Lyle Stevik

Circumstances The man who identified himself as "Lyle Stevik" checked into the Quinault Inn, a motel in Amanda Park, Washington, on Friday, September 14, 2001, after arriving in the area by bus. The police located that hotel, but none of the staff members recognized photos of the deceased.

Stevik may have derived his name from that of "Lyle Stevick", a character from the novel You Must Remember This (1987), written by Joyce Carol Oates.

Located by techniques of genetic genealogy performed by staff and volunteers of the DNA Doe Project in 2018, the man's family had been unaware of his suicide. They believed that he was living a life elsewhere and did not want to speak to them. Due to the estrangement, they had not filed a missing person report. There was no report that appeared to match the decedent. He paid at the desk for one night's lodging, but said that he planned to stay for "a few more days".

Postmortem examination Stevik was described as fair-skinned with black hair and green/hazel eyes. DNA analysis concluded he was at least one-quarter Native American and one-quarter Hispanic or Spanish.

The man known as Stevik was later buried in an unmarked grave at the Fern Hill Cemetery in Aberdeen, Washington.

Identification In 2018, two genetic genealogists from the DNA Doe Project, Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, uploaded DNA profiles to GEDmatch in an attempt to link Stevik to individuals living in Idaho and New Mexico.

The Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office announced on May 8, 2018, that Stevik had been identified through DNA analysis and comparison with genetic relatives, performed by the DNA Doe Project, in collaboration with Aerodyne and Full Genomes Corporation. The Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office notified the man's family, who had believed him to be alive and had thought he had estranged himself from his family. The decedent's family had a set of his fingerprints that were taken in grade school, as part of a children's identification program. The Sheriff's Department compared those with the postmortem prints taken in 2001 and made a positive identification. To protect his privacy as well as theirs, his family has chosen not to identify Stevik publicly.