PORT ANGELES — The Clallam County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that DNA tests identify a body found at a Bean Road house in May as being that of a man who disappeared in 1987.
Detective Sgt. Lyman Moores declined to give details on how and when Norman Boullion might have died, saying the case was at a sensitive point.
“We are investigating, and we hope to have some closure on this case soon,” Moores said.
Decomposed human remains were found in a backyard when a resident, whom the sheriff’s department did not identify, was leveling the ground with a small tractor for a children’s play area on May 14.
DNA samples taken from the remains confirmed that the body was Boullion’s. Boullion disappeared in January 1987 at the age of 39, Moores said.
Boullion had told his stepsister he was returning to his California home but never arrived there, said Clallam Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Monty Martin.
The case was reopened in 2007 when a prison inmate in Ohio said he had helped bury Bouillon’s body.
Moores declined to release the name of the inmate, who is imprisoned for life, or if he will be charged in the case.
At Clallam County’s request, FBI agents interviewed the inmate and found that he had lived near Port Angeles during the time Boullion disappeared.
The clues led to the house on Bean Road, just off U.S. Highway 101, and in the summer of 2007, the sheriff’s department received permission from the family who lived there for the excavation of several feet of fill to a layer of river rock.
Cadaver-detecting dogs indicated that remains might be buried near a tree at the north edge of the lot, but investigators found nothing there.
Nearly a year later, in May 2008, an unidentified man living at the home was excavating the yard when he found the remains.
The remains were sent to the State Patrol crime lab in Washington state and DNA samples to a Texas lab.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsula dailynews.com.
