PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — Authorities using genetic genealogy have identified a man more than 27 years after his mutilated and decomposed body was found in a wooded area of south Florida.

The identification closes a chapter of the “Hog Trail” serial murders, but investigators are now tasked with tying the death of 31-year-old Gerald “Jerry” Anthony Lombard to his alleged killer.

Lombard vanished from his Lowell, Massachusetts, home in the early 1990s. When his remains were found in an overgrown area of Port Charlotte in February 1994, he had been dead for about a month.

“According to the family, Jerry was a bit of a drifter, and it was common for him to disappear for long periods of time,” Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office officials said in a news release last month.

Lombard’s killing has long been attributed to Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., a Punta Gorda licensed practical nurse who was arrested in 1996, tried and convicted in the kidnapping and murder of another man, Richard Allen Montgomery.

Conahan, now 67, is on death row at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, according to prison records. The U.S. Navy veteran is suspected in at least three murders besides those of Lombard and Montgomery, though he has never been tried in the other cases.

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Lombard was survived by his parents and 16 siblings. One brother and their parents, Frederick and Ruth Lombard, have since died without ever knowing what…