For 35 years, a man found dead in Portage County was never identified. Now he has a name

After nearly 36 years, David Ralph Kaziateck is no longer "John Doe."

Now investigators want to find out who killed him and buried him in a Paris Township field.

The Portage County Sheriff's Office reopened the case last year, culminating with the identification of Kaziateck, a 36-year-old Warren resident, as the John Doe buried in Paris' Hawley Cemetery more than three decades ago.

"We don't have a lot of background on him," Portage County Sheriff's detective Trent Springer said. "We don't know where he hung out. We don't know who he hung out with. We don't have a whole lot of that information and we're trying to generate some leads to see if we can take this from a who is it, which we now know, and it's become a 'who did it' and that's what we want to find out now."

In the meantime, plans are in place to finally give Kaziateck a proper headstone with his actual name on it.

"It always bothered me that we had a John Doe in our cemetery," said Paris Township Trustee Ed Semec.

How was a body discovered on a Portage County farm in 1988?

A farmer mowing a field off Cable Line Road on Sept. 28, 1988, saw something shiny, which turned out to be a rod and screws from a prosthetic hip that it is now believed Kaziateck needed following an accident. The farmer then saw a human leg and called the sheriff's office.

The body of a man, who it was estimated had been dead for several months, was then found in a shallow grave.

Robert Wain, current chief investigator with the Portage County Coroner's Office, said the manner of death was ruled homicide and the cause was blunt force trauma to the head.

Springer said the body was decomposing, but investigators at the time were able to get a single fingerprint. It was sent to the FBI but no match was found.

A missing persons report was never filed for Kaziateck, Springer said.

About two or three years after the body was found, detectives got a tip concerning a pair of brothers who lived near the farm.

"This came from out of left field," he said. "This was another person, I want to say right around 1990-91, who was in some trouble with the law and made mention of these two brothers who had supposedly killed somebody. But we have no indication that there was any follow up done on that. We don't know what the outcome of that was."

Springer said he cannot even call the brothers "persons of interest" in the case because there is no evidence found that they killed anyone or that they knew Kaziateck. Both brothers are believed to be deceased, said Springer.

So the case went cold and, due to personnel changes over the years at the sheriff's and coroner's offices, forgotten.

Until last year.

Fingerprint key to solving mystery

In April 2023, Wain was looking at NamUS, a national database of missing and unidentified persons, when he noticed the 1988 discovery of a body in a Portage County field.

Unfamiliar with the case, he decided to pull out what he could find in the coroner's office's archives and discovered there had been no apparent resolution.

"As far as our files showed, the person was unidentified and I was following up on that to see if that was still the case," he said. "I reached out to the sheriff's department to see if they had any additional information in their case files that maybe wasn't provided to us over the years or didn't make it into our files. So it was just a follow up."

Wain decided it was time to re-examine the case.

"Knowing that this was from the '80s and that there's been a lot of advances in technology as far as, like, DNA and identification methods and whatnot, that's when I suggested to the sheriff's office we take another look at this," Wain said.

He sent the sheriff's office what the coroner's office had and Springer and Balasz went to work. The detectives went to the farm to interview the farmer, only to discover he was suffering from dementia and initially did not remember anything.

"We were talking to him and I pulled up Google Maps and showed him an overhead view of [the farm] and he said, 'I found it right there.' So he gave us a good spot to where to begin to look," said Springer.

Next was to bring in cadaver dogs, which are trained to find human remains. Two dogs with different handlers were separately sent into the field and while they did not go into "full alert," they did show interest in the same general area, supporting what the farmer told them.

Meanwhile, the detectives also sent all the evidence they had to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which is part of the attorney general's office, for examination and possible testing.

Ultimately, it was the single fingerprint collected years ago that proved crucial.

Dominic Binkley, deputy press secretary with the attorney general's office, said in a Feb. 7 email to the Record-Courier that the print matched in the FBI database with David Kaziateck, born Oct. 7, 1951, last known address in Warren.

Springer said a lot had changed in more than three decades, with fingerprints no longer having to be compared to those filed on cards.

"That fingerprint was resubmitted last year, and due to an upgrade in technology and the interfacing of different databases, they were able to within a week get us a hit and told us who he was," said Springer.

Who was David Kaziateck?

Little information is known about Kaziateck.

It was Carolyn Berardino who first helped get some attention for Kaziateck when the freelance writer wrote a recent article about it for The Porchlight Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping solve cold cases.

"I know he did odd jobs, I think, while he lived in Warren," Berardino said. "But if anyone who knew him or lived near him at all…the information can help, like, fill in the gaps and fill out his story so they can kind of try to solve this once and for all."

According to Berardino's article, he was from Michigan and adopted into the family of a man named Ralph Kaziateck, who had been in the newspaper business.

Springer said the investigators were able to track down a woman Kaziateck had been married to for a time in the 1980s.

"She met David when she was going to school in Colorado and he was working as an iron worker there," said Springer. "They wound up coming back to Northeast Ohio. They got married. David was kind of a drifter. He would take off, he would come back. He would leave for work, he would come back. And when he left the last time, he just disappeared and she assumed that he had just found somebody else and left her because he didn't want to be part of her life anymore."

Beyond that, even she knew little about him, said Springer.

"He didn't work a lot," he said. "You know, decent guy. He was a heavy drinker. But just not a whole lot and it seemed as though she had limited information on him also. Once we identified him, we were able to find a picture of David when he was in the Marine Corps. I think she had no idea he was ever in the Marines."

Berardino said she attempted to reach out to the woman, who remarried and seemed to have moved on with her life, but she received no response.

Springer said Kaziateck also had a daughter from another relationship who now lives in Arizona, but she had had very little contact with him and was unable to provide any information.

'We need to memorialize this veteran'

Springer said that initially, sheriff's detective bureau staff were planning to purchase a headstone for Kaziateck, but that plan was scrapped after he spoke to Semec and Dean Funeral Home in Sebring about it.

"They basically said, 'No, we're going to take care of this and we're going to get it done for you,'" said Springer.

Semec, who includes the cemetery on his list of responsibilities as trustee, said Dean Funeral Home has been involved in other burials at the cemetery and provided the stone at no cost. The township is providing the foundation.

"Probably in June we will pour footers for the headstones out there and his will be part of that," he said.

Semec said the stone is about 8-by-18 inches and is a mix of marble and granite. It includes Kaziateck's name and the years of his birth and death.

He said providing the stone is the right thing to do.

"We had somebody buried in our cemetery that did not have a name," said Semec. "That never sat well with me from the first day that I took over as the trustee that oversees the cemetery. So when detective Springer told me that he had identified the gentleman and also he was a veteran, I myself thought, 'Okay, we need to memorialize this veteran, this human being, with a name and the proper headstone.'"

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call Portage County Sheriff's detectives Trent Springer or Karl Balasz at 330-297-3888 or 330-297-3890.

Reporter Jeff Saunders can be reached at jsaunders@recordpub.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Man found dead on Portage County farm in 1988 finally identified