By Brian T. Murray
Star-Ledger

September, 2003

As Internet sleuths celebrated their role in solving the mysterious case of a missing Wayne man yesterday, they discovered they had solved another missing persons mystery in Utah.

The Rich County Sheriff's Office in Utah, acting on data compiled through a Web site organization called the Doe Network, confirmed that an unidentified body found last month was the missing son of a Las Vegas family. That makes eight cases in two years solved through the Doe Network by amateur cyberspace sleuths who have reached worldwide in their efforts to link missing persons to unidentified bodies

"I think it shows really what we are now capable of doing. The cold case missing persons project is just part of what the Doe Network is now trying to do, and our success is growing as we become better known," said Dana Gonzalez of Netcong, one of the group's original members and its New Jersey representative.

The nonprofit, volunteer network began in 1998 with a few amateur sleuths chatting on the Internet about "cold" missing persons cases.

Today the Doe Network, so christened by co-founder Jennifer Marra using the surname detectives give to unidentified human remains, is international with several hundred certified volunteer members aided daily by thousands who surf the Web site.

They all remain, for the most part, amateur Sherlocks, including Carol Cielecki, a 38-year-old paralegal from Whitehall, Pa., who pieced together the case of Sean Lewis Cutler of Wayne within minutes of surfing the Doe Network in February.

"There was the 1998 posting by Cutler's cousin explaining that this handicapped man had been missing and that the man's father died mysteriously in a house fire he may have set himself in Wayne, New Jersey, in 1996," said Cielecki.

"Then, on the same Web site, I saw the listings for all the unidentified skeletal remains found over the years, and from there I found a link to the Vermont (State) Police, who had found a skull and jawbone in 1997 of someone they believed must have been handicapped," she added.

Patrick Harkness, who posted the information on Cutler, had left an e-mail address on his 1998 message about his first cousin, and Cielecki used it to reach him. Harkness then called Vermont State Police and provided dental records that led to an initial identification in April. By Wednesday, after DNA tests were completed, Vermont State Police declared the remains to be those of Cutler.

"It's astonishing when you think that the information was there sitting on a Web site and someone put the two together," said Harkness yesterday. "It was shocking, yet relieving when she contacted me. I knew right away it was my cousin."

Lewis Cutler, 51, died in a house fire that Passaic County authorities said he may have set deliberately. Harkness said the elder Cutler was his uncle, was feuding with the family over money and Sean's care, and disappeared with the handicapped son in upper New York state in 1993.

"The Doe Network was the reason this case was solved, no question," said Harkness, adding that he was so moved that he and Cielecki went beyond being just visitors to the network Web site and joined it as certified members.

"I found that it's basically made up of people like me, people who are searching for someone, and a bunch of people who just want to help out and retired people who are doing it as a hobby," he said.

It has been like that from the beginning, said Todd Matthews, a 33-year-old father of two from Tennessee who participated in the early makeup of the Doe Network. He explained that there was more than one genesis and many founders.

"Many people realized in the late 1990s that the superhighway is what they needed to solve these cases. No one could travel around the country to check on information. With the Internet, you didn't have to," Matthews explained.

He was drawn to cyberspace sleuthing through an obsession with a famous Kentucky missing person's case dubbed the "Tent Girl." Matthews learned of the case in 1987 when he met the man who became his father-in-law, the same man who discovered the remains of "Tent Girl" in a Kentucky field on May 17, 1968.

"I really became obsessed with the case. I mean really obsessed, and when the Internet came along, I began searching it, all different missing persons Web sites," Matthews explained.

In January 1998, Matthews came across the words "Lexington, 1967, missing" on a computer search. It led him to the description of a young girl named Barbara, last seen in the Lexington, Ky., area decades earlier.

The dead girl's sister had posted the message, and DNA tests in April 1998 confirmed that "Tent Girl" was her 10-year-old missing sister, Barbara Ann Hackman-Taylor.