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

by Laurah Norton

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.