YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown police said solving the latest case of an unidentified body required the help of a retired fingerprint technician and a current Youngstown officer to comb through thousands of old-school fingerprint cards.

And despite that seeming like a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, the effort paid off as the department celebrated the determination that the man whose body was found along the south bank of the Mahoning River below the Market Street Bridge downtown June 29, 1980, is George Coffman, 55.

Coffman lived on West Avenue off of Marshall Street just west of downtown at the time his body was found, but authorities did not know that or know who the man was for 43 years. All they knew was that the man was 50 to 55 years old, white and about 5-foot-8 and about 150 pounds.

Investigators believed the body had been in the water several days. It was wedged into rocks on the bank. Investigators suspected that the man had entered the river west of downtown, and his body was carried downstream by the current, detective Dave Sweeney told The Vindicator in March 2021.

After officials announced in February they had solved the unidentified body case of a Earl Sanders of Youngstown, whose remains was found on the East Side in 1987 after Sanders went missing in 1977, Detective Dave Sweeney said he and his partners were moving on to the 1980 case.

Sweeney and Capt. Jason Simon, head of the Youngstown Police Department detective division, said Wednesday the best lead in the “John Doe Mahoning River” case was poor-quality fingerprints obtained from the the deceased man, whose body was later cremated.

Capt. Simon said investigators “surmised” that the man might have fingerprints on file, so they went to the thousands of old fingerprint cards in the police department’s archives. They were of questionable value, however, because they used the Henry classification system, which Simon compared to Latin. “Nobody speaks it anymore.”

Fortunately, retired fingerprint technician George Ross was willing to interpret the system and eliminated the need for anyone to look through six of the nine boxes of fingerprints.

That left patrol officer Sonia Green three boxes of fingerprints — still thousands of cards — to examine to look for the characteristics found in John Doe’s fingerprints. Eventually, it led to those thousands of card being whittled down to one.

Then, John Doe’s fingerprints and Coffman’s fingerprints from 1972 were sent to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and BCI found that John Doe was Coffman, Simon said Wednesday during a news conference at the police station.

Simon said the cause of death of John Doe was “asphyxiation by drowning,” and that is still the the cause of death of Ralph Coffman. No foul play is suspected.

Capt. Simon said such investigations are carried out because the police department “has a professional and moral obligation to bring closure to families.”

Val Bogart, genetic genealogist with the Porchlight Project, a nonprofit organization that offers support for families of the missing and murdered and has worked with the Youngstown Police Department on unidentified bodies cases in the past, found relatives of Coffman in Ohio and the Carolinas.

“We reached out to them, and they wanted to thank everyone who identified Ralph. They elected not to be here for this press conference and requested privacy from the media during this time.”

Simon expressed the police department’s condolences to the Coffman family “for the passing of someone who was their father or son.”

“This investigation truly highlights old fashioned police work done by our highly trained law enforcement professionals here, both active and retired,” Simon said. He said it also “underscores the necessity we have for our partnerships with the Mahoning County Coroner’s Office, BCI and the Porchlight Project.”

“It has been 43 years, and this cold case is closed,” Simon said.

Sweeney said said later he could not talk about the circumstances relating to Coffman going missing in 1980 at the request of the family.

Next, Detective Tyrone Highshaw of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office provided details of another unidentified body case, this one involving the finding of the body of a woman in Smith Township, in a drainage ditch along the side of South Range Road about a half mile east of 12th Street in Sebring.

The woman had been dead six to eight months when her body was found Oct. 4, 1976. She was believed to be 6-foot-2 and about 180 pounds, Hyshaw said. Anyone with information is asked to call 330-480-5009, Hyshaw said.

The Youngstown Police Department also provided reporters with photos of three other female missing persons: Dolores Donoghue, 46, who was born in 1953, of Youngstown, 5-foot-2 and 140 pounds with brown hair and hazel eyes, from the South Side and Liberty Township; Samantha Joseph, 43, of Youngstown, born in 1965, 5-foot-12 and 120 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes from the East Side; and Kimberly W. Wilson-Talley, 49, of Youngstown, who was born in 1967, 5-foot-2 and 149 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes from the East Side.

erunyan@vindy.com