‘Grateful Doe’: Sleuths on Facebook and Reddit solve 20-year mystery of a missing teenager

Twenty years after the van he was in ran off the road in Northern Virginia, and 10 years after the Internet started trying to close his case, the man known only as “Grateful Doe” finally has a name.

On Wednesday, both the Virginia Medical Examiner's office and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System confirmed that Grateful Doe is 19-year-old Jason Callahan - the man first identified by sleuths on Reddit and Facebook almost a year ago.

Callahan, originally from South Carolina, had been hitch-hiking up the East Coast following the Grateful Dead's 1995 tour when the car he was travelling in was involved in a fatal accident in Emporia, Virginia. The driver of the car, a 21-year-old man, was immediately identified by his family. But no one knew who the man's passenger was, and his injuries made it difficult to describe or sketch him accurately.

To make matters worse, the so-called Grateful Doe didn't match any missing persons report. Because she was unsure when and where her son had actually gone missing since leaving home, Callahan's mother, Margaretta Evans, never filed a report.

“It just broke my heart,” said Lauren Rutley, who helped publicise Doe's case online. “That he was so young, and no one had reported him missing at the time.”

Rutley was one of dozens of volunteers and amateur detectives who worked on Grateful Doe's case over a period of nearly 10 years. Users on Websleuths, a forum popular with cold-case and true-crime fanatics, had been cross-referencing Grateful Doe's case against hundreds of entries in the missing persons' database since July 2005. The search only heated up last December, however, when Reddit took on the case.