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rendered unconscious with a blow to the head and placed in a plastic bag, where she asphyxiated. The bag was then wrapped in the tarp and tossed in the woods. Her fingerprint was obtained and an artist drew her likeness, but all attempts to identify the victim failed.
    Decades passed and Riddle, the man who found the Tent Girl, retired and moved to Livingston, Tennessee, where his daughter, Lori, had a boyfriend named Todd Matthews. Matthews was fascinated by the story of the girl with no name and began working to identify her. When the Internet became available, Matthews switched his quest to an online search. Now married to Lori, he searched for clues to Tent Girl’s identity and one day he found her—Barbara Hackman Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old mother married to a carnival worker. Following exhumation and a DNA comparison with the victim’s living sister, a positive identification was made.
    Barbara Hackman Taylor’s husband, who said Barbara ran off with another man, was by then deceased, and her murder has never been solved. It took three decades to identify her and put a name on her headstone, a step Matthews believes is crucial—all John and Jane Does deserve to be identified and buried with dignity and their families to mourn their losses.
    “When I made the identification of the Tent Girl, I really had no idea that I had a better chance of hitting the lottery,” he says.
    His job now—and that of NamUs and modern, forward-thinking coroners and medical examiners like Murphy—is to make sure the tools exist for more identifications, as well as better cooperation between law enforcement and the civilian community. The reality is that officials have not always been willing or able to cooperate with one another, much less civilians, while working missing persons cases.
    For decades, the direction and depth of missing persons investigations have been determined by local jurisdictions, except in cases involving federal or state-level authorities. In fact, the local protocol regarding whether to even take such a report has varied. Some jurisdictions treat with seriousness every report of a missing person and start an immediate investigation. When a Jacksonville, North Carolina, man was reported missing by his family, county deputies completed a report and started backtracking the man’s movements. Within days it was discovered he had left of his own accord, traveling to Texas, and the case was closed. I think that’s the way it should always be done, but I realize that different agencies have different resources available.
    My former department always took missing persons reports on the theory that it was easier to clear them as unfounded if the person turned out not to be missing than it was to play catch-up if the case evolved into something else (like a homicide or kidnapping), and we investigated them without delay, too. But I discovered some jurisdictions, such as the Minnesota departments contacted by Brandon Swanson’s parents when he went missing, resist filing reports.
    Part of the resistance comes from their reluctance to complete what they consider unnecessary paperwork. It’s true—the vast majority of missing persons turn up in a matter of hours, their disappearances a result of misunderstandings, miscommunications, or other domestic situations. Sometimes the responding officer doesn’t believe the evidence is there, and that missed opportunity can leave families shaken and scrambling for answers when the missing loved one isn’t late coming home but in trouble.
    That is exactly what happened in Brandon’s case in which a traffic mishap transformed an entire family. On May 14, 2008, when Brandon was nineteen, he was driving back to his Marshall, Minnesota, home through the flat agricultural area between his parents’ house and a town called Canby.
    According to Brandon’s mother, Annette Swanson, “Brandon was living at home when he went missing. He had just completed his first year at