The Last Place You'd Look Read Free

autopsied in a morgue.
    That is where the young girl found in Henderson, Nevada, “sleeps” in this photograph. Her picture, as well as many others, appears on the Web site of the Clark County Coroner’s Office.
    It is a Web site not for the morbidly curious, but rather it was established to help authorities unite this young girl and the other unidentified dead on the site with their identities. The problem of unidentified remains is not unique to Clark County, but Clark authorities are on the leading edge of finding a solution.
    Clark County, the fifteenth-largest county in the nation, is home to the city of Las Vegas and has a population of two million that derives much of its commerce from the tourism industry. Thousands flock from all over the world to visit the area’s casinos. Some of them die there, and not all are identified.
    I heard Clark County Coroner P. Michael Murphy speak at a conference entitled, “Responding to Missing and Unidentified Persons,” which is held each year by Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. Murphy says his county has 8,060 square miles of territory, and each year, on average, his office deals with about fourteen thousand deaths. Sometimes the bodies are bones or even bone fragments. Murphy and other staff members work hard to identify the unknown dead that turn up in his jurisdiction because, as he puts it, “they’re all somebody’s children.”
    In the case mentioned earlier, number 80-01221, the victim died as the result of a homicide. Five feet, two inches tall and 103 pounds at her death, the girl had fair skin, red hair, and green eyes, as well as a tattoo of the letter S on her right forearm. Her body was found on October 5, 1980, with lacerations to her scalp and puncture wounds on her back. She wore no clothes.
    The coroner estimates her age at somewhere between fourteen and twenty years. I chose her from among the many who fill the Web site’s pages because I found it hard to understand how this girl could remain unidentified and unclaimed for three decades. Someone, somewhere, misses this young woman, but until very recently there was no organized method of sharing this information with the public, law enforcement, or even other medical examiners. Today that is changing: coroners and medical examiners across the nation are not only posting the likenesses and descriptions of unidentified bodies that are found in their jurisdictions, but they are also taking part in a new initiative designed to link civilian and official resources in an effort to identify the more than forty thousand bodies retained by authorities that remain unclaimed in this country.
    Called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), the program allows law enforcement, medical examiners, and families to input information and grants access to the public, except for some investigatory details not released by the police. This unique, citizen-centric approach has already helped officials make several identifications.
    “The government finally woke up,” says Todd Matthews, a civilian who works with NamUs.
    I first heard Matthews speak at the same Wisconsin conference as the Nevada coroner. Later, we talked about his involvement with NamUs, as well as his unique take on working with missing persons and unidentified human remains.
    Matthews has a deep and abiding personal interest in both subjects, and he is one of the more interesting individuals I encountered while writing this book. One of the founding members of the Doe Network, a civilian, Internet-
based enterprise that works to match human remains to missing persons, his obsession with missing persons began in 1968, when a man named Wilbur Riddle discovered the body of a woman wrapped in a green tarp discarded near a dirt road in the area of Georgetown, Kentucky. A local newspaper dubbed the young woman—thought to be between sixteen and nineteen years old—the “Tent Girl.”
    The autopsy suggested she had been