WHEN THEY found the body in Kentucky, Thanksgiving Day 1993, the dead man carried no identification and the only clue, if it was a clue, was a plastic grocery bag secured around his head with a belt. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The grocery bag was from Capitol Centre Foods - in downtown Madison.

Authorities were unsure if the dead man was a suicide or the victim of a homicide. The Madison clue went nowhere, and the investigation faded away. Years went by.

After a decade passed, many people had forgotten the unidentified corpse, which was buried under an aluminum marker in Paint Lick Cemetery in Garrard County, Ky.

There was one area resident, Ahlashia Thomas, who had not forgotten. She had kept faded newspaper clippings about the case. One day early in 2003 she was on the Internet and came across a Web site devoted to the nameless dead run by a Tennessee man named Todd Matthews.

Thomas got in touch with Matthews, and the end result was Matthews traveling to Kentucky in June 2004. Matthews was able to get the Kentucky forensic medical examiner to circulate a more detailed sketch of the dead man. At the end of his visit Matthews and Thomas put a nice stone marker on the grave. It read "Madison Man - 1993."

The Capitol Centre Foods bag, the Madison link, was why Matthews got in touch with me in the summer of 2004. He wondered if I might write a column about "Madison Man."

"Somebody up there knows something," Matthews said.

It was a few months later that a Lodi couple, Mark Prouty and Janet Juckem, were downloading family photos onto a new home computer. In some of the photos from their wedding, Mark's brother, Doug Prouty, was pictured.

Seeing the photos triggered an emotional response in both Mark and Janet. They hadn't seen Doug in over a decade. Mark had filed a missing person report with the Madison Police Department in January 1994 after not seeing his brother for several weeks.

The brothers had grown a bit apart as adults. Doug was a good person with a big heart, but he had some problems, occasionally exasperated by his drinking. The Proutys had grown up on University Bay Drive in Madison and Doug was working here at the time of his disappearance. In the years since, Madison police would occasionally contact Mark. The missing person file was open. Had Doug been in touch? The answer was always no.

Having downloaded the wedding photos in December 2004, Janet went on the Internet and found a Web site, Wisconsin Advocates for Missing People. She clicked around on it and soon came face to face with the Kentucky authorities' sketch of "Madison Man." Todd Matthews' story of the grave marker and the column I had written in June 2004 were linked as well. Janet looked again at the sketch and yelled to Mark.

"I think I've found your brother!"

That night, Janet sent an e-mail to Matthews in Tennessee. Janet wrote, "Mark just said, 'I'm hoping it isn't him, but I know it is.' "

It seemed likely. When I spoke to Mark Prouty last December, he said Capitol Centre Foods was a place his brother shopped.

Mark gave authorities a DNA sample which when compared with the DNA from the body in Kentucky would give them a definitive answer. But labs get backed up and for months the Proutys heard nothing.

We were in touch a few times while they were enduring that wait, and it was clear how grateful Mark and Janet were for the work done by Matthews and the networks that attempt to help people with missing loved ones. Adult missing person cases are not a police priority. Matthews told me last year that there are 5,500 unidentified bodies registered with the National Crime Information Center, an FBI clearinghouse in West Virginia. There are more than 100,000 missing persons.

"And those numbers are very low," Matthews said, because many go unreported.

On Monday of this week, Mark Prouty heard from the Kentucky State Police. The DNA test results were in. The man found dead in Kentucky on Thanksgiving Day 1993 was his brother Doug.

Mark sent me a note. "Doug was a wonderful person," he wrote. "It is a tremendous relief to us that we have found him. His missing all these years has hounded us. Learning of what happened to him is heartbreaking, but at least we have closure. He will no longer be languishing as an unknown in a grave site far from home."

The case remains under investigation. Mark and Janet, meanwhile, have requested that Doug Prouty's remains be cremated and sent to them in Wisconsin.