Forensics lab brings cold cases back to life

ByABC News
February 27, 2009, 1:24 AM

BATON ROUGE -- The clay face perched on a lab shelf at Louisiana State University's Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services FACES looked familiar to the sheriff's deputy. It got him digging back into his old case files.

A few weeks later, the face reconstructed from the remains of an unidentified 20-year-old slain man was matched to a skull found 32 years ago on a sandbar in the Red River near Shreveport, La.

"It's amazing what they're doing in that lab," said Lt. Robert Davidson of the DeSoto (La.) Parish Sheriff's Office, who helped identify the remains. "Anything we find now that is not identified, we're sending it straight to them."

FACES is at the forefront of a recent national push to bring names to the thousands of unidentified remains sitting in coroners' closets and sheriffs' evidence rooms across the USA. In 2007, the Justice Department launched an online database (www.namus.gov) that links coroners' offices and law enforcement agencies all over the country and allows the public to peruse clay and computer-enhanced renderings of unidentified persons.

States like Texas, California, Louisiana and Kentucky are bolstering their unidentified victims databases and sharing the information across the country, said Mary Manhein, FACES director and a forensic anthropologist.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates there are between 15,000 and 40,000 sets of unidentified remains in coroners' offices across the country. These cold cases often go unsolved for decades. Even with new technology, the cases are difficult; The FACES lab has identified four in the past two years.

But the forensic work is one of the few rays of hope to solve many cases.

"There is so much more effort going into it now as opposed to 10 years ago," said Todd Matthews of the Doe Network, a group of nationwide volunteers who help identify victims. "If nothing else, communication between agencies is so much better."

In 2006, Louisiana lawmakers passed a law mandating that law enforcement officers and coroners in each of the state's 64 parishes forward all unidentified remains to the FACES lab, Manhein said. The lab also got about $500,000 in additional funding, allowing Manhein to hire extra forensic anthropologists and an imaging expert.