tool name

Monday, Oct. 26, 2009

Web site NamUs helps put names to unidentified bodies

Just two miles south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the tugboat Nancy Allen needed to refuel. Capt. Christopher Campbell tried to put in at Wickliffe, but the fierce current kept pulling the boat away from Kentucky and toward the Missouri shore.

That was when the crew saw the lump in the water and thought it was a deer caught in the strong undertow. Attempting to retrieve it, they realized the lump was not a deer but a man. Unable to bring him aboard, they took a barge rope, fastened him to the side of the boat and brought him to the near bank, where they waited for the Ballard County Sheriff's Department rescue squad to arrive.

The body in the water looked really good for a dead man. The man still had skin and hair. He was dressed in jeans, with a layer of gray sweatpants underneath, which was a little odd because it was May 21, and it had been warm out for a while.

Deputy Sheriff Bobby Hickman says floating bodies on the river aren't as common as you might think. He can remember only one in his 15 years on his job.

The coroner would do the pronouncement of death. Then, it would be back to the sheriff's department to find out exactly who this man was and to notify his people. The medical examiner would determine how he died.

The body was bundled off to the medical examiner's office in Madisonville where, after a day, Dr. DeDe Schluckebier definitively could say that the man in the Mississippi had died from blunt force trauma to his chest. She determined his injuries were consistent with someone who had hit a steering wheel in a car accident. But it's not like the sheriff's department or anyone else had found a car in the river.

The man had been in the water, Schluckebier said, for as little as one week and maybe as long as 24 weeks, and probably had been stuck near the bottom of the river — where the water would be coldest — for most of that time, as decomposition had hardly set in. He was 45 to 65 years old.

Soon enough, Kentucky State Police sent Hickman three possible matches of known missing persons, but none fit the description of the bearded and slightly balding 6-foot-2, 230-pound white man.

Schluckebier took stock of the situation. The man could have drifted up or down that river, having fallen off a thousand banks or dropped off a thousand boats. She had no location to start to look for his identity. She knew what he died of but not what manner of death had dealt the blow.

All she had was him.

And she knew soon enough she had one place she could go. She was going to enter him into a new nationwide database of unidentified persons.

Schluckebier told Hickman she was going to get his identifying characteristics onto the U.S. Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, database to see what it could do.

Hickman had never heard of such a thing.

Schluckebier's first call was to Emily Craig.

The state's forensic anthropologist says that dozens of unidentified bodies turn up in the state every year, but within a few days of having been found, nearly all are identified. That is, after all, what her office does. They take the location of the found body, the circumstances surrounding its condition, its time of death, its age, race, sex, stature, height and weight. All of that adds up to a narrow range of possible humanity.

Less than 1 percent of the time, says Craig, or about one set of remains a year, is there a John or Jane Doe. On the books in Kentucky, dating to 1969, there were 38 such cases of remains without names.

On May 26, Emily Craig took Schluckebier's call and added the man in the Mississippi as No. 39.

His listing on the site includes, for the entire public to view in the manageable and fully searchable database, much of what authorities know about his case. You can even see the pictures of his sodden brown size 11 wide Clark's shoes. You can read the description of his legs. You can view his dental X-rays.

The addition of this entry was the first time since Nam-Us fully launched in January that a new Kentucky case has been added. Kentucky was, in fact, one of the few states with its entire catalog of unidentifieds entered into NamUs. This process started as soon as the Web site launched.