The Unidentified

Every day Law Enforcement receives reports from people who are concerned about a friend or relative how has gone “missing”. It’s  hard to disappear, particularly in today’s culture of personal identification, data tracking and governmental oversight. So in the vast majority of cases the missing person is soon found and balance is restored to the social order. At the same time each and every day there are bodies, or bits and pieces of bodies, found and never identified. You would think that identifying a found body would be somewhat easy, but people who are trying to hide someone they have killed can be innovative in making it difficult for law enforcement to identify the body. I recently read that there is a minimum of 40,000 unidentified bodies and cold cases at any moment in the United States, and there are indications that that figure might be too small by as much as 50 percent.

Americans believe that success is largely due to hard work and the many law and order shows that litter the networks supports that belief. When was the last time you watched one of those shows and seen them admit that they had failed and the case had gone dead? But in real life cases do go cold and law enforcement is inundated by fresh cases with higher priority and ultimately a large percentage of missing person cases are put aside, filed away and finally forgotten. Too many families and friends never know what happened to their friend and too many morgues have unidentified cases languishing in their files. There is a bureaucratic disconnect in merging reports of missing persons and bodies found elsewhere. Police, medical examiners and coroners do not have a well developed and linked reporting system and are often reluctant to share information.

But in a society that has grown up on TV crime and reality shows there is a (relatively) large and articulate audience that has a desire to link the missing in one jurisdiction and the found elsewhere and to provide closure to families and solutions for law enforcement. They have three weapons they bring to bear on solving this problem; Public records, usually found via the Internet, an empathic drive to solve a problem and the grit to override the initial reluctance of many in law enforcement (and administration) to recognize that a “civilian” can solve a case they have given up on.

I don’t know if I have the ability to expend the time and energy it takes to link together disparate bits a data and develop a coherent case. But I have to admire the people who spend their own resources to close long dead cold cases and bring families back together again. If you want to learn more search the Internet; NamUs, Doe Network and Websleuths are good places to start.