You might be able to make a positive ID from a tattoo, if it's unusual enough and everything else fits. The rose on Luna's wrist wasn't unique, but both she and Jane Doe were also dark-haired, female, the same height, and missing about the same length of time. In Luna's case, I wouldn't have been willing to rely on the tattoo alone, because so many young women nowadays are tattooed, and small flowers, hearts, and butterflies are so common.
Fingerprints are also nice, though this type of evidence can be more subjective than most people think. You compare fingerprints by a system of points, and if you can't get enough points to match, you may not be able to make a positive ID. Of course, since I deal with bones and decomposed remains, the flesh from their fingertips is usually long gone or so badly decomposed that prints aren't possible.
Surgical hardware is another good basis for a positive ID. Since 1993, doctors have been required to record the individual serial number of many of the pieces of hardware they install in people's bodies, which certainly makes life easier for the folks in my office.
An x-ray might lead to a positive ID, if it reveals a sufficiently unusual body part-an ankle with a healed fracture, say, or a uniquely curved pair of finger bones. Or maybe someone has a strange growth on her elbow-something she never even knew she had-but it shows up on an x-ray in her antemortem medical file somewhere, a perfect match for your remains. Some bones, too, are as unique as fingerprints, such as the frontal sinuses-the air pockets in the forehead bone at the area right between and above the eyes. So if I'm lucky enough to have an antemortem x-ray showing a frontal view of the sinus area, I can compare that to John Doe's skull and get a positive ID out of that.
Of course, the ultimate positive ID is matching DNA. It's almost foolproof and it tends to put all questions to rest. However, it's only used as an absolute last resort. It's not like you can plug your Jane Doe's DNA into some big database-most people's genetic material is not on file. If you have some idea who your victim might be, you can ask his or her family for a matching sample. But if all you've got is dry bones, you have to match mitochondrial DNA. This is an expensive and time-consuming method of identification. As of this writing, mitochondrial DNA extraction and comparison costs an average of five thousand dollars and usually takes weeks or even months.
Sometimes you don't even get to the stage of a positive ID-the best you can do is eliminate a bad choice. My office posts all our unidentified victims on a website, and every two weeks or so I get a call from an investigator somewhere in the country, hoping to match his missing persons report to my John or Jane Doe. We start checking through all the variables: Okay, we can match the height, the weight, the time since death. We might even find evidence of a striking tattoo or a broken arm that healed years ago.
Then he faxes me the dental records-and no dice. Our guy's teeth may be similar, but they're not the same. We cross each other's names off the list and go on to someone else.
For the process to work, of course, you need two kinds of reports on file: missing persons and unidentified remains. When the Luna case was over, I found myself wondering why the Memphis and Kentucky police had never put their reports together.
The answer was simple-though profoundly embarrassing. For some reason, although the Kentucky State Police had circulated details about the case to local news outlets and police posts across the state, they had never entered their information into the NCIC database. So in addition to all the other factors that might make victim identification difficult, we have to add simple human error.
The Luna case also raises an interesting question about where to look for a missing person. Before this case was solved, when you found a body in a river, you tended to look upstream for its source, especially if there was no evidence of foul play. But Luna's body had not been shot or stabbed or strangled-she had obviously died by drowning-and yet her body had come from downstream. Why?
The answer lies in the unique hydrology of the “duck ponds” created between two barges in a tow. The motion of the barges creates eddy currents in these open spaces, sucking up the water and anything else on or slightly below the surface, down to a depth of eighteen inches. Luna's body had somehow gotten caught in a duck-pond eddy and been pulled upstream with the barges. Now, my fellow investigators and I are all going back to other Jane and John Does that have been found in the Ohio River, looking downstream as well as upstream for missing persons reports they might match.
Of course, the toughest problem in identifying human remains is also the simplest: Where do you start? According to Kym Pasqualini, the founder and coordinator of the NMCO, the number of reported missing adults topped 43,000 in March 2003. When you add the number of missing children to the list, the total comes to a staggering 97,297.
Those numbers are daunting enough when you've got a victim with an unusual biological profile or a special piece of surgical hardware whose serial number might somehow be traced. But what about the thousands of victims who basically resemble thousands of others?
Such was the problem with the Jane Doe in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the one whose facial reconstruction I described in the prologue to this book. This was the young woman whose body parts had been butchered and flayed and carefully wrapped in grocery bags, which someone had then thrown into the Wisconsin River. Since months of searching for her by conventional means had failed, Sauk County Detective Joe Welsch and Wisconsin Special Agent Elizabeth Feagles had come to me, hoping I could do a facial reconstruction on her skull.
By the time I became involved with the case, forensic scientists in Wisconsin had already done a complete analysis of the remains, determining that the young woman so brutally butchered had been a young Black female, about twenty to twenty-five years old, probably about 5'2'' and weighing 120-130 pounds. Wisconsin fingerprint expert Mike Riddle had even managed to lift prints from her decomposed hand-an almost superhuman feat that left me awestruck.
But all this science hadn't gotten them very far. According to the NCIC database, more than 1,500 women who fit that profile had been reported missing since early that summer. Getting the prints was terrific-but where could they find a match? Most people who aren't criminals don't have their fingerprints on file. If Joe and Liz had had any idea where to look, they could have tried to lift prints from one of the young woman's possessions. But until they had some idea of who their victim was, they were stuck.
Like so many other unidentified victims, the Baraboo Jane Doe was so frustratingly ordinary. Her teeth were perfect, with no restorations. She had no tattoos or scars and no evidence of previously broken bones. The D.A. hoped that her skull would hold some critical forensic evidence-some cut marks that might someday be matched to a weapon. That was why we were using the rapid prototyping technology to create a perfect replica of her skull. But so far the skull itself had yielded far too little information about this woman's identity.
When Liz and Joe came to me, I was their last resort. They hoped desperately that my facial reconstruction would give them a visual image that they could circulate throughout the state. If all went as we intended-and we all knew that it might not-someone would see the image I created, recognize the victim, and come forward.
So as I began my facial reconstruction that Labor Day weekend, I knew the stakes were frighteningly high. Until the police knew who Jane Doe was, they would never find her killer. If a serial killer was out there somewhere, we had given him virtual license to try again. If the killer were someone more ordinary-a boyfriend, spouse, relative, or friend-he might literally get away with murder, and a particularly brutal murder at that. There was one last chance to keep that from happening-and it was all up to me.