For 33 years, Pittsburgh carried a mystery in the Allegheny River. The man pulled from the water in 1992 between the Sixth and Seventh Street bridges in downtown finally has a name: Allan Barry Keener.
Allegheny County officials announced Wednesday that the long-unidentified case is now closed after investigators used modern DNA techniques to identify the remains, according to WESA. The county medical examiner had preserved evidence from the case and sent it to an outside lab in 2024, eventually receiving investigative leads tied to that testing.
How Investigators Finally Closed The Loop
Scientists at a private lab built a forensic-grade genome sequencing profile from the old evidence and used it for genealogical searches that pointed toward living relatives, DNASolves reports. Investigators then collected reference DNA from a relative and compared it to the profile, which produced a positive match.
The unidentified-person record for the case appears in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System as UP17266, according to NamUs.
The 1992 Riverfront Killing And Conviction
In August 1992, police and Pittsburgh River Rescue pulled the victim’s body from the Allegheny River after a witness called 911 to report an assault on a dock between the Sixth and Seventh Street bridges. That witness identified a suspect, a man officers arrested near the Sixth Street Bridge who was identified at the time as Arthur Wiley. Investigators later matched blood from the scene to the suspect and say he confessed, according to WESA…