Author: MIKE ANDERSON - Tribune-Herald staff writer
Waco Tribune-Herald (TX)

February 6, 2002

A woman whose body lay unidentified for eight years in the McLennan County indigent cemetery may soon be making a final trip home to Kentucky, thanks to members of a group that helped identify her last year.

Angela Parks died on Aug. 4, 1993, at age 23, seven days after she was struck by a southbound train as she was walking along tracks in Elm Mott.

Efforts to learn her name were stymied because she was not carrying personal identification and she remained in a coma until she died. Attempts to check Parks' description against national missing-person databases proved fruitless, so she was buried later that year in the county's Restland Cemetery as "Jane Doe," the name traditionally given to women whose bodies cannot be identified.

In the summer of 2001, a group of cybersleuths, known as the "Doe Network," used tattoo descriptions to help identify the McLennan County Jane Doe as a woman who had been last seen by her family in Bowling Green, Ky., in 1992. Members of the international volunteer organization, made up of both civilians and law enforcement officers, work in their free time to match missing persons with unidentified bodies.

Today some of those who helped identify Parks are working to send her body home to her family. Todd Matthews, a group member from Tennessee, has taken the lead in the effort.

Matthews said he has spent countless hours trying to arrange the move, acting as a intermediary between Parks' Kentucky relatives and officials in Texas. He said although he did not know Parks or her family before she died, he has grown to feel a bond with her son and daughter, as well as Joyce Trent, the aunt who took over their upbringing when their mother disappeared.

"I've had opportunities to visit with them, and as I've come to know them I have felt like we need to do this for them," he said. "We gave them some really bad news. Every hope they had that she might come home was shattered. I talked to her little girl and she asked me, 'Can you bring my mother home?' I said, 'Baby, of course I will. It may take a long time, but I will bring her home.'

"The family doesn't have any money. Somebody had to do this for them."

Living up to that promise has proved to be both time-consuming and expensive, Matthews said.

Parks' family owed McLennan County $510 for the county's expense for her burial. After talking with Matthews, county Judge Jim Lewis agreed to waive the reimbursement. Matthews said he then began working through the red tape surrounding exhuming Parks' body, moving it across state lines to Kentucky and burying her in Bowling Green.

According to Larry Volcik, general manager of Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Funeral Homes, which oversees indigent burials for the county, there are several steps to the process. First, the state of Texas requires a burial transit permit for remains to be moved across state lines. The Texas Department of Health also requires that the family sign a disinterment approval form before her remains can be removed from Restland Cemetery. The document then goes before Lewis to sign the county's approval. Once the request makes it to the state level, it can take up to 12 weeks for approval.

Forms to process

Matthews obtained a copy of that form, and last week it was given to Trent to sign.

Matthews said more daunting than the red tape is the effort's cost. He said he paid $25 of his own money to cover the state's fee for the disinterment application. The exhumation, however, has proven to be beyond his means. Volcik said the cost could come close to $1,000. Then there is the cost for a coffin, also potentially several hundred dollars, as well as the expense of transporting the remains and burying them again in Kentucky.

Another Doe Network member recently came to Matthews' rescue. Bobbie Lingoes, a police dispatcher in Quincy, Mass., raised more than $600 at his Moose Lodge chapter. Volcik said Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey also may help defray some of the expense.

"Everyone has been so helpful, I think we just may get this done," Matthews said.

He said he continues to look for someone to donate a coffin. As for transportation costs, he said he plans to rent a van and drive Parks' remains to Kentucky himself.

"I won't feel creepy about having her with me," he said. "It is deeply personal to me. I have always been told you should never disturb a grave, but this is the only thing I can do to help her and her family, and I know she would approve."

Trent said she is grateful for all that Matthews and others have done to bring her niece home.

"He has done so much for her and her children," she said. "I never thought we would know what happened to her. To think someone would go so far to help us find out, and then do this, too. . . . He means so much to us."

Trent said she will give up her space in the family's burial plot so Parks can be buried next to her mother.

"We plan to have a funeral," she said. "She needs a proper burial; her children need that, too. It will be closure, but it will also be a new beginning. They have waited long enough for their mother to come home."

Mike Anderson can be reached at manderson@wacotrib.com or at 757-5755.

Caption: Staff photo — Duane A. Laverty

A simple marker in Waco's Restland Cemetery shows where Angela Parks is buried. Members of a volunteer group that helped identify Parks eight years after she died are now working to have her body taken to her family in Kentucky.