BY JANICE WILLIAMSON
KHOU.COM

October 10, 2002

HOUSTON (KHOU) -- We're taking you into the world of unsolved mysteries. Every day missing people reports are filed while unidentified remains stack up in morgues across the country. But there's a new effort to find out who the people are.

Hundreds of unidentified bodies lie in morgues all over this country, some of them for decades. They are the faces no one knows.

It would seem the remains of the missing would have little to do with Lori Morgan's world. She's a homework supervisor to five-year-old Grace and by her own description -- an Atascocita housewife and budding detective.

Surrounded by pictures of her own three girls, she spends more than 40 hours each week on the Internet looking for other people's children. "These are all the unidentified cases for the state of Texas," says Morgan. "It's heartbreaking for me because there's so many cases."

It was the disappearance of Jessica Cain in 1997 that started her on this journey. "She was just an average all-American girl," she says. "She's out there missing. I look for her all the time."

Morgan is part of the Doe Network, which is a group of volunteers that work with law enforcement to match up missing person reports with unidentified bodies.

"This would be about the only possibility," she studies a possible match. "It's close enough to when she went missing. The dates match up and the height and weight and hair color." And if she sees such a possible match, she quickly sends an e-mail to the Doe Network. If the group agrees it's a potential match, then the proper law enforcement is notified.

"It's not a very pretty subject and a lot of people don't like to talk about it so it's scooted under the rug, just because it's not something people want to know about," says Morgan. "There's so many people who lie in morgues every day."

Unidentified remains eventually end up at the Harris County Cemetery, where they're not known as John or Jane Doe. There they have no name at all.

"Somebody's daughter, somebody's 20-year old daughter," reflects Lt. Greg Neely with HPD's Homicide Division. For twelve years, Lt. Neely has tried to put a name to the face.

"Even the medical examiner's office says she can be Asian or Hispanic, medium length brown hair," says Lt. Neely.

The young woman, barely five feet tall, was found wearing two pieces of jewelry, a distinctive T-shirt and pants. "The pants were pinned at the ankle with safety pins to make them look more tapered," says Lt. Neely.

A visit to the murder scene brings back that long ago October afternoon. "The body lay here in the water," he remembers. She was stuffed in a drainage pipe, heavy rains had washed out the body, but no solid leads.

"We never got the first word as to who she was or where she came from," says Lt. Neely. He remembers the traffic above the bridge, and the bats below it. If the bats could talk he says, this case would be solved.

"We didn't get that one person we needed to come forward to tell us who she was," he says. Lt. Neely's next best hope could be thirty miles away with Lori Morgan.

At least four times in 18 months the Doe Network has done what detectives could not. "It makes me feel sad for the mothers," says Morgan. "But then I guess it makes me feel that maybe the families can have some peace. I mean, that's why I do this."

The more people who know about the Doe Network website, she says, the better the odds of solving a few more cases. "You never know, they could be the person that knew this unidentified," says Morgan.

It's her job she says to make sure the notebooks full of faces are not forgotten.

There are several Internet sites the public can use to sift through lists of both missing people and the dead who have not been identified. They are Harris County Medical Examiners Office: Unidentified Bodies or the Doe Network.