About 100 unidentified dead people arrive at morgues around Washington state every year. Most of the John and Jane Does get identified in a matter of days or weeks. But about 10 percent aren’t. OPB's Conrad Wilson reports what happens to those who remain unidentified.
Several white boxes sit on a shelf in the evidence room at the Clark County morgue in Vancouver, Washington.
“The unidentified remains that we still have here are kept in this room in those containers.”
Dr. Dennis Wickham is the county medical examiner. He says his team is working to identify seven people -- only two have been added to the list of unidentified in the last 19 years.
“So the vast majority of people who die and are unidentified when they come here, we’ve already identified within a short period of time.”
At any given time in Washington state, there are about 1700 people who are actively missing. At the same time, there are 147 unidentified remains in the state that have been reported to law enforcement nationwide.
The process of matching the missing with the unidentified dead relies on officials as much as it does family members.
An alphabet soup of databases help match bodies with missing people: NCIC, CODIS, AFIS, NAMUS.
Most require family members to not only report someone as missing, but also submit information like dental records and sometimes provide a DNA sample. Without that component there’s no way for law enforcement to get “a hit” or a match between a John Doe and an unidentified body.
“If they’re not in the system we’ll never identify them.”
Dr. Kathy Taylor is the Washington state forensic anthropologist. She’s an expert in skeletal biology and applies that to death investigations.
“Say I get a completely unidentified person. The first thing, obviously, I’m going to do is if I can print them I will finger print them.”
Those fingerprints are then run through state and national databases.
“And we get a lot of ID’s that way, which is awesome. But there’s two things that have to happen. One is that we have to have fingerprints available post mortem. And two, they have to be in the system, anti-mortem, before death. And a lot of people are walking around that have never been finger printed.”
Taylor says if that fails, the next step is to try to identify someone by their teeth and compare those with dental records.
“Ultimately the problem with that is that many, many, many people that are in the system as missing’s don’t have dental information in the system.”
Despite that -- between fingerprints and dental records, the vast majority of dead people get ID-ed – all but about 10 percent.
Those remaining go through a full biological workup that includes everything known about the unidentified like race, sex, and any possible DNA. An artist might create a sketch of what the person may have looked like. All that information gets shared with law enforcement around the country.
The goal of all that work is to get a match with a missing person – which actually happened in southwest Washington earlier this year.
Nikki Costa is the operations manager at the Clark County Medical Examiner’s office.
“So the case was an unidentified from 1974. It was a homicide. And actually skeletal remains found in Dole Valley.”
Costa realized in 2011 that the remains had been mislabeled for decades.
It took years, DNA samples from two siblings and finally the exhumation of her father in Arizona. With the help of a team of national experts, Costa was able to identify the remains as Martha Morrison, a then teenager living in Portland.
“This is the only thing that would matter to me for people to remember what I’ve done in my public service. Forty-one years she sat on a shelf.”
Today the container in the evidence locker in Vancouver where Morrison’s remains had been is now empty. But there are seven others.
Costa says she’s working a case from 1980. She’s shared DNA nationally. Now she’s just waiting for the right family member who’s missing someone to submit DNA.
Copyright 2015 OPB