Madison County Coroner’s Office and Rankin County Coroner’s Office team with Othram to identify a 1983 homicide victim

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - WLBT has new information about a bizarre case more than 40 years old, involving a former Jackson city official, embezzlement, deception, and a burned body.

Edward L. Cates was arrested and imprisoned for his crimes, but one mystery remains, whose body was in Cates' burned vehicle.

Now, two metro area coroners are teaming up to hopefully find an identity and answer the question.

May 24th, 1983, a badly burned 1977 Honda Civic is found in a field on Bozeman Road off Highway 463 in Madison County. The body in the driver’s seat was so charred, it was difficult to positively identify.

The license plate and other items showed the vehicle belonged to 55-year-old Edward L. Cates, a former Mississippi assistant attorney general and Jackson City Commissioner.

William “Billy” Noble was Madison County sheriff at the time.

“Could be foul play, could be accidental, uh, hard to say at this particular time,” said Sheriff Noble.

Nevertheless, Cates, a veteran, received a full military funeral, but that was not the end of this story.

A month later, Cates was found living in an apartment in an Atlanta suburb. Officers traced him to Georgia after Cates' wife began receiving money orders from a man named “Curts” and turned them over to her attorney. Her attorney gave them to investigators.

Cates was indicted by a Madison County grand jury on charges of capital murder and arson.

He was also indicted in Hinds County for embezzling $233,000 from a farm cooperative he had done legal work for. Prosecutors maintained Cates faked his death to cover his involvement in the embezzlement.

Madison County Coroner Alex Breeland said, " What I think is he found this guy somewhere.“

So, who was the man found burned beyond recognition in Cates' car? It’s a mystery that has endured more than 40 years.

Breeland explained, “The remains were sent to a pathology lab in Florida back in the 80s where they did advanced studies that were available at the time, trying to identify who the gentleman was. The remains stayed at that lab until the director of the lab, or the doctor retired at which time they were trying to clean out his old cases. It’s been several years ago that they called me just out of the blue and said we are about to send you the remains from this case that would’ve been related to what was referred to as the Ed Cates case. Gave the address and everything where to send and they sent me the remains with all of their reports and so forth and so it was pretty extensive what they were able to send, and I held onto it ever since until all this came up.”

You may recall a series of reports I did with Rankin County Coroner David Ruth and his success in identifying a cold case Jane Doe murder victim from the 1970s, using DNA technology through Othram labs in Dallas, Texas.

Ruth said, “And that’s what we were hoping to do here. I was talking to Mr. Breeland about the Jane Doe success story and I was here at his office and he said, well lemme show you this and he still had the remains from his 1983 case or that was handed off to him and he had kept it preserved all these years in hopes of something, maybe coming out of it and I said hey let’s just try and I contacted Othram and they were very excited about this because it was a very high profile case here in Madison County.”

For the first time, we are learning new information from that Florida pathology report about the injuries the victim suffered. He was a white male, determined to be 39 years old, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall.

Coroner Breeland read from the report: “He had suffered fractures to at least his left fibula, 12th thoracic vertebra, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th left ribs, and possibly 11th right ribs ... [the] body was severely burned in the presence of accelerants...the burning probably did not cause the apparent absence of teeth. Two ribs, the left 7th and 8th ribs showed fresh fractures that might have occurred around the time of death or during post-mortem handling...”

The remains are now in the hands of pathologists at Othram Labs.

Will we finally learn the identity of the John Doe homicide victim in the Ed Cates case?

Coroner David Ruth said, “If anybody has anything, you know, if they’ve been sitting on something all these years and just needs to call somebody and just maybe help out, you know, if they got an idea who they think it might be, somebody that just stopped showing up, you know, we just don’t know. We’re asking for any help we can get.“

Ed Cates died in Parchman Prison in 1990 without ever revealing the name of his victim. He was 62.

No taxpayer dollars are being used in this investigation. Othram is taking donations through crowdfunding to raise the $7,500 cost of DNA testing.

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