A teenage girl, seemingly from a middle-class background, was found dead on the side of a highway. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody came forward to claim her body. For months, and then for decades, she lay nameless.
She had been discovered by two young men riding motorbikes. It was obvious she had been sexually assaulted and beaten. She was barely alive when they found her. She died, and because no one could identify her, she became known only as Walker County Jane Doe.
The case went viral on social media, with a Facebook page devoted to finding her true identity. Hundreds of thousands of people followed the effort, driven by the belief that somewhere, a family was still missing her. The difficulty in solving cases like hers was not simply a lack of effort. For the longest time, local jurisdictions across the United States each had their own systems, their own formats, and their own methodologies for documenting missing and unidentified people.
This fragmentation made it extremely difficult to share information across county lines and state borders, and to connect an unidentified body in one place with a missing person report filed somewhere else. More than a decade ago, the Department of Justice funded a project through the National Institute of Justice to address this problem. The project was called NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The goal was to build a federal-level system that could document unidentified and missing persons throughout the country in one central location.
NamUs is actually comprised of three components. The first is the unidentified remains database. When remains are found, jurisdictions can upload the details of the case, including any biometric data and the context in which the body was discovered, and create an unidentified person’s record. The second component is the missing persons database.
This is where people who are known but unaccounted for are documented, usually with a photograph, the circumstances surrounding their disappearance, and where and when they were last seen. The third database, which few people know about, is the unclaimed persons database. These are the remains of people whose identities are known, but whose bodies have never been claimed by next of kin. The idea was that if all this information could be aggregated in a central location, the three systems would work together and allow investigators to connect the dots.
When a case is well reported, NamUs should allow investigators to compare the properties of an unidentified person, such as age, where they were found, and when, against similar details in a missing person’s record. That is the entire purpose of the system. But there are instances in which knowing those basic details alone is not enough. In a research study of over 600 remains, researchers found that early assessments of biogeographical ancestry, conducted using anthropological or other forensic techniques, sometimes produced ambiguous or even wrong determinations of a person’s origin.
If a person was inaccurately determined to be African when they were actually Asian, the database would match the unidentified person’s record to the wrong missing persons records. In these cases, other techniques are needed to bring more detail and more clues into the investigation. For years, the forensic laboratory Astrea has been bringing DNA testing into these cases as an investigative tool to add context to who a person is. Sometimes, forensic genetic genealogy can be used: a DNA test is conducted, relatives are found, and the identity of the deceased is established.
Sometimes, even when an immediate identification is not possible, DNA testing generates new leads. There are many cases in NamUs where the biogeographical ancestry of an unidentified person is unknown, ambiguous, or even wrong. DNA testing is obviously important for driving an identity, but it can also provide context clues that traditional forensic anthropology or isotope testing cannot. While there are many techniques used to determine a person’s origins, DNA testing brings the most specific and accurate information about where someone is from.
The case of Tracy Sue Walker illustrates the kind of distance that can separate a victim from those who are searching for them. She was a young girl who went missing from Indiana in 1978. She was not found until 1985, and she was found 400 miles away in Tennessee. Those who worked on her case found it shocking to learn she was from Indiana and still had living family members.
They had assumed she was from somewhere closer to where her body was discovered. When a working system exists that can centralize what is known about missing and unidentified persons, share that information across jurisdictions, and combine it with advanced DNA testing that can shed light on a person’s historical origins and identify their relatives, the path to restoring an identity becomes much clearer. Ultimately, after all the testing was done for Walker County Jane Doe, the unidentified girl found on the highway was identified as Sherry Jarvis. It was an emotional day, not only for those who had worked the case, but for the many people online who had followed it.
The case had seemed hopeless for so long. There were, at that time, more than 15,000 unidentified remains cases in NamUs. The National Institute of Justice has called this accumulation of remains a silent mass disaster. It is a significant underestimate, because most cases are not reported into NamUs at all.
Over the years, the backlog of people who have died but cannot be returned to their families because they have no name continues to grow. Translating those 15,000 cases into identities is an enormous task. It requires the best tools and the best scientific methods to bring as much detail as possible to assist investigators on the path to an identification. The importance of reuniting unidentified people with their families is not the only reason to pursue these cases.
A retrospective study conducted by Astrea found that in at least 25% of the human remains cases they worked to an identity, identifying the victim was sufficient to enable investigators to find the people who had harmed the victim. If those perpetrators were still alive, they were apprehended and prosecuted. Identifying victims therefore also allows investigators to identify perpetrators, making NamUs a tool for public safety. Despite its success, NamUs is not funded at the level that it should be.
In part, this may be because the general public is not aware of what NamUs is and what it does. Participation is also not mandatory in all states, and the database is only as good as the data that is put into it. The hope is that with greater public awareness, more families will report missing loved ones, more jurisdictions will upload their cases, and more of the nameless dead will be given their names back.