LAKELAND, Fla. — Some 41 years after 19-year-old Mark Duane Woodard disappeared, Florida authorities have finally identified his remains.
Diann Wells tells the Ledger that Polk County Sheriff’s deputies told her last week that remains found in the north Florida woods in 1977 were recently matched to her brother.
Woodard went missing on April 14, 1975. His body was spotted by two people in a heavily wooded area about 70 miles north of Lakeland in March 1977.
Thirty-two years later, the medical examiner’s office sent a bone to the University of North Texas to have DNA samples extracted.
Polk County Sheriff’s deputies came across Woodard’s name while reviewing missing persons cases in 2015. They sent DNA that had been provided by his parents and the match was made June 23.
“You always kind of hope it sometimes, sometimes you accept that he’s gone, and you know, but every once in a while, it just sneaks in there,” Diann Wells, a sister, told ABC Action News. “They told me they wanted my input on an investigation,” she recalled to the Ledger. ‘When they got to my house I still didn’t know what it was about.”
Then the officials mentioned her brother’s name. “I was having a hard time listening to what they were even saying,” she added. “My thoughts froze.”
