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

by Laurah Norton

After all, if you can construct a story with the pieces that death has left behind, someone might recognize the life that preceded them.

But when we become unidentified, the scientific is the only way back to the specific.

People often make the mistake of thinking rural departments won’t have forward-thinking investigators. That’s not necessarily the case. I’ve visited tiny offices in my home state of Georgia where everyone’s up-to-date on the latest DNA technology and that have sent detectives to trainings at Quantico. What’s more, at least in my experience, smaller departments with a lot of homicide experience are willing to listen. Jefferson County was certainly open to seeing what we could discover.

But it’s not as simple as matching up a skeletal feature to a perfect set of predetermined features and solving the puzzle.

contextual evidence that can place a victim who may have been a migrant, or unhoused, or otherwise distanced from their home of origin.

Human variation means that a single puzzle piece won’t necessarily reflect the whole.

Academics come in two flavors: neat and armed with expensive pens they special ordered, and well-meaning human whirlwinds who accidentally got hair dye or coffee on student papers and had to note not blood in the margins.

But DNA science has been both a boon and, some might say, treated as the answer when it might not always be—or, at least, when it is only one of the answers. I’m certainly not suggesting that agencies avoid testing, but if there’s limited funding for these kinds of cases, then the lower cost of dental identification, spread across more cases that would not have otherwise received DNA review? Seems like a win-win. A dental match, like a DNA result, is considered a confirmed ID. The bottom line is: It can resolve a case. We can still build and use and celebrate rapid DNA sequencers because they truly are a marvel; we shouldn’t forget to utilize the simple and effective method of recognizing a filling in a molar when the option arises.

I saw Amy stuffing a few handfuls of gloves into her jacket pocket, which honestly made me feel better; I’d begun to think she was manifesting them from thin air. This was the first restock I’d actually witnessed.

yes, more gloves. If we had to perform emergency field surgery on a dozen or so people, we’d be well-equipped in the clean hand department.

A giant stuffed frog propped up in a chair. Unfortunately, it had its own set of very human teeth. I decided not to mention it. But I kept eyeing that frog. If it was meant to encourage children into brushing their teeth, well… I could see why it had ended up in the basement.

Still, every time I saw Ina Jane Doe’s skull sitting out on a table, it bothered me. It’s not that the experts weren’t doing what they could to help identify her—that’s exactly what was needed. It’s why I’d been flying up and down the East Coast and driving across the Midwest with Amy. But seeing her, with the autopsy cuts across the cranium, and the glue, and thinking about all the eyes that had already been on her… she needed to be at rest.

Project EDAN: Everyone Deserves a Name. He got forensic artists from around the country to donate their time and create art for cases that had no professional renderings

Skill plays an important role, as in any art form, but the stakes here are even higher: The choices a forensic artist makes can be the difference that resolves a cold case.

Unfortunately, there were no real leads in Cheryl’s case—not until her classmate saw Kelly’s drawing, all those years later, and called the GBI. Cheryl’s body was exhumed, and in January 2020 her positive identification was announced.

Later, I asked Carl about his choice to put landscapes in his forensic reconstructions. I’d never seen another artist do it. “I’ve had other people, who are in the industry who are paid forensic artists, say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be putting backgrounds in there, and making them all colorful.’ And I said, ‘Well, the whole point is to try to get people to look.’ You can make something very technically accurate and make all the fine details perfect. But if people aren’t going to look at it, then there’s no point in putting it out there. The idea is to make something so visually appealing that people will stop and look at it and then say, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting image. What’s the story?’ And then they read it and share it.” Considering that I had discovered Carl in precisely that way, when I’d clicked on a picture of Julie Doe… he had a point. Whether or not other forensic artists liked his style, the reconstructions never looked like death masks, or mug shots, or wanted posters. You weren’t quite sure what they were: illustrations of a person, partly photograph, partly digital image, smiling at you from a dreamy location, sometimes frozen ten years, or thirty, or forty back from the present day. And you wanted to know more about them. And you clicked. And then you read.

Whenever I described her specialty areas to other scientists, they all made impressed noises, so I figured it was pretty intense stuff.

She’d once sent me an audio track consisting only of my spitty mouth noises and heavy breathing to show me what she took out of each track.

Whenever he couldn’t go on the playground as much as he liked, he’d thump around the house, doing what he alleged was “parkour” off furniture and nearly colliding with the dogs.