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Almost 40 years after he vanished, David Arthur Stack might finally go home.

It was June 1, 1976, when Stack, a teenager with a penchant for flannel shirts, left his home in Broomfield, Colo., to hitchhike to California.

The 18-year-old apparently never made it to the Golden State; the Tooele County Sheriff's Office strongly suspects he died near Wendover. DNA testing is underway to prove whether a John Doe who turned up on the outskirts of the desert town is, after all these decades, the missing teen.

"We're working with his sister," sheriff's Lt. Ron Johnson said. "If it is, in fact, her brother, she does want him back."

Stack never was seen or heard from after he left his home on the 200 block of Laurel Street in Broomfield, a once-agrarian community about halfway between Denver and Boulder. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Stack's destination was possibly one of his siblings' homes in California: Truckee, a Sierra Nevada town just west of Reno; or Berkeley, a university city near San Francisco.

But later that June, a man's body turned up near a landfill on the outskirts of Wendover. The man had been shot twice in the head, Johnson said.

He didn't have any identification on him, so he became a John Doe.

"Back then, the technology wasn't as good as it is now," Johnson said. "Of course with the advent of the Internet, that just increased the odds to get matches nowadays."

Namely, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System — or NamUs — emerged. Detectives around the country can upload their missing-persons cases to NamUs and check them against unidentified human remains in the hopes of finally cracking years, even decades-old cold cases.

It was NamUs that potentially matched human remains found in a suitcase near Saltair last month to the disappearance of a Las Vegas woman, all within hours, Johnson said. Testing is still underway to confirm a match.

Some time ago, the Broomfield Police Department uploaded Stack's missing-person report, too.

A Tooele County sheriff's lieutenant learned about NamUs at a conference two years ago. He came back and, working with Utah medical examiner investigator Jill Haslam, eventually realized that their John Doe could well be Stack — largely because there was a "high-percentage" match between Stack's dental records and the John Doe's teeth, investigators say.

The time frame fit, too, and his most likely route from Broomfield to northern California would take him through Wendover, Johnson said, adding: "They started putting two and two together."

But everyone wants to be sure.

The John Doe had been buried in a lot at Tooele City Cemetery, which reserves space for unidentified bodies. The morning of May 12, the sheriff's office exhumed the body and worked with the state forensic anthropologist to retrieve a DNA sample.

The sample has been sent to a lab at the University of North Texas for a confirmation, which could take about six to eight months.

Stack's relatives already have submitted their own DNA samples for comparison, Johnson said.

Stack's sister lives in Colorado, and police there have kept in touch with her in light of the discovery, said Broomfield police spokeswoman Joanne Reefe. The sister has declined to speak with reporters.

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