A body found in Lake Ontario more than three decades ago has been identified as a Buffalo man who disappeared 16 months prior.
Vincent Stack was 40 years old when he was last seen alive in Niagara Falls State Park on Dec. 4, 1990. About 130 miles east in Oswego, a man found a body on the shores of Lake Ontario on April 8, 1992 while walking his dog.
The two incidents were finally connected through DNA evidence, police announced Tuesday.
Investigators believe Stack went over Niagara Falls and then his body floated across Lake Ontario.
Stack’s remains were badly decomposed and mostly skeletal when they were found, the Oswego County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday in a Facebook post. Medical examiners at the time were only able to determine that the person had died between six months and five years prior.
“At the time, efforts to identify the remains by comparing them to missing person cases were unsuccessful,” the sheriff’s office wrote.
Authorities uploaded a DNA profile to a nationwide database in 2008 but got no matches. A missing person report for Stack was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database in January 2020.
The Oswego County Sheriff’s Office reopened the case in April 2022, working with other local agencies. A Canadian detective, Sara Mummery, was credited with helping to obtain a new DNA sample in the case.
In February 2024, authorities found a familial match to Stack’s DNA and confirmed his identity, according to police.
Cops believe Stack went over the falls, and his body then traveled down the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario before slowly drifting east across the lake.
