By Erin Alberty

| The Salt Lake Tribune

Police hope a skull fragment found in the Virgin River will confirm the death of one of two Boy Scouts who disappeared in a flash flood more than 50 years ago.

About 25 Scouts were in The Narrows on September 17, 1961, when the flood roared into the canyon, said Springdale Police Chief Kurt Wright. Five of the boys were presumed dead, but crews found only three bodies.

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The families of Eagle Scouts Frank Johnson and Alvin Nelson have been left to assume the worst.

But in 2006, Wright’s neighbor brought him what appeared to be a fragment of a human skull. He found it near the Driftwood Lodge where two of the Scouts’ bodies were found buried in debris after the fatal flood so many years ago.

"At that time, I didn’t know what to do," Wright said. "I didn’t want to disrupt the families with this when I didn’t have a way of knowing if it was one child or the other ... and it could be something totally unrelated to these two."

The fragment went to the medical examiner’s office. In recent weeks, an investigator found the bone and told Wright of a free DNA analysis program offered by the University of Texas.

Wright set out to find relatives of both boys, whose parents have died. Johnson has multiple living siblings. A brother living in Bend, Ore., shipped a DNA sample to Washington County last week, Wright said.

Nelson has just one relative — a younger sister who is 65 and lives in Holladay. Her children were adopted, so she is "the end of the bloodline," Wright said. Unified police officers took her sample. Wright said he is shipping the material from both siblings and the skull fragment to Texas on Wednesday.

"As we’ve told both family members, it could be from an old Indian grave or it could be another flash flood [victim]," Wright said. But a positive match for one of the Scouts could bring some much needed closure to one of the two families, he said.

"It’s a lot harder when you don’t have anything to say goodbye to," Wright said.