Growing backlog of Unidentified Human Remains/Searchable databases

[Nut44x4]

Unidentified Human Remains: How Many are There in the U.S.? What Happens to Them?

Newsletter Published July, 2007

The United States currently has an extensive, growing backlog of unidentified human remains, from murder and accident victims, homeless people and other missing person cases who died of natural causes.

U.S. medical examiner and coroners' offices receive an estimated 4,400 unidentified human bodies every year, according to the first national census of medical-legal death investigations, "Medical Examiners and Coroners' Offices, 2004." Of these, about 1,000 are still unidentified after one year, and 600 are buried or cremated.

Though the remains represent a "critical component in the nation's effort to resolve missing persons cases,'' according to the report, only half of the medical examiners and coroners' offices surveyed in 2004 had policies for retaining records on unidentified human remains, such as x-rays, DNA, or fingerprints, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

The report highlights an urgent need for a comprehensive system to keep track of such remains, as advances in DNA and other forensic technology have made it increasingly possible to identify remains and find criminals involved.

"The missing link has been a good inventory of remains," said Jeffrey Sedgwick, director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in a USA Today article.

In all, it's estimated that upwards of 40,000 unidentified human remains exist in medical examiners and coroners' offices, or were buried or cremated before they were identified.

An Initiative to Help the Missing

The FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a database that includes criminal record history information, fugitives, stolen properties and missing persons and is available to law enforcement officials 24/7, 365 days a year, is one current method being used to help solve missing persons and unidentified human remains cases.

However, of the estimated 40,000 unidentified remains out there, only about 6,000 -- or 15 percent -- have been entered into the NCIC, largely because the volume of is simply too great.

Over half of the nation's unidentified remains are held in large offices in five cities:

New York, New York

Cleveland, Ohio

Los Angeles, California

Houston, Texas

San Bernardino, California

Meanwhile, while cases of missing persons 18 and under must be reported, only a few states require law enforcement agencies to report missing persons cases for adults -- it's all voluntary.

Since so many missing persons cases have never been entered into a national database, and only half of coroners' and medical examiners' offices routinely take DNA or fingerprints from unidentified remains before disposing of them, a large number of crimes could be going needlessly unsolved.

In response, the Office of Justice Program's National Institute of Justice has launched, in July 2007, The National Missing and Unidentified Persons Initiative (NamUs).

The initiative involves two programs:

IdentifyUs.org, which has searchable information on unidentified human remains
https://identifyus.org/

Find-the-Missing.org, which has information on missing persons
http://www.find-the-missing.org/

The databases are geared not only to law enforcement agencies, medical examiners and coroners, but also to families and the general public who are looking for a loved one. They allow users to search for potential matches between missing persons and unidentified human remains records, and will hopefully bring some closure to families who are searching for someone -- and justice to any criminals involved.

http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/07/07/11/unidentified-human-remains-how-many-are-there-in-the-us-what-happens-to-them.htm
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Is it possible to get a Mod to 'sticky' this?
Thanks.

[packy]

It's shocking to see the numbers and also shocking to see that only half the coroner' and ME's offices save evidence from these remains.

[Nut44x4]

Indeed!
Thanks for the 'Sticky' :)

[packy]

YW, Nut.
Some interesting info at this site. Much more at link.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/feb/10/cold-cases-go-online-respect-victims/

In July, the Justice Department launched a Web site that allows anyone to search through photos of America’s unidentified dead, carefully cropped images compiled from coroners and medical examiners across the country. The site, called NamUs after the federal National Missing and Unidentified Persons Initiative, is an sign of just how much public opinion has changed. When Murphy launched a local version of the same online identification concept in 2003, he took considerable criticism from colleagues who thought it was too morose, too disrespectful of the dead.

Then his office identified 29 bodies.

Now the Justice Department is developing a missing person’s component to the NamUs site. The goal is to create a public database of missing people, then cross-reference it with the unidentified remains on record, in the hope that each match will close two cases at once. The government is trying to get this done by 2009. Murphy, who has been closely involved with the creation of NamUs, said it could take years.

Arroyo Grande Doe is one of the cases that now lives online, unresolved.

Death investigators estimate she was 14 to 20 years old when she was discovered about 9 on an October night nearly three decades ago, nude and face down in the desert near what is now the intersection of the Las Vegas Beltway and the street that became her name: Arroyo Grande Boulevard. Her photo, the one they can show online, reveals nothing of her homicide: blunt trauma to the head, stab wounds to the back. Her fingerprints and X-rays are still in the coroner’s case file, but she’s long since been buried in Henderson, under a headstone that says “Jane Doe, Oct. 5, 1980. From your family at the Henderson Police Department.”

And Jones, sitting in his cramped cubicle in the coroner’s office, still flips through her file, scanning for something he can hold on to.

•••

Bodies left to decompose in the desert do all kinds of things — swell and shrink, attract animals, bleach into bones. These bodies, discovered outside, make up most of Clark County’s unidentified, for a number of reasons. Bodies found in homes, hotel rooms or apartments give investigators more to go on; they can identify a person by his papers and possessions. People found outdoors are often homeless, and have no identification at all. Or they’ve been dumped, victims of foul play.

Roughly half of Clark County’s unidentified are homicide victims.

Left alone in the Southern Nevada heat, bodies go through a transition that’s not unlike meat drying into jerky, Murphy said. This complicates the death investigator’s first job, finger printing.

To rehydrate fingertips, the coroner must soak them for 90 days. Clark County medical examiners use embalming fluid to do this, though other coroner’s offices have been known to use Downy fabric softener.

When the fingers are printable, medical examiners run a ball of Silly Putty over the pads, capture the print and transfer it to paper. Silly Putty, as it turns out, works just as well as an expensive polymer sold for the same purpose, Murphy said.

Bodies left in damp environments start to waterlog and loosen. Layers of skin can slip off in neat sheets. Sometimes, inexperienced investigators will try to hoist these bodies up by the hands and the entire epidermis sloughs off. This is called “de-gloving,” Murphy said, and it presents its own problems. The only way to get fingerprints from de-gloved hands is for a medical examiner to slip the skin on and roll the prints himself, as if they were his own.

It’s one of those chores, Murphy said, that curls even the most experienced medical examiner’s toes.

Once prints are collected, they’re run through local and federal databanks to search for a match. When this doesn’t work, the medical examiners turn to secondary techniques. They’ve identified a few people through the footprints that were pressed when they were newborns. Foot ridgeology, like the swirled patterns and lines of fingertips, never changes.

In cases where body parts are missing, tattoos help. Once investigators found a torso, in the desert, and identified the victim by her birthmark.

When all other options are exhausted, medical examiners take X-rays of teeth and bones, looking to pinpoint an age range and unique characteristics.

Jane “Sahara Sue” Doe, for example, was discovered in 1979 outside what was then the El Rancho casino parking lot, a homicide victim with an unusual feature: Though she was only 17 to 21 years old, she had a complete set of dentures.

In years of searching national records, investigators have come across only one other missing woman that matched Sahara Sue Doe’s profile — a woman in Reno. It seemed as if that had to be her, so in 2003 they exhumed Sahara Sue, only to find out the DNA didn’t match.

Considering about 120 unidentified bodies are rolled through the Clark County Coroner’s office every year, with the vast majority identified within a matter of days, Sahara Sue is an exception to the rule. Still, she weighs on Murphy’s staff, just like all the others.

“We speak for the dead,” the coroner said. “These are the silent folks, and we have an obligation to speak for them. To carefully listen and to speak.”

Coroners across the country deal with different problem populations. In the states along the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s illegal immigrants. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s suicides. Murphy’s burden is people who come to Las Vegas to check out of life. It’s the people who come here to escape families, or hide from them, who are hard to identify when they die, and harder to trace to a family.

Determining unknown identities often boils down to DNA. The coroner’s office collects samples from family members and compares them with the DNA from the remains — if there’s something to work with. When only bones or teeth remain, medical examiners must send out samples to test for deep-drawn mitochondrial DNA, a complex process performed at only a few labs across the country.

One of those labs is at the University of North Texas near Dallas, where pathology professor Arthur Eisenberg directs the Center for Human Identification. A pioneer of DNA research, Eisenberg thinks the number of unidentified remains is a crisis on par with Hurricane Katrina, or 9/11, or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Our nation’s bank of unidentified bodies, he said, amounts to a “mass disaster over time.”

Eisenberg’s center receives federal funding to conduct DNA tests and identify remains for coroners throughout the country, free of charge. The center also collects tissue samples from family members of the missing and cross-checks them against databank of DNA that his center is slowly compiling from human remains. Just entering the information has lead to 19 “cold hits,” identifications no one was expecting, Eisenberg said. Tissue samples sent by coroners and medical examiners have bumped up the center’s identification total to 130.

(link to the Namus site to have on hand. It is still under construction)
http://www.namus.gov/

[Nut44x4]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
June 11, 2009 Thursday

3 UNKNOWNS SHARE COMMON GROUND

In a sprawling, pastoral cemetery, on a muggy, sunless afternoon, three mismatched caskets sat side by side under the shade of a green awning.

A small group of mourners assembled in front of the tent: A forensic investigator in uniform and badge. A representative from the Doe Network for missing persons. Reporters and camera crews. A black-clad funeral director. A stranger who came here simply to pay her respects -- to women she never met.

Their eyes were dry. They spoke in hushed tones. Some took pictures. A lone bagpipe wailed in the distance.

"Today we commit to God three women that we do not know," the Rev. Thomas Hamilton said, reading from a sheet of paper folded into a prayer book. "Three women whose paths never crossed, yet they share a common fate: They are unidentified and unclaimed."

The women were part of an often-overlooked, often-forgotten group, the nameless dead, denied, until now, a final resting place. For years, their bodies had been zipped in blue bags and locked in the musty coolers of the Allegheny County morgue, unidentified and perhaps unmourned.

The first, named only as 99-2629, was a homicide victim found June 28, 1999, in the storm cellar of an empty house in Wilkinsburg. The mummified remains of another woman, 00-4395, were found in Homestead in 2000; the cause of her death was undetermined. The body of a third woman, 03-5925, was discovered in the Allegheny River near the Fox Chapel Yacht Club in 2003. She died of a drug overdose.

Investigators have tried extensively to determine their identities. They examined the women's DNA and dental work, studied limited fingerprints, sought the public's help and chased fruitless leads. Years passed, and the bodies went unclaimed.

The medical examiner's office opted to have them buried at Woodruff Memorial Park in North Strabane before the morgue moves this month to the Strip District. But officials pledged that yesterday's burial does not mean the end of efforts to identify them.

The women's profiles -- artists' renderings of their faces, their dental records and DNA -- have been stored on national databases for the missing and unidentified, which means investigators could one day make a match.

"It's just like any other cold case, we always have another opportunity," said Edward Strimlan, chief forensic investigator for the medical examiner's office, who stood through the service in silence. He said investigators still field inquiries from around the country about the women. "To us, it's not the end."

Rev. Hamilton told the group that God provides justice and that even during the darkest times in the women's lives, they were not alone. He read from the Bible, and onlookers shut their eyes in prayer.

"Putting aside our professional roles, consider, what if these women were part of our own families? A daughter, a sister, a wife or a mother," he said. "We do not know their names or anything about their lives, their families, their friendships, faith, interests or anything that helps define our lives in this world. ... Though we do not know them, God does."

Yesterday was the first time in 18 years as an ordained minister that Rev. Hamilton, of Canonsburg United Presbyterian Church, had delivered such a service. He was asked to officiate by Beinhauer Family Funeral Homes, one of several businesses to give its services and resources for the burials.

Donated were the caskets, the burial vaults, the three silver hearses parked along the grass. Three bronze markers, also donations, will label the graves, though their inscriptions remain undetermined.

Also on hand was Nancy Monahan, the Pennsylvania-area director of the Doe Network, a group of volunteers who help law enforcement in cases of the unidentified. She gave renderings and descriptions of the nameless women to reporters, saying she and other volunteers had spent "countless" hours scouring newspaper articles and missing persons Web sites in a quest to identify the women.

"These girls mean a lot to me," Ms. Monahan said. "I've been trying for years to figure out who they are. You just don't give up."

As the Rev. Hamilton finished speaking and the crowd began to disperse, a tearful woman named Barbara Raffaele rose from a lawn chair and placed a bouquet of roses on each casket. She had decided to come to the service after reading a newspaper article about the women. She had no connection to them, but grieved nonetheless.

"I just can't imagine someone leaving this world without anyone noticing, caring," said Ms. Raffaele, of McMurray. "I hope they have more peace now than they had in their lives."

Sadie Gurman can be reached at sgurman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1878./

PHOTO: Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette: Barbara Raffaele, of McMurray, places bouquets of roses on the coffins of three unidentified women who were buried at Woodruff Memorial Park in Canonsburg yesterday.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09162/976674-455.stm

[Nut44x4]

http://www.ktnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=11439062

Clark County NV
Cracking cold cases by posting pictures of the dead online

Updated: Nov 4, 2009 02:44 AM EST
Many of you probably may have seen The Forgotten on ABC before, a show dedicated to solving cases with unidentified victims.

In Clark County, the coroner gets about 20 to 30 unidentified bodies each week, but most have identities within 24 hours.

But what about those that aren't identified? They end up online. It's a unique effort by the Clark County Coroner's office to crack cold cases with the internet.

From tattoos to jewelry and glasses, everyone on the web site has a feature that makes them different, yet they all have one thing in common.

They're gone, and no one knows who they are. Now their pictures are talking for them.

On the web site, you'll only find John and Jane Does, 152 people forgotten in Clark County.

But not by the coroner's office, every Doe has a name based on what makes the person's case unique.

One young woman was found in the Arroyo Grande wash. Jane Arroyo Grande Doe was murdered 29 years ago and to this day, investigators have no idea who she is or who killed her.

Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy knew something had to be done to figure out who these people were, but with no money, the question was what?

Out of a brainstorm session, the web site idea was born. But the concern was how would people react to seeing pictures of dead people online?

"I started calling the families and speaking with them personally and saying, are we doing the right thing, should we do this," explained Murphy.

Families of the missing were supportive, but criticism still came from other coroners' offices until they got their first hit within 24 hours.

"We started getting phone calls from those same offices that said can you help us develop a web site," said Murphy.

So far, Murphy says, 32 cases have been solved by people logging on and using the site.

Murphy says the most important thing about the site is the hope it gives to the families of those missing.

"They said just knowing, that, having some resolution or peace of knowing finally what's happened, is monstrously important to them," said Murphy.

http://www.accessclarkcounty.com/depts/coroner/unidentified/pages/unid.aspx

[annalyzer]

'Jane Doe' from 1987 is still a mystery
1987 victim one of thousands unidentified

By Jim Balloch
Posted November 29, 2009 at midnight

excerpt ~

It is just one of thousands of cases of unidentified bodies from around the country. No one knows for sure how many there are.

The FBI's National Crime Information Center lists 7,212 such cumulative cases, including 62 from Tennessee. But NCIC accepts reports only from law enforcement agencies. Medical examiners, coroners and other sources are excluded.

Researchers and criminologists say the actual number is much higher. A U.S. Justice Department study found an average of 4,400 unidentified human bodies reported each year, of which about 1,000 remain unidentified a year after being found.

"My personal opinion is that the real number is in excess of 60,000," said George Adams, program coordinator for the Center for Human Identification, the world-renowned DNA forensics lab at the University of North Texas. "When I call agencies relative to a case and ask how many unidentified remains they have, the number seems to go up."

Undoubtedly, some of those are of people who have been reported missing, but remain unidentified because police do not have enough clues to connect the body to a missing person case.

"We don't know what proportion of (eventually unidentified remains) were missing persons," said Dr. Kenna Quinet, a professor of criminal justice at Indiana University and Purdue University.

But thousands of missing or lost persons are never reported missing, especially if they are on the margins of society - prostitutes, transients, drug addicts, gay hustlers and mentally ill or homeless persons.

"We cannot expect the police to look for victims whose families never even reported them missing," Quinet said.

Quinet refers to this population as: "the missing missing."

"We don't have a good handle on this situation at all," said Libba Phillips, founder of the Florida-based Outpost For Hope, an organization dedicated to raising public awareness about that category of cases.

"There are just too many cracks in the system for these people to fall through," she said - including an occasional reluctance or refusal by a police agency to accept a missing persons report.

Phillips has coined a term for "missing missing" children and teenagers, including runaways whose indifferent parents or guardians do not bother to report them missing: "kids off the grid."

"They are the most vulnerable of these cases, and the most hidden group of missing or lost children," Phillips said.

Quinet, Adams and others agree that such people are often the victims of serial killers, some of whom delay or avoid arrest by preying on people who are not likely to be missed. Most of "Green River Killer" Gary Leon Ridgway's dozens of victims were street prostitutes.

"I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be," he said after he was caught. "I picked them because I thought I could kill as many as I wanted without getting caught."

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/nov/29/jane-doe-is-still-a-mystery/