Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless

by Laurah Norton

I began to recognize a thorough skeletal analysis when I saw one. Amy also taught me that her field, biological anthropology, and its application to forensic science, was far from static. Anthropologists continually refine and redefine and reform their opinions, and that has a lot of implications for these kinds of criminal investigations. For example, if a skeleton was recovered and examined in 1986 but not identified, it should be regularly revisited. That was Amy’s view, at least, and one she was pushing to make a norm. New technology might be able to reveal new clues about who this person was. Mistakes could be caught—or not even mistakes, necessarily. Perhaps we can gain new understanding or reinterpretation on an unidentified person’s ancestry, their age, their sex characteristics. Getting new eyes trained by new mentors on new methods could be the difference between an identification that finally brings worried families some peace and an everlasting cold case.

never officially reported missing but found all the same. They became the bags of bones along highways. At borders. Under bridges. Across state lines, on the routes that truckers favor. You don’t always get the answers you’re seeking, but sometimes you realize you need to take a step back so you can move on to the next search and work on how to address the most ignored or underfunded cases: decedents at the Southern border; the unidentified, unhoused, stolen ancestral remains lying in museum collections; the unmarked graves of Native children at residential schools; boxes of bones sitting on university shelves. It just never ends.

There’s a clear connection between missing people and unidentified people, and those 2008 findings correlate with what we know today. The Black and Missing Foundation pointed out in late 2022, “40% of the missing-persons reported in 2021 were persons of color.”2 And though Black women made up only 13 percent of the population in 2020, “a third of the almost 300,000 U.S. girls and women reported missing in 2020 were Black.”3 That seems to line up with the findings of the 2008 study: Regarding prevalence among the unidentified, when race was recorded, “the Black male rate was 1.9 times the white male rate, while the Black female rate was 2.4 times the white female rate.” When I checked National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) in late 2022, cases tagged as “Black” made up roughly 22 percent of the total female-identified cases in the system.

That’s never going to be a precise count due to a number of factors: uncertain information about the deceased, how case information is entered by law enforcement, and how racial categories are assessed and assigned—and even the actual number of deceased in the United States versus what’s represented in the database. In 2022, NamUs listed approximately fourteen thousand unidentified decedents—a number far below the estimated forty thousand in the United States. I’ve yet to find an update on that figure from 2007, besides one estimate that it could be as high as sixty thousand; forty thousand is still used by both governmental, nonprofit, and university publications, and was referenced in a report on the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls as recently as 2022. Anecdotally, many professionals have told me that the people who they see as long-term unidentified in their offices, making up that 40,000+, are the people who are given less attention in life: people who are unhoused, who have lived in various systems—foster, penitentiary—people who are living on the margins due to a confluence of factors that might include age, income, citizenship status, substance dependence, illness, and more. Anyone can go missing and become unidentified. But there are people whose disappearances are never actually reported—the “un-missing,” as a forensic anthropologist once described to me—who likely make the numbers harder to calculate.

We go back to NamUs’s numbers and reports because it is the official, national system devoted to missing and unidentified persons. Its purpose is, per the National Institute of Justice, to serve as a “national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases throughout the United States.”4 An entry for a Doe case in NamUs might include as little as a short description and a contact number, and as much as a detailed write-up, full dental records, case photos, information as to DNA availability, and more. What can be accessed depends on the authorization of the user (general public or authorized by law enforcement) and what is uploaded. If I’m logged in, I can see basic case details and contacts, forensic art, and clothing items, if those photos are provided; very rarely I might see a postmortem photo used for identification. If Amy logs in, she can view ...

Our freedom of information laws and public access are practically transparent compared with, say, those of the UK or Australia. Plus, we aren’t limited to official federal, state, county, and city databases; all the information that is released through those channels and the press allows for Doe Network to exist. It also fuels other essential Doe research sites, like Charley Project, the most comprehensive citizen-run database for cold cases, and Unidentified Wiki, an online encyclopedia of unidentified decedents. In Doe cases, this web of volunteer websites is vital for research.