
The response was an enthusiastic yes. “I was hopeful that we would get some kind of profile or some answers back,” Stroop remembered.
The remains, still housed at the University of Tennessee, were carefully selected for testing.
Dr. Jantz worked with the TBI to determine which fragments held the best chance of yielding usable DNA. “There were limited remains found, which always makes it a little more difficult with the science side of things,” Elkins admitted.
“But we took a shot.” The bones were sent to Astrea, a forensic DNA laboratory in Texas.
Astrea’s technology proved remarkably robust.
“I was surprised that we could get DNA out of them, you know, the exposure to the environment and scavenging can really cause problems with DNA analysis,” Elkins said. But Astrea has developed methods that can extract usable profiles from even the most degraded remains. “We’ve worked with exploded remains, remains dumped in sewage tanks for decades, remains floating in an ocean for a hundred years,” the company’s experts noted.
The DNA profile confirmed the victim was largely of European descent. Forensic genetic genealogy researchers then began the painstaking work of building a family tree. The case turned out to be unusually straightforward.
“Because there were so many genetic relatives at so many generations on both sides of the family, this was a very straightforward genetic genealogy puzzle,” one analyst explained. “It really restricted the possibilities of where our person could sit on the tree.”
Within a short time, the team identified a potential match.
“We identify a daughter,” the analyst said. They called Special Agent Elkins with the lead. “Once we had a possible lead on this case, we were able to find a family member that we believed had a missing person in their family they hadn’t seen since the 1970s,” Elkins recounted.
That family member was Angela, Tommy Green’s daughter. She agreed to provide a DNA sample for confirmation. “When they found me and I did the DNA testing, I didn’t believe it at first,” she said, her voice trembling.
“But I’m very thankful that my DNA matched up with his and we know it was him.” The result was a flood of emotions. “He was loved so much by his family, by his mom especially, who really before death never gave up hope in finding out what happened to Tommy.”
Angela’s grandmother had kept a briefcase full of newspaper clippings, phone numbers, and handwritten notes about her missing son. Among the items was an article from four years after his disappearance about a body found with “very little remains.” She had placed a question mark beside it.
“She had that desire to find him,” Angela said softly.
Now the investigation has taken a sharp turn from identification to homicide. “Now we have a person, a person with a family, a person with a history, a person with friends and associates that are still alive today,” Detective Stroop emphasized.
“That just opens the Pandora’s Box of potential evidence.” The timeline is narrowing. Court records show Green was arrested for minor charges in early November 1977, released late that month, and given a court date in December.
He never appeared.
His last known contact was a phone call from jail to his young daughter. “Baby girl, don’t ever forget I love you.
Daddy’s got to go,” he told her. Angela remembers that call vividly. “I realized he was telling me goodbye,” she said.
“And then I never spoke to him again.” His mother always suspected foul play, telling family members that “something must have happened in his inner circle because he’d gotten in trouble with a certain crowd.”
The location where his remains were discovered only deepens the suspicion.
“It was an area of a lot of wildlife, so obviously that helped contribute to this, but it was an unusual place to be in a very isolated area in the foot of a mountain,” Stroop said. “It was just a strange place to find his body. My mind immediately goes something else must have happened.”
Law enforcement is now working to reconstruct the final days of Tommy Green’s life. They have spoken to associates, a girlfriend, and people whose names appeared in a book of contacts he kept. “We’re trying to figure out who he had been in contact with, trying to figure out his last movements,” Stroop said.
“We’re starting to be able to build that picture.” The investigation is active and ongoing.
The Blount County District Attorney’s office has been brought in to evaluate potential charges.
“Once law enforcement has potentially developed a theory of the case and if they think that theory potentially exposes someone to criminal culpability, that’s when they’re going to bring me in,” said a prosecutor involved in the case. “I’ll have that discussion with them. It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach.”
For the broader community, the identification of Tommy Green marks a historic milestone. “We literally went from having no one identified of all these cases to one right after the other because of this new technology,” Elkins said. “It’s a place that I never thought that we would be, but now I’m very optimistic about the other cases we have.”
The TBI initiative has now identified 10 individuals.
Angela Green, who spent years buying Father’s Day gifts for an absent father, now has a place to lay those emotions to rest. “Even if what happened isn’t totally solved, we do have some closure,” she said.
“And that’s worth a lot.” She remembers her father as a tough, independent man who once defended his younger siblings and coached her brother’s baseball team. “My father was my best friend,” she said through a laugh that quickly turned to tears.
Detective Stroop remains focused on the future. “I definitely have some work cut out for me going forward,” he said. “I think this investigation really is just starting to take off.
I really believe with the Green case, this comes down to the final moments of his life and who he was around and what he was involved in. I believe there are people in East Tennessee that know the ins and outs of that.”
The message from law enforcement is clear: someone knows what happened to Tommy Green in the late autumn of 1977, and the technology that finally gave him his name back may also be the key to bringing his killer to justice.
For a family that spent decades wondering if their father had chosen to leave, the truth is both a relief and a new beginning. DNA did not just tell a different story. It told the real one.
