In Ohio, just over 100 John and Jane Does are waiting to get their names back.
At any given time, it’s estimated there are more than 40,000 sets of unidentified human remains in the United States.We’ve been profiling cases out of northern Ohio for the past five months in our series Unidentified, in hopes someone out there may recognize them or have information that could help solve their case.
You may be able to help thanks to a free, national database that helps connect unidentified cases to missing persons cases.A cold case with a connection to Ohio was solved thanks to the power of this database and a determined family member.She was missing for just over two decades when in 2010, her sister Stephanie Clack was watching TV and stumbled on an online database that would change everything.Clack logged on and found a match to Paula’s case in just 30 minutes. “How I realized it was her was by the description of the tattoos I didn’t think anybody else would have, except for Paula,” she said in a video from the National Institute of Justice. Paula had been an unidentified murder victim for decades, buried without a name more than 500 miles away in a suburb of Dayton. “Her sister had been found deceased in Ohio 14 hours after she went missing from Kansas City,” said Chuck Heurich, a former forensic DNA analyst who has been leading NamUs for years.NamUs became fully operational in 2009, not too long before Clack made a connection in her sister’s case.“It’s our job to let them know what happened to that person, to identify that person, and even in the worst case scenario brings some sort of resolution to that family or those friends that have that person missing,” Heurich said.The databases reach across the country and can provide investigators with new leads. When a case comes in, investigators enter the basics into required fields and unique details into the database.“Everything from height, weight, and hair and eye color, all the way to scars marks, and tattoos, which can be entered to NamUs as well,” Heurich said.We found the majority of cases are listed as unknown and undetermined when it comes to their causes of death, according to data from the National Institute of Justice:“They’re able to possibly provide additional information, such as seeing the person that went missing get into a car and go drive off with somebody that nobody else saw because the two people were together,” Heurich said. NamUs has helped resolve tens of thousands of cases, sometimes with the help of families or even web sleuths, who have matched cases on their own and gotten their leads confirmed by law enforcement. Heurich hopes more people will start using it to help give these John and Jane Does their names and their dignity back, one case at a time. “They stumble on it. They go to it. They see its value. They see the utility of matching the cases together, putting in as much information in as possible. So I would just urge everyone out there to take a look at NamUs,” he said. More than a dozen states now require law enforcement to use NamUs when they have a missing person or unidentified case.Over 93k pounds of raw meat sent to multiple states including Ohio recalledChild found safe in Strongsville following AMBER Alert, NE Ohio school employee in custody: PoliceUnidentified: Who was this young man found dead on train tracks just months ago?