At her day job, she deals with corporate executives. During her spare time, Anita Moyer identifies unknown human remains and seeks the stories of people who went missing and stayed missing.
She said the nameless dead don't haunt her, because she's trying to help them tell their stories.
Moyer, a 1993 Falls High graduate, is Minnesota's area director for The Doe Network -- an international community of people trying to match missing persons cases with unidentified human remains.
"Our focus is to give names to the nameless dead," Moyer said. "They can't speak or tell us their story. We try to make sure they can."
While visiting family after the death of her own grandfather recently, Moyer used some of her time in International Falls to gather information on two disappearances in Borderland.
Kevin Ellsworth disappeared the night of the Rex Hotel fire July 11, 1982 and John P. Morrissey was last seen July 14, 1999 walking shirtless on U.S. Highway 71 south of Big Falls.
If members of The Doe Network can match any human remains from their online records with the records of Ellsworth or Morrissey, they will have found endings to stories that for now can only be guessed at.
Ellsworth, 18 at the time of his disappearance, was reported to have been sleeping in a basement room of the Rex Hotel the night it burnt down. He'd done some janitorial work for his father in the hotel and had a key. After flames engulfed the hotel, the car Ellsworth had been using earlier that day was found across the street from the hotel. After the fire, his remains were not found, and it was rumored that a woman recognized a person with Ellsworth's distinctive style of clothing walking in the Falls the next day.
Morrissey was 62 when he disappeared.
Deputies found his wallet and two dogs inside his car, which appeared to have broken down earlier that morning. Deputies conducted a ground search aided by a trained rescue dog, but the dog was unable to pick up Morrissey's trail, according to a July 21, 1999 article in The Journal. Morrissey had a history of mental illness and hadn't been taking his medication at the time he disappeared, according to a Koochiching County Sheriff's Office news release, which also stated Morrissey may have been picked up by a passing motorist and driven to an unknown location.
Although Moyer said looking at files of dead and lost people doesn't haunt her, she said death terrifies her. Once and a while, she said, a case gets to her, especially if it's a child.
"There's one child on (The Doe Network) that looks like my daughter," Moyer said. "And I will not look at her case, ever."
Moyer was in high school when Jacob Wetterling was abducted in 1989. She said she was one of the few high school students hanging up flyers in International Falls.
Moyer ended up finding The Doe Network while searching the Internet for Jacob Wetterling's name.
In her day job, Moyer serves as a corporate liaison in Arden Hills.