 He was variously identified by parents and friends as a host of men, including Al Watson, John Barrett, Earl Keesee and Joseph Ahrens; the coroner joked about the inability of the man to stay identified.Investigators considered the most credible possibilities as Barrett, a former Canadian Soldier who disappeared from Chicago's skid row that same day, or Eddie Ryan, whose mother was a homeless washerwoman named Nellie Ryan who had given him years earlier to a farmer to raise and then identified his body.Finally in August 1921, the coroner released the body for burial after a woman identified him as her son who she had sent off to a farm 18 years earlier and had never seen again.