Serial Crime News - August 2001
On any given day, there are more than 91,000 people missing in the United States. Unfortunately, not all come back alive, and some don't come home at all. Some don't want to be found — they skipped town or simply cut off contact with their former life. But the most somber end for a person gone missing is when they're found, weeks, months or years later, and never identified. These John and Jane Does, or "Does," as they are called, number more than 4,000 on any given day. They represent the dark side of missing persons cases, the end of a dangerous path riddled with few clues for the investigators determined to bring them home.
The end is the beginning
It's not often that a body turns up in Campbell County, Tenn., a small, rural county on the fringe of the Smoky Mountains. Campbell County is a farming area, a place where neighbors are still neighbors. There, the biggest sign of the outer world is I-75, the highway that runs from the Canadian border in the North down into the tip of Florida in the South.
Between January 1997 and October 1998, the two bodies were discovered in the brush, each dumped down a hillside that rims a deserted stretch of the roadway.
Add this to the mix: both Jane Does were women, both were nude, both were stabbed (the second was also shot), and both had been dumped within a mile of the Stinking Creek Road exit along a stretch of the thoroughfare.
Detective Ed Barton, who led an investigation with three other detectives, was nearly certain he had a serial killer on his hands.
"We don't have a lot of unexplained homicides here," he says. "These girls weren't killed in this county."
If the women hadn't disappeared from Campbell County, Barton wondered, where did they come from? Leads took him to distant parts of the state, into crack-addict havens, but nothing panned out. Barton was left with a pair of cold cases or, as he puts it, "drawing at straws."
His situation was similar to that of the thousands of law enforcement officials and private citizens crusading to match nameless victims to an identity — possibly that of a missing person — and to a home. On any given day, the number of missing persons is roughly 91,000 — 85 percent of which are children — and that number only accounts for the missing persons who have friends or family that can report their absence.
In many ways, trying to identify a body is much like trying to find a missing person. Investigators of both cases are armed with a person's characteristics, and must scour the country, sometimes the globe, to reach a conclusion. Both are pressed for time — for the longer it takes to find someone, the less likely it is that they'll be found.
Unlike a missing persons investigation, however, the task of identifying a Doe can take on a somber finality. Investigators know there will be no happy ending when the case is solved, at best some closure. They sometimes have to break the bad news to relatives and friends who may still be holding out hope that their loved ones are alive.
But this task can transform an investigator driven by a need to transfer their charge to a final resting place.
Some investigators dedicate years to just one case. They give their Does nicknames, such as "Tent Girl," or "Tiger Lady," when "Jane" and "John" don't suffice. They bury them, sometimes raising money in the community for their tombstones and flowers. For some investigators, identifying a Doe even becomes a lifelong obsession. But few intend to go this far in the beginning.
Going national
Barton first took his search to the national level when he used the NCIC database, a massive index of criminal information maintained by the FBI (news - web sites) and available for use by any law enforcement agency.
The NCIC database is an electronic file of about 20 different categories of information, from wanted persons to missing persons to "articles" files that track guns, boats and other forms of property. It enables investigators to cross-reference their Doe's characteristics with those of the people in the missing persons file, and to look for fingerprint matches in federal criminal records.
Barton used a terminal in the Campbell County police department to search the "unidentified persons" file of the NCIC, plugging in the characteristics of his first Jane Doe, a woman between 35 and 45, possibly of Hispanic or Native American descent.
Jane Doe #1 bore a series of unique tattoos that he thought would help identify her — a few "jailhouse" tattoos, a peacock on her left shoulder, a rose on her inside left elbow, and a professional tattoo on her right arm that read "Mom '77." But Barton had no luck. A number of possible matches turned up negative.
He then tried the second one, a black female between 30 and 40 years old. With a partially decomposed face and no unique identifying marks or scars save an overgrown tooth and a ring finger that had once served its purpose, she was a less likely match. Barton again came up empty.
Monte McKee, who oversees the NCIC as the FBI's chief of the investigative and operational assistance unit, explains that in his system, a match is anything but guaranteed.
"The difficult part is that a lot of the unidentified bodies are just normal people," he says. "There's very little to go on if you don't have good fingerprints." Even then, McKee notes, only more serious crimes warrant the forwarding of fingerprints to the national level.
McKee says the NCIC database depends on the thoroughness of the information forwarded to it by local law enforcement agencies. Before the passage of Jennifer's Law (proposed by Susan Wilmer, whose daughter, Jennifer, has been missing since 1993), law enforcement agencies and coroners were not required to file descriptive information, such as dental records, DNA records and fingerprints, about missing persons. Now they are. But, McKee notes, many records are not as detailed as they should be, and many more missing persons never even make it into the database because no one noticed them missing.
With about 100 Does entering the NCIC every month, there will always be unidentified persons. The system now has more than 4,600 Does, and has been processing more cases than ever.
Active since 1967, the NCIC set a record last month when it processed more than 3 million searches. "It would be difficult to find police that can remember what it was like before," says McKee.
In years past, when NCIC couldn't crack a cold case, investigators were stuck. Not now. Today, investigators in Barton's situation turn to the Internet.
Taking the search online
A relatively recent innovation in missing persons and unidentified bodies cases is the use of searchable, online databases of information that collect information from across the country. And families and friends of missing persons themselves also turn to the Internet in their search, providing additional material for police seeking to make a match.
Barton began the online phase of his search with the DOE network, a network of more than 1,000 photographs and descriptions of cold cases that is manned by volunteers.
With the help of the DOE network, he posted descriptions of his Does on the Internet, where police and relatives or friends that might be searching for them could look.
The postings may be a last resort, but according to the DOE Network's media coordinator Todd Matthews, they keep hope alive. "We can't bring them back to life but we can bring them back home," he says.
Matthews knows what he's talking about: Ten years ago, the 49-year old quality control manager began an identity search for a woman's body his father-in-law found in Kentucky in 1968, and had already spent 20 years investigating. The woman was known as "Tent Girl."
She was a young woman between 16 and 19 years old, 5-foot-1, about 115 pounds, and with short reddish-brown hair and no identifying marks, scars or piercings. Two or three weeks earlier, she had been bludgeoned to death, wrapped in a tent, and dumped on the side of the road. Matthews knew little about her, and had never seen her, but she came alive for him. He was compelled to find her home.
After years of fruitless searching and the near-failure of his marriage, Matthews turned to the Internet. He developed a routine, spending hours in front of the computer poring over Web sites and waging an extensive e-mail campaign.
His efforts paid off one day when he came across a listing posted by Rosemary Westbrook, who was looking for her sister, Barbara Taylor. Matthews e-mailed Westbrook and, after the two exchanged information about their cases, Matthews suspected he had a match for Tent Girl. After comparing photographs, working with authorities to exhume the body, and then running the final test, a DNA analysis, he was sure.
"I almost had a heart attack," he says. "It was such an emotional moment."
Matthews had solved his case. In 1967, Barbara Taylor lived in Lexington, Ky., with her husband, Earl Taylor, and their three children. She was 24 years old.
When she disappeared, Earl Taylor told his family that he thought she ran away, and no one tried to search for Barbara Taylor or thought to file a missing persons report.
Her killer was never found.
Matthews realized he never would have solved his case without the Internet, and resolved to help others do the same.
"It's just the satisfaction of being able to put things back the way they're supposed to be," he says. "Knowing that I had the power to help these people, there's no way that I couldn't."
Since joining the DOE network, Matthews has seen a John Doe found in Massachusetts matched to a missing French man, a Jane Doe from Texas matched to a missing woman from Kentucky, and many more. He was so moved by Kentucky Doe's story that he worked to help fund the return of the woman's remains to her family, something he explains "we don't normally do."
Matthews cedes that the DOE network isn't the best way to identify Does. "We're nowhere near as effective as television, but we're getting there." And, he adds, the disappearance of former Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy has sparked interest in Internet groups such as the DOE network. "[It's] waking people up," he says. "It's something that you just don't hear about."
Perseverance and publicity pay off
Barton hopes his case, too, will one day become one of the DOE Network's success stories. But he knew from the start that identifying his Does would be difficult. "So many people are missing," he says. "It's just mind-boggling. You could work 12 hours a day seven days a week and not even scratch the surface."
Back in Campbell County, women in the community raised money to bury the Does, side by side, in the County Cemetery. Each grave is marked with a stone ("as good as any I'd have," notes Barton) that reads, "Jane Doe: She was one of God's children."
But even if his Does have been buried already, and even though he is now the only detective still working on the case, Barton is not giving up. He recently ordered 50 sets of the women's prints to be made and sent to law enforcement agencies across the U.S. He has also worked to publicize his story in hopes that someone will recognize one of the women.
"If we can get enough coverage on the first one, we will identify her. Then we can check and see if we've got another girl missing from the same geographical location, hopefully the second one," Barton says.
He pauses, then adds, "I'll be working on this case until they're found."