Lake Mead Barrel Victim Identified After 4 Years

Sundae Schor learned on Sunday that the man she feared for decades is dead. A Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter told her that Edward Lelburian Jackson, her stepfather, was identified as the person found shot in the head, placed in a barrel and left in Lake Mead.

"I've been waiting to hear this news my whole life, ever since I was hiding in my closet from the guy who would come and find me in the closet and rape me," Schor, 77, said.

The identification ends four years of questions. A barrel was found in Lake Mead in May 2022, and investigators have been working to name the person inside since then.

Jackson was born and raised in Arkansas. He married Schor's mother, Mauna Ross, when Schor was 3, and the family lived in Long Beach, California, through the 1950s and 1960s. He worked as a self-employed painting contractor and sold bomb shelters, and he drove Cadillacs that earned him the nickname "Eldorado Ed" among his peers.

He left the household in 1969, Schor said, leaving behind a note that blamed Ross' "crying and whining." Schor saw him only a handful of times afterward, the last at her second wedding in Sacramento in 1974. He was not invited by the bride, who said his presence nearly made her cancel the ceremony.

Schor said Jackson sexually assaulted her from when she was 5 or 6 until she was about 15, while her mother was at work. She never reported it to police. "My whole big plan in my life was not to let my mom find out so that she wouldn't feel horrible because there was no point in ruining her," she said.

A childhood neighbor, Holly Schkoda, recalled a December 2006 party where a former associate of Jackson's said he had been shot. Schkoda discussed the memory in a phone interview Wednesday: "He had heard, where, I have no idea, but that he had been shot and left out in the desert."

Jackson's clothing when he was found included a dirty Idle Time button-down, jeans, Kmart sneakers and a digital Timex watch. Schor said she never saw him wear anything like it. She believes he was alive as late as 1987, the year of her grandmother's funeral, which would conflict with Las Vegas police speculation that he died in the early 1980s. Investigators believe he was in his mid-to-late 50s when he died.

Schor now lives in a Bullhead City, Arizona condo along the Colorado River, downstream from where the barrel was found. She has begun her own investigation into Jackson's background and has not been contacted by police about the homicide. The Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

She has started searching his name online for obituaries. "I'd go, 'Oh, I should look up and see if anybody's murdered this guy yet,'" she said.