It seemed as if everybody in Georgetown came to the service, trying to look at the family-and Todd-without seeming to stare. Todd, of course, was the hero of the day, with Rosemary, Bobbie's daughter, and the rest of the family clustered around him, thanking him again and again for not giving up on his quixotic quest. I wished we could have told the family who killed Bobbie and promised them some kind of justice for her lonely death. But as I watched Rosemary and her niece shaking Todd's hand and patting him on the back, tears of relief streaming down their faces, I was glad that at least we had been able to give Tent Girl back her rightful name.
The story of Tent Girl evokes for me one of the most important-and poignant-parts of my job: victim identification. It's the police's job to catch the killers. It's my job to analyze the remains, which often starts and ends with figuring out who the person was, so that the law enforcement team-or the family-can take it from there. Much as I like working with the investigators, it's important for me to remember that their job is fundamentally different from mine. And if I forget that basic difference, I might get into real trouble when it comes time to testify in court. It's important for all parties-the lawyers for both sides, the judge, and above all the jury-to see me as supremely neutral, simply there to tell the scientific truth as I see it. If I ever once seem to be part of the prosecution's team-if I ever start to think of myself that way-my value to the process will be lost.
Because so much of crime drama and detective fiction focuses on catching the bad guys, my part of the process comes in for a lot of misrepresentation. In addition to everything else, movies, TV, and mystery novels often make my job seem a lot simpler than it is. If you don't know any better, you might get the idea that there's some kind of national database out there, recording every detail about every missing person in the country. You might easily come to believe that once the police have found an unidentified body, that magical computer will spit out an instant match.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of people go missing every day-and, for many, nobody even bothers to report their absence. Say a family has a troubled teen at home, perhaps even a child who is being abused. The child runs away and the family-angry or ashamed or simply confused-doesn't report it. If that youngster's body turns up three states away with no identification, how can investigators ever give it a name? People don't come with bar codes. If someone asks us to compare a set of bones to the medical or dental records of Mary Smith or José Lopez, that we can do. But to pull a name out of thin air-no.
Even when there are missing persons reports, matching them to a body or a set of remains can be tricky. There is a national database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which theoretically serves as a clearinghouse for matching missing persons reports with reports of unidentified remains. However, valuable though it is, the NCIC has a number of limitations.
First, as I said, many missing persons simply don't show up in the database. Maybe their loved ones never thought to file a report-perhaps because they fear the police, or are living in denial, or are simply ashamed to admit that their husband, wife, or child has seemingly left without a trace.
Then, too, a missing persons report is not always a high priority for an overworked police department that might have more than its share of homicides, robberies, and assaults to deal with. Many departments wait till the end of each week to file their missing persons reports, or maybe even the end of each month. If I've got a set of remains in my lab, I might not find the matching report the first time I look-or maybe even the second. Of course, the loved ones might take weeks, months, or even years to go to the police in the first place. And let's not forget human error-some agencies simply neglect to put their reports in the database.
Then there are problems with the way the NCIC records forensic information. The database was originally designed to match up stolen property and fingerprints, and the original fingerprint system has been taken over by an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS). NCIC is still the only code-based data system available to those of us who try to identify the dead. So if everyone collects all necessary data from both sides of the equation (missing on one side, unidentified on the other) and if there are enough correctly coded unique identifiers (dental records, tattoos, previously broken bones, etc.), investigators stand a good chance of finding a match-if there is one.
However, a great deal of biological information is simply subjective, and it may not show up in the objective language of computer matching. What if the missing person's report describes a daughter's hair as golden blond-and the investigator who finds the remains thinks of her hair as closer to red? Even if both reports are on file, the NCIC isn't going to match them up. The same goes for descriptions of tattoos or scars or any other distinguishing feature-it's hard to do a computer match by verbal description alone.
Missing persons reports are also legendary in their shortcomings because people don't necessarily know what kind of information will help investigators identify their loved ones. Most people's impulse is to describe a missing person as if they wanted to pick him or her out of a crowd-blond hair, blue eyes, mole on the left cheek. That's not necessarily the information that will help us make a forensic identification. Did she suffer from scoliosis when she was young? Does he have a broken bone that eventually healed, or has he maybe had some back surgery? Does she file her nails into a particular shape or use a unique polish? Is he a heavy smoker-enough to stain his teeth? Did she wear braces as a child? Do you even have his dental records or her medical records? Then, too, the people who take down missing persons reports aren't scientists and they don't necessarily know the kind of information we need.
In the end, the biggest difficulty in identifying missing persons is probably the sheer volume of people who seem to have simply vanished. The NCIC database contains literally hundreds of thousands of names, and for any search you conduct, you might easily get dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of matches. Trying to sort through every single one of these can be an investigator's nightmare.
Suppose, for example, that you find a set of bones in the woods that you identify as belonging to a middle-aged White man about six feet tall, of average weight, with no unique dental features, and with no unusual fractures, scars, or tattoos. Your best guess puts his age at thirty to forty, though you realize that you might be off by three or four years either way. You can only estimate how long he's been there or when he disappeared. If you put information like that into the NCIC database, you'd end up with probably a thousand matches, going back for at least ten years and extending over all fifty states and Canada.
Maybe you can narrow it down a bit. Perhaps your remains show evidence of a broken collarbone that healed shortly before death. So you ask to see only missing persons reports that mention such an injury. That should knock out lots of matches-but what if the person who filed the report didn't know about the collarbone or didn't bother to tell the police about it? Then there's no chance of a match even if your guy's report is in the system.
Or suppose you put the man's age at thirty to forty and he's actually forty-one? Your computer search will blithely eliminate the one report you need-while providing you with hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports that you don't need. (I always add an extra five years on either end of my age estimates for this very reason-even though it doubles, triples, or even quadruples the number of reports I have to sift through.)