By Frank Geary
Review-Journal

November, 2003

As if she were frozen in time, the mystery behind the teenage girl in the picture remains unsolved since her body was dumped in the desert 23 years ago.

Nobody ever has come looking for her. But her photo still nags at Henderson police Detective John Williams, who found her beaten over the head with a hammer, stab wounds in her back.

"All the murders affect you," said Williams, a 29-year veteran of the detective bureau. "This one, it has been a long time. I have been over it and over it hundreds of times. This one affects me the most."

The girl was laid to rest in a pauper's grave after the coroner's office couldn't identify her through fingerprints, dental records or the homemade tattoo on her arm.

"Obviously, we would like to find out who did this, but it's also important that we identify her and give the family some peace," Williams said.

Frustrated with such unsolved cases, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy and his staff are looking to the Internet to help identify the murder victim and 137 other dead people who have gone unidentified for months, years or even decades.

Murphy on Sunday posted photographs online of the unidentified corpses, their belongings, tattoos and birthmarks with the idea that somebody somewhere might know who they are.

The site link can be found at the county's home page, www.accessclarkcounty.net.

The cases surrounding the unidentified dead date as far back as 1968. Some cases are murders. Others are of victims of accidents, suicides or natural deaths.

"This is the last step in the identification process before the case is shut and not given much attention. The Internet allows us to keep the case alive," Murphy said. "There is some mother or father out there who doesn't know where their child is. That is what is driving this, reuniting people and bringing closure to these families."

Murphy's endeavor mirrors 50 to 60 similar programs used by the national Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the 2-year-old Doe Network, and which are in place in New York state, Kentucky and some California counties.

A representative of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children applauded Murphy's plan, but at least one critic suggested that placing images of corpses on the Internet might be inappropriate.

Children could be exposed to the photos, and they could be used improperly by those with morbid interests, said Stephen Doheny-Farina, a technical communications professor at Clarkson University in upstate New York.

"From a law enforcement point of view, I don't know how effective it could be," he said. "The potential negative for the coroner could be that that coroner is hosting a snuff Web site for people to view."

Murphy said he weighed the negative consequences of making public such images, but he believes controls are in place to limit disturbing content.

His staff considers photographs' appropriateness for use on the Internet. Mutilated faces of corpses, such as in one case involving a homeless woman hit by a train, can be repaired surgically and further altered using digital photography.

Not only do the alterations make the photo more presentable, they provide a more recognizable image of the deceased person, Murphy said.

He acknowledges that most people who log on to the site might be motivated more by curiosity than a desire to help identify a corpse. But he said the more people who view the images, the better.

"If we get 100,000 hits, that is 100,000 sets of eyes that wouldn't have looked at this before," Murphy said. "If we get one or two identifications out of this, we are on the road to success. ... We would be remiss if we weren't using every bit of technology to do our jobs, and this is the next logical step."

One of every seven times an unidentified person is identified, it is through the use of a photograph or artists' rendering of the person, said Gerry Nance, case manager for the Special Case Unit at the Missing and Exploited Children center.

Nance and Todd Matthews, media director for the Doe Network, an international Internet-based organization of volunteers who try to identify the 700 unidentified dead people in the organization's database, said Murphy is on the right track.

Matthews and others set up the Doe Network in 2001, and the group has helped identify 15 people since then. The Web site is www.doenetwork.org.

The identifications were the result of the network's volunteers combing through Internet-available records and matching missing-person reports with the descriptions of unidentified dead people.

Although the identifications weren't the result of random people logging on to the Web site, the Internet was vital to solving the cases because it is such a valuable tool for sharing information, Matthews said.

For instance, Matthews for 10 years starting in 1987 tried to identify a young woman whose body was discovered by his father in 1968 not far from his father's home in Georgetown, Ky.

Matthews, who was born two years after the woman died, struck out again and again until he came across a woman on an Internet bulletin board who was still looking for her sister after 30 years, Matthews said.

"If it wasn't for the Internet, I wouldn't have ever solved it," he said. "It was the communication that the Internet gives us that solved the case. Our key is communicating."