The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office is asking the public for help after identifying a John Doe whose identity has been unknown since 2001.
A Sonoma County resident told the sheriff’s office on February 15, 2001 that they had found a human skull on the “motorcycle mountain” near Duncan Road in Monte Rio. The skull was handed over to officers.
The sheriff’s office then went to the reported area but was unable to find any other remains. For twenty years, the only information the sheriff’s office had was that the skull belonged to a white male, approximately 25 to 40 years old.
In 2022, the sheriff’s office turned to the DNA Doe Project and the following year, in March, a possible relative was found. The genetic genealogy testing eventually led the sheriff’s office to John Doe’s brother and a DNA test comparing the two revealed the man’s identity as Jeffrey Thomas Rupen.
A native of North Carolina, Rupen was born in 1958. He was in New York City in the early 1980s, where he had attended Columbia University.
According to the sheriff’s office, Rupen at some point became estranged from his family and came to California, where he may have worked as a house painter.
Anyone with information about Rupen’s life or death is asked to call the Cold Case Unit at 707-565-2727.
