A composite image generated by a Virginia-based company could offer the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office new clues in solving a nearly 20-year-old homicide case.

When sheriff’s deputies responded to the intersection of Burns and Christensen roads in unincorporated Livermore on May 27, 1997, they found the torso of a man’s body. Investigators who sought to discover his identity searched a national DNA database without success.

Now, with the release of the image generated by Parabon NanoLabs, the sheriff’s office hopes others can identify this cold case victim.

“You have to identify your victim before trying to solve his or her death,” Alameda County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ray Kelly said Wednesday. “Step one is knowing who’s dead. Once we can figure it out, we can piece and puzzle together what happened to our victim.”

Kelly praised the technique called Snapshot, which Parabon NanoLabs describes as a DNA phenotyping service, that generated an image of the man for the sheriff’s office. Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Snapshot uses forensic analysis to predict a person’s ancestry and appearance from a DNA sample.

Although many have a passing familiarity with DNA from pop-culture portrayals of criminal cases, others know it better from personal efforts to study family history and genealogy.

According to information gleaned from the DNA sample recovered from the remains, Parabon believes the man was between 26 and 32 years old and stood about 5-foot-7 when he died.

The company also generated an image of what the man might have looked like based on genetic traits. They surmised he had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, reddish-brown to black hair and was of northern or western European ancestry.

Kelly’s own experience solving homicide cases has included work with forensic reconstruction artists, who recreate facial features based on skull markers and clay models and also early efforts of gleaning clues from DNA.

“When we started to use it, it was so cumbersome and took a long time to get profiles back,” Kelly said. “As time went on, we got into rapid DNA profiling, and now other elements like phenotypes.”

Clues garnered from DNA can exclude groups of people with greater degrees of certitude as well, Kelly said.

“It allows us to eliminate populations that we don’t have to waste our energy on,” Kelly said. “It allows you to focus your investigation. It cuts away a lot of work and effort that a lot of time in homicide investigations goes nowhere.”

Kelly acknowledges the body’s discovery in a remote location may require a broader reach than previously tried.

“The case looks like a body dump, and it’s possible he was killed in another part of the state and then left in that rural, remote area,” Kelly said. “We are reaching people in the Bay Area, but maybe we need to try to reach further.

“When we have a case like this and have made no headway, this is a way of revitalizing that case, bringing it back to life.”

Anyone with information about this case should call Alameda County Sheriff’s Detective Jason Hawks at 510-667-4434 or the department’s anonymous tip line at 510-667-3622.

Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180 or follow him at Twitter.com/allaboutgeorge.