Human remains found off Atlantic City 45 years ago identified as retired Coast Guard officer
Glen Burbage was last seen in March 1981, after having flown from South Carolina to Atlantic City.
New Jersey State Police have identified the remains of a man found off the coast of Atlantic City 45 years ago.
Glen Napoleon Burbage, a retired U.S. Coast Guard officer from South Carolina, was last seen in March 1981. Burbage, who was 59 when he disappeared, had flown to Atlantic City that month, and was never heard from again, officials said in a statement.
Two months later, on May 22, 1981, a group of boaters found a human body in the ocean about a mile off Raleigh Avenue in Atlantic City. At the time, investigators believed the man had died several weeks before his remains were recovered.
Police, however, were unable to immediately identify the remains. Previous DNA testing did not reveal any matches in the Combined DNA Index System, a national, federally managed DNA profile database. And lacking further leads, the case went unsolved for decades.
In April, authorities enlisted the help of Ramapo College’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center. Founded in 2022, the Mahwah center specializes in training students in an increasingly utilized field of DNA-based investigative technology that uses data from commercial genetic testing to identify previously unidentified victims and suspects.
That month, the center said, it had undergraduate students and law enforcement officials attending a weeklong boot camp examine the then-unidentified body’s DNA. Students built family trees and examined genealogical records in an effort to identify the man.
Following the boot camp’s end, they found a lead in Burbage, who had been missing since March 23, 1981. New Jersey State Police later conducted what they called a “one-to-one familial DNA comparison” with DNA collected from one of Burbage’s living children. South Carolina authorities also assisted in the case.
“For 45 years, Glen Burbage had a name and a family, even though investigators did not yet know who he was,” said center director Cairenn Binder in a statement. “Investigative genetic genealogy gives us a way to revisit cases that once seemed to have reached the limits of available technology.”
Burbage’s case is not the first solved with help from Ramapo’s center. Perhaps most notably, in June last year, it identified through similar means the remains of Henry Goodsell, the captain of a schooner that wrecked off the coast of Brigantine in December 1844.
When it was solved, Goodsell’s case was among the oldest closed using investigative genetic genealogy, at more than 180 years old. Goodsell, having been unidentified for so long, and his remains discovered along a wide swath of the New Jersey coast, had become known colloquially as “Scattered Man John Doe.”
Investigative genetic genealogy differs from traditional DNA testing in that it is more expansive, and is able to identify more distant relatives. Regular DNA testing, meanwhile, looks at relatively little DNA information, Binder told The Inquirer last year.
With that additional information, genetic genealogists are able to reverse-engineer an unidentified person’s family tree to home in on the identity.
That investigative technique became widely known in 2018, when it was used to identify the Golden State Killer in California. Since then, it has been employed in notable cold-case identifications locally, including in identifying the so-called “Boy in the Box” and the Fairmount Park rapist.
Burbage’s death, however, remains under investigation, as authorities have not determined what led to his disappearance or demise. Officials have asked anyone with information about the case to contact the New Jersey State Police Missing Persons Unit at missingpinformation@njsp.gov.
