By NOAH SHACHTMAN

NY Times

January 1,2004

Carol Cielecki wasn't looking to become an online detective. She just wanted to find her ex-husband.

In May 1989, Todd Martin Smith disappeared from South Orange, N.J., after selling his motorcycle for a pittance to a local dealership. At first, Ms. Cielecki said, she was not particularly alarmed. He had vanished once before, when Ms. Cielecki was seven months pregnant.

But as Mr. Smith's absence stretched from days into months and then into years, Ms. Cielecki wanted to give her young daughter an explanation of what had happened to her father.

So Ms. Cielecki, a former paralegal from Whitehall, Pa., began to scour Web sites cataloging missing persons and Internet databases of unidentified bodies, looking for clues to her ex-husband's fate.

She has yet to find him. But in her explorations, Ms. Cielecki started to find patterns in the data trails - connections in a seemingly endless sea of information - that led her to others long gone. And now Ms. Cielecki, 39, is at the forefront of a growing coalition of amateur and semiprofessional cybersleuths who specialize in finding the vanished and putting names to the unidentified.

"I think I owe it to my daughter to find him, to find answers for her," she said. "In the meantime, there are people out there looking for help that don't know where to turn."

Families of the missing have been turning to the Doe Network (www.doenetwork.org), a collection of more than 200 volunteers, including Ms. Cielecki, who rake through long-cold missing-person cases, swapping leads and constructing theories in their spare time.

Since the network was started in 2001, it has helped solve 15 such cases, its operators claim. And some analysts say groups like the Doe Network could be a significant crime-fighting source.

"In the late 1960's and early 70's, the police realized they were understaffed, so they began to rely on community groups to be their eyes and ears to help prevent crimes before they happened," said Ralph Taylor, chairman of the criminal justice department at Temple University in Philadelphia. "These Internet groups are an extension of that, supplementing investigations of crimes after they take place."

Robert McCrie, a professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, agreed. "Law enforcement's too important to be left up to the police," Professor McCrie said. "These amateur sleuths have a lot to offer, as well. We've seen TV programs help solve crimes. These databases dispersed though the Internet can accomplish the same thing."

Ms. Cielecki used several information centers to make her most spectacular catch. Sifting through the Missing Persons Cold Case Network (www.mpccn.com) in February for information on her ex-husband, she came upon a picture of Sean Lewis Cutler, and was drawn to it instantly. Like Ms. Cielecki's sister, the young man was mentally retarded. And Sean was last seen at his father's home in Wayne, N.J., not far from where Ms. Cielecki used to live.

When the Cutler house burned down in 1996, the remains of Sean's father were found at the scene of the blaze. But there was no trace of the son.

It seemed impossible that Sean could have escaped. How could a man confined to a wheelchair, mentally retarded and blind since age 7, get out of a smoke-filled building? The local police did not know. The psychic they brought in was not much help, either, the Passaic County authorities affirmed.

Within hours, however, Ms. Cielecki had the answer. Running through the Doe Network's listings of unidentified bodies - John Does, in police patois - she came upon a reconstructed head, based on remains found in Readsboro, Vt., in May 1997.

The Cutlers had spent time in upstate New York not far from Readsboro. Based on the bones, the local police thought the person might have been disabled, like Sean.

"There were so many things in common: the geographical similarities, the look, the disability," Ms. Cielecki recalled. "I looked at it, and I knew."

A Google search for "Sean Lewis Cutler" produced an Internet plea for help from his cousin Patrick Harkness, who was a Doe Network member himself. Ms. Cielecki e-mailed Mr. Harkness. He contacted the Vermont State Police and gave them Sean's dental records, which matched their John Doe. How the remains got to Vermont and how Sean Cutler died are still mysteries.

Jerry Nance, a case manager with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who has been working with the Doe Network since its inception, said the Cutler case was "the one that really impressed me."

"It was a cold hit: the person making the match didn't know the missing person or the unidentified body," Mr. Nance said. "You just don't see too many of those. That's one in a thousand or more."

The Cutler case was also unusual by Doe Network standards. Members are generally discouraged from going directly to the local authorities or to families of the missing. Instead, potential "solves" are hashed out in the network's members-only e-mail discussion group.

If a missing person or a John Doe has any unusual features - tattoos or prosthetics, say - Bobby Lingoes, a Doe Network member who is a civilian database manager for the police in Quincy, Mass., will use his access to the F.B.I.'s databases to do a search, or he will ask the F.B.I. to run an offline query, one that cannot be done remotely.

Only when the group has come to a consensus on a match between a missing person and a previously unidentified body will a network area director contact the local police with a tip, said Tracie Fleischhut, one of the group's New York State directors and the Doe Network's database administrator. The network has about 1,000 such potential matches in various stages of development.

The tightly controlled vetting process has given the network an air of legitimacy among some law enforcement officials. Others are less appreciative of the outsiders' advice. "They're often like, 'What are you doing here?' " said Todd Matthews, one of the network's founding members. "And then, when you get a solve, they say, 'We'll take it from here.' "

The group's Web site boasts that Mr. Lingoes solved the case of a missing Las Vegas man, Arthur Wuestwald Jr., by matching him with an unidentified body near Randolph, Utah. But Sheriff Dale Stacey of Rich County, Utah, said the Doe Network "only helped us find family members," not identify the body.

Mr. Lingoes disputes the sheriff's assertion. But he has not spent countless hours on network business to win accolades from the police, he said, or even to hear his Quincy police colleagues call him the "Bones Man."

The victims motivate him, he said. His nephew was one of them. The boy was stabbed to death in 1998. "I know what my sister went through when she lost her son," he said.

It took years of uncertainty and curiosity to drive Ms. Cielecki to look online for her former husband. In the first few days after his disappearance, she was still angry at him, for stunts like buying a new car when she could not afford maternity clothes. By and large, she assumed that it was up to the local authorities to find him.

Now, her attitude toward the case could not be more different. Working with the Doe Network and hunting on other Web sites, she not only looks for him but also helps adopted children find their biological fathers, reunites long-lost friends and tracks down missing people.

Her search for one man - her former husband - has left Carol Cielecki feeling responsible for just about the whole world.