NEW ORLEANS (AP) — From the time he was 9, Dennis Stewart was haunted by a boy eight years his elder.

For Stewart, now a state trooper, Danny Dewey’s funeral last month laid to rest the ghost of a slight young man who was murdered and dumped near Stewart’s boyhood home nearly three decades before.

What led up to the quiet service also answered a simple question that had captivated Stewart since he heard about the body found not far from where he was growing up: Who was he?

The killing was the talk of rural Greensburg, La., about 100 miles north of New Orleans, where the population has hovered around 600 for years.

“Murder is something that doesn’t happen in Greensburg,” Stewart said. “And here was a really horrible murder dumped on our doorstep.”

Police investigated, but the case went cold. No one knew who he was. No one claimed the body.

The years passed and the case was largely forgotten by all but Stewart. As a youngster, horrified by the killing, he couldn’t get over how someone not much older than he could be killed and yet no one would miss him, or claim him.

In fact, it was easy for Danny to be lost.

“Our mother died in a car accident when I was seven and Danny was six,” Billy Dewey, one of the victim’s three brothers, said Wednesday. “We were all just sort of farmed out after that, going from relative to relative. Our upbringing was pretty rough.”

Dewey, 47, remembers the last time he saw Danny — the day Billy graduated from high school in May, 1979.

“Danny was a junior in high school,” Dewey said. “But the people we lived with moved the next day, Danny and I were both homeless then. The last time I saw Danny he was getting on a bus.”

In 1995, Stewart became a State Police detective and renewed his interest in the unidentified body, putting hours into solving the case, or at least determining the teenager’s identity.

“He did most of the work on his own time,” said Lt. Doug Cain II, a State Police spokesman. “Even after he transferred to the academy, he kept at it. It was kind of like a puzzle he couldn’t stop worrying with.”

The victim, found Nov. 12, 1979, was slightly built with long blond hair and blue or gray eyes. He wore shoes that were too big and on the wrong feet, oversized pants, a black T-shirt with the phrase “Sex is better than weed if you have the right pusher” on the back.

Police said there was no sign of sexual assault.