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Among rows of family grave markers as old as Johnstown itself lies a much newer stone. It’s small and low to the ground. It reads “John Doe, Nov. 26, 1995.”

That’s still all that passes for an epitaph for Carl J. Isaacs, Jr., a troubled young man according to court records, whose unidentified bones authorities say they found on a wooded rural hunting property near Clinton in 1995.

This week, police finally identified Isaacs through a years-long DNA analysis after his cold case rolled out for 27 years. His identity for all those years remained a mystery to Rock County authorities, some who have since retired after years spent trying to learn Isaacs' identity and erase his John-Doe status.

With Isaacs’ identity now known, a 69���� review of Walworth County court records reveals Isaacs actually was alive months longer than Rock County investigators initially suspected.

An analysis of the decomposition of Isaac’s remains earlier in the investigation estimated his body had been in the woods since late 1994—or about a year—before police discovered human bones still clad in a heavy metal concert t-shirt and camouflage pants.

Yet, Walworth County Court Records reviewed by the 69���� this week show Isaacs might have been alive as late as mid-April of 1995 when according to court records, a Walworth County judge had signed an arrest warrant for Isaacs for a probation violation.

Authorities said Isaacs, then 20 years old, had disappeared from his mother’s home in Walworth while he was a serving part of a state prison sentence while under house arrest there.

Now three-decades-old court records paint Isaacs as a troubled young man with drug and alcohol problems who'd gotten roped into a string of low-level burglaries. What the court records and police investigations don’t show is the unknown: How could a young person under house arrest simply vanish for years without any family or friends reporting them missing?

From jail to disappearance

Isaacs was serving a five-year-sentence at the time for burglary, but was allowed home on electronic monitoring. Court papers indicate he disappeared from home on April 16, 1995—or at least, that’s when the state-appointed official who supervised his house arrest said he’d vanished without authorization.

A 1996 criminal complaint’s only other notes showed that as of February 1996, Isaacs' whereabouts remained unknown.

Meanwhile, Rock County Sheriff’s detectives months prior had discovered Isaacs’ unidentified bones in a field near to the Rock-Walworth county line.

After that, for years, an active warrant for Isaacs' arrest was transferred from judge to judge. In all, eight Walworth County judges re-upped the warrant for Isaacs’ apparent flight—with judicial transfers rolling out all the way up through August 2018.

That was the same year that a nonprofit DNA analytics team told Rock County they believed they’d found two half-siblings whose DNA matched Isaacs.

That means Walworth County authorities knew Isaacs had vanished while another neighboring county sheriff’s office simultaneously worked for decades with universities and county agencies and nonprofit sleuths to determine Isaac’s identity in a case in which authorities still haven’t determined a cause of death.

Rock County’s efforts ultimately mushroomed into a full quarter-century of authorities there scouring for answers found in Isaac’s bones and seeking answers, including four years of DNA testing through multiple autopsies and the exhumation of his now late father’s body. That happened alongside a statewide distribution by investigators of high-resolution computer renderings of the then-John Doe’s face based on skull scans.

Rock County paid for a pauper’s grave for Isaacs and a funeral home donated the small, quartz stone marker that bears the name “John Doe.”

But apparently, not until now did the two occurrences—Isaacs absconding from house arrest in Walworth; and his ultimate disappearance, death and discovery by police—connect.

Troubled teen

Walworth County Court records paint a picture of a teenager who’d had substance abuse problems since junior high school, and then entered adulthood imprisoned for a string of burglaries and criminal damage to businesses and residences in 1991.

These were crimes Isaacs was tried for as an adult after he and his friends were accused in June 1991 of a pulling a spree of small-time, alcohol and drug-fueled heists in Delavan, according to court papers.

Prosecutor’s statements from court transcripts in 1991 painted the then-17-year-old Isaac and his friends as wanton thrill-seekers responsible for multiple overnight burglaries that left a Delavan golf course’s fleet of golf carts damaged and a Delavan liquor store pilfered and with a smashed-in wall.

Isaacs’ own defense attorney described the teen as an indigent, unemployed young man who had few close friends and showed a track record of clouded thinking during periods of severe alcohol and drug abuse.

In one of the few statements Isaacs is shown making in court transcripts, Isaacs told a judge during presentencing in 1992 that he'd come to realize that even though he hadn’t physically harmed anyone in the burglaries he’d pulled, that didn’t mean the crimes were victimless.

As a younger juvenile, Isaacs had been placed in a substance abuse program, court documents showed. His attorney indicated that Isaac considered himself more of a “follower," and that he was concerned that when he got out of prison, unless he moved away from home, he’d likely fall back in with people he’d pulled burglaries with and backslide into old his patterns of substance abuse and crime.

The court records show Isaacs was cooperative with investigators in leading them to unravel a number of local burglaries involving people Isaacs was running with at the time who spanned ages 17 to 22.

Cold case insights

Jack Freiss, a now-retired volunteer with the Rock County Coroner’s Office was for a time a sleuth with the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit genealogy-tracking group that provided a crucial DNA match that ultimately led to Isaacs’ identification.

Friess was involved in data analysis and an earlier set of tests the Rock County Sheriff’s Office hired out through a complex, Tennessee university tissue decomposition study. Those tests, Friess indicated, showed that in Rock County’s climate, it could take as little as 5 or 6 months for a body to decompose.

That testing was several years ago, but it supports what court documents now make clear: Isaacs could not have died in late 1994.

Drawn-out case

Friess said that despite the lengthy period during which the cold case rolled out, some elements of Isaacs’s case aren’t all that uncommon. He said at any given time, about 40,000 people are missing in the U.S.

In fact, Friess said, it’s common for cold cases to develop around missing people with circumstances similar to Isaacs’s.

Friess said the DNA team he once worked with learned that Isaacs’s family moved away at some point in the last 20 years, but when he was still alive, he’d grown distant from them.

“There’s kids still today who are just like that. They’re estranged from their families. In this case, mom and dad were divorced. He (Isaacs) was kind of living with mom, although I don’t think he stayed there very often. He was kind of on the streets, basically homeless. I don’t think he had a friend, nobody at all around who would have missed him to the point they’d try to find him,” Friess said.

Investigators say Isaacs had been in and out of juvenile custody and had attended an alternative high school in Elkhorn in the late 1980s and early 1990s that then was a new program. It now operates as a career development academy through Gateway Technical College.

In prison, Isaac at one point tried to launch an appeal of his conviction, but he’d relied on another prison inmate to file for the appeal.

Moving forward

Friess said investigators working the cold case focused on Janesville and Madison most heavily, canvassing high schools and rock concert parking lots.

Those were places authorities figured they might find someone who recognized computer renderings of a long-haired man with a “Venom” band t-shirt, camouflage pants and a goat skull-shaped pendant.

He said for whatever reason, investigators working the cold case didn’t spend the same effort canvassing Walworth County.

Friess said he now wonders if it might have led to a faster break in the investigation if agencies at the time had canvassed statewide for people who’d jumped bail or were flagged for failure to appear in court.

Aaron Burdick, the Rock County Sheriff’s Office captain in charge of the sheriff’s detective bureau, said his detectives inherited the case as sheriff’s office officials and people in the coroner’s office who’d worked the case retired one by one.

Burdick declined to speculate why Walworth County authorities filed multiple warrants for Isaac for years but did not seem to actively search for him.

The sheriff’s office hasn’t disclosed the names of Isaac’s family, and Burdick declined to share more details of what he says is an ongoing investigation.

Burdick said now that the sheriff’s office is aware of the new timeline of Isaacs’s disappearance and death, investigators plan to look back at circumstances surrounding his disappearance from custody.

Burdick thinks the more pivotal break in the case is the fact that this week, police were finally able to publicly announce Isaacs’s identity.

Burdick wouldn’t give details, but he said the sheriff’s office already has received multiple tips that investigators hope can reconstruct a more complete picture of how he might have died.

At the Johnstown Center Cemetery, there was evidence that someone has taken notice that the John Doe buried in the cemetery now is known to be Isaacs—a real human being with a known, if somewhat vague, background.

In the ground at the head of Isaacs’s grave, someone recently had placed a few sets of red, white and blue flowers next to a handful of gravel laid out in the arched shape of a “rainbow bridge.”

It means that someone, somewhere, is still baring silent witness to the memory of a mystery man who vanished so long ago.