River Man case frustrates police

November 4, 2007
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Kim Bell, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

ST. LOUIS - Workers at the city morgue call him the River Man.

His remains have lingered there since mid-June, when he was pulled from the waters of the Mississippi.

Investigators say the case went cold almost immediately. They found no papers in his pockets. No fingerprint matches. No leads. They can't even tell how he died.

Not one person has called St. Louis police or the medical examiner's office to inquire about him. A national database of missing person reports has yielded zilch.

So his remains stay, for now, on a gurney, alone in a small room kept at a frigid 5 degrees, behind a 1920s-era set of wooden doors in the city morgue, 1300 Clark Avenue. A tag identifies him by his case number: #2007-1244.

It's rare for someone to go unidentified this long at the city medical examiner's office. Most bodies get identified quickly, claimed by loved ones and buried.

"In this day and age, people leave trails of identification and people miss people," said St. Louis Police Capt. James Gieseke. "This case is particularly puzzling."

The search for the River Man's identity illustrates the challenges authorities face when an unidentified body comes their way. The challenges, some say, show the need for national registry of unidentified dead and missing.

Frustrated investigators in St. Louis are bent on finding the River Man's real name and the family who gave it to him. It's a matter of personal pride and respect for the dead. He is anonymous now, but they know he's someone's son, perhaps someone's father.

And unless someone comes forward soon, the city will bury him in a nondescript grave.

"We try to imagine how difficult it must be for the decedent's family to wonder and not know where he is," said Rose Psara, the St. Louis medical examiner's chief investigator.

Investigators cling to hope that something as simple as the black-and-red plastic wristwatch he wore could be what breaks the case by triggering someone's memory.

The watch is by no means unique. After researching it on the Internet, detectives found that scores of these watches were handed out by Burger King restaurants years ago, a cheap prize inspired by the 1999 movie, "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace."

Many cases, few leads

According to Connie Marstiller with the National Crime Information Center's database, Missouri has 45 active cases involving unidentified dead. Illinois has 139.

These could include very old cases and cases where hunters found bones in a field somewhere. Police agencies started entering information in that database in 1983, and it includes some cases from decades earlier.

Once a person is identified, the police agencies are responsible for updating and changing their entries.

But those figures may not tell the whole story. Not all agencies report to the NCIC. Participation is voluntary when it comes to the remains of adults. There has not been a mandatory, central clearinghouse for such matters.

In the Metro East, the Illinois State Police count about a dozen cases in the last decade where the remains are still unidentified. Last week, the Madison County sheriff's office got some tips but no solid leads after it distributed a sketch of a drowning victim found floating in the Mississippi River five months ago.

Another recent Illinois case involves a man whose body was found wrapped in a tiger-print blanket Aug. 23 in East St. Louis. Although an autopsy couldn't determine the cause of death, investigators did learn that the man in the blanket suffered from a variety of health problems. Once toxicology tests come back to reveal a list of prescription drugs he was taking, police might take that list to pharmacies to see who recently stopped picking up those drugs.

On the Missouri side of the St. Louis region, the two best-known cases are the still unidentified headless girl who was found 24 years ago in St. Louis; and the unidentified torso of a woman dumped June 2004 at a rest area in Warren County.

Those cases, because of their gruesome qualities, got relentless media coverage. The case of the River Man, like other victims pulled from the Mississippi where the cause of death is undetermined, failed to stir much interest.

On the night of June 13, a motorist parked on the cobblestone wharf near the Eads Bridge saw the body in the river and called St. Louis police. An autopsy couldn't determine how the man died, or how long he had been in the water.

Here's what investigators know about the River Man: He was an adult black man, 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds. He had good teeth, no tattoos. He could be between the ages of 20 and 30 and had an old healed fracture on his right forearm.

He wore size 10 Dickies brand lace-up boots, blue jeans and a T-shirt with "Amerikus" and "Triple Crown" logo.

Maybe he was a barge worker who fell overboard. Maybe he wandered away from a homeless shelter. Or maybe he was a victim of suicide or homicide, a wayward son who has been away from his family for so long they wouldn't think to report him missing.

The River Man in the St. Louis morgue hadn't been wearing a life jacket. His clothes were neat - too neat, some say, for him to be working a barge. One detective thought it peculiar that the man, who wore a belt on his blue jeans, had missed a back belt loop and was wearing a kid's watch.

The watch and missing loop have fueled a dark theory about why no one has reported him missing.

"That just makes it seem like a normal adult wouldn't have those two things going on with him," said one detective. "If he's a simpleton, then he's getting a check (for disability) and somebody's cashing his check, thinking, 'I'm getting free money now.'"

No central clearinghouse

St. Louis homicide detectives are handling the case, even though it's unclear whether he was a victim of foul play.

Detectives check websites of missing adults and children. They've put details on the Missouri Highway Patrol's criminal information newsletter and entered the information in the National Crime Information Center's database. But they've yet to receive a single inquiry.

Making things tricky is the fact that there is no central clearinghouse for unidentified adults. Laws about reporting these cases to the NCIC vary from state to state. So, in essence, it's hit and miss whether someone pulled, say, from the river near Cairo, Ill., will ever be connected to the person who fell in the river in Iowa.

Todd Matthews, a spokesman for the Doe Network, says his volunteer effort tries to fill that void of information.

The Doe Network's site, www.doenetwork.org, is visited by some police agencies, Web sleuths and family members of missing people. More than 40 cases since 2001 have been solved worldwide because of information posted there, said Matthews, of Livingston, Tenn.

The Doe Network has details of the St. Louis case on its website.

"We're trying to reach the world with this case now. We're not just looking upstream," Matthews said. "Lots of things can throw you off when tracking a body found in water."

Take the case of Tisha Luna, 21, whose car was found with its engine running on a Memphis bridge in August 2000. A search downstream found nothing. A year later, a Kentucky medical examiner browsing the Doe Network site found that Luna's description - a rose tattoo and glasses in her pocket - matched a body they had there.

Her body had been found, days after her disappearance, several hundred miles upstream in the state of Kentucky. Her body apparently got caught up between two barges.

Maybe it was just luck that the Kentucky authorities ran across the description on the Doe Network, Matthews said. A move is afoot, within the U.S. Department of Justice, to try to improve the chances of making such matches. By 2009, the federal government expects to have a database in place that can be searched by the police and public.

'Still optimistic'

The St. Louis medical examiner's office handled about 2,800 death cases last year. It conducts perhaps a dozen indigent burials a year, complete with a small grave marker, when the person is known but the family can't afford to pay for it.

"Rarely is it someone we don't even know," said Psara, the medical examiner's chief investigator. "It's been well over 10 years, maybe as long as 15 years, since we have had anyone that was unable to be identified before they were buried.

"We're still optimistic he'll be identified."

This summer, when weeks had passed without any leads, Psara asked a police sketch artist to come to the morgue. Sgt. Bill Vize, who was trained on facial imaging at the FBI Academy, took photographs and worked from home on his own time to come up with a sketch.

Vize's sketch shows the man with a slight smile, something Vize did on purpose so he could show the man's teeth. Because of decomposition, the teeth were one of the few "knowns," Vize said. Vize hopes it can solve the case.

"I'm pretty confident it will look just like this guy," Vize said. "I just try to calculate what the guy would look like in life."

The fact that no one has called leads Gieseke, the city police captain, to believe the man isn't from the St. Louis area. But investigators can't necessarily focus on river towns to the north.

"Bodies can get caught up in a vacuum underneath barges and be carried upriver," Gieseke said. "The river can be a place that hides a lot of secrets."

No identification. No fingerprint matches. No cause of death. No missing person report. And soon the body will have to be buried.

PHOTO - Investigator's hope someone will recognize this black and red plastic wristwatch found on a body pulled from the Mississippi River in June. J.B. Forbes | Post-Dispatch The River Man The man was 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds. He had short black curly hair and no beard or mustache. He had good teeth, no tattoos. He could be between the ages of 20 and 30 and had an old healed fracture on his right forearm. He wore size 10 Dickies brand lace-up boots, blue jeans and a T-shirt with "Amerikus" and "Triple Crown" logo.