Law Enforcement News
September 30, 2002

A Web site dedicated to matching missing persons with unidentified human remains might be the last, best hope for putting names to the bones of children and adults who disappeared long ago.

Called the Doe Network, the three-year-old site features some 4,400 missing persons cases in it's database, some dating back to the early 1970s. It provides photographs, reconstructed images and any available information, such as the circumstances of the disappearance. To be included, the cases must be at least nine years old and be considered by law enforcement agencies to have gone cold. All of the 400 or so unidentified victims listed by the Doe Network were believed to have died prior to 2000.

The site is manned by volunteers from the United States, canada, Europe and Australia. At least some are in law enforcement. including dispatchers and forensic artists.

"It is probably one of the better Web sites where you can get an overall picture of all missing and unidentified persons, adults and kids", said Jerry Nance, a case manager for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and a consultant for the network.

"One of the problems, particularly with unidentifieds, is in many states they will only post on their site what they have in their state." he told Law Enforcement News. "So to try to find something if you're searching for an unidentified versus a missing person, it's very difficult unless you have your own database. That alone is one of the biggest strengths they have."

What the volunteers do is come up with a pool of potential matches and then notify law enforcement, said Nance. The work is particularly difficult when it involves unidentified bodies. The network does not use morgue photographs, but rather reconstructions made from clay or sketches.

"We have the ability to do soft tissue reconstruction of the face," said Nance. "If it is either decomposing or traumatized, we can make it look like it wasn't. Those are the easy ones. Your chance of reconstruction is pretty high with that."

More difficult are the skulls, he said. For that, a forensic anthropologist is needed, and there are not many of those around. "Once you get to a point when you have a generic face, then you're left to guess as to how the lips were. We can pretty much get the nose down," he said, but eye color, hair style and color, and ears are more problematic.

"Ears are probably as good a marker for identifying people as fingerprints are," Nance told LEN.

Wesley Neville, a forensic artist with the Florence County, S.C., Sheriff's Department, volunteers with Project EDAN (Everyone Deserves A Name), one of the programs the Doe Network sponsors, and is a regional director for the network.

In the past year or so, Neville has worked on more than 20 cases for Project EDAN. Post-mortem sketches, he said, are usually a "last resort" to getting people identified. One recent cases involved a three-dimensional reconstruction in clay of a Jane Doe from campbell County, Tenn., who may have been the victim of a serial killer.

"The Doe Network aids us tremendously because these kinds of cases take up so much time, and organizations like Doe have volunteers that are constantly trying to match people up," Neville told LEN. "Twenty-four hours a day; somebody's on there searching. Law enforcement, we don't have the time or the resources."