Vigilant Citizens Hold Out for Justice

“There is no time limit to solving a mystery” – that’s the motto of the Doe Network, also known as the International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons, a group of volunteers working to help find missing persons and identify dead bodies at the morgues. The Doe Network website, visited by 2.3 million since 1999, contains indices of the missing and the unidentified dead.

The descriptions are disturbing:  “Located on November 9, 1979 in Caledonia, Livingston County, New York. Estimated Date of Death is November 8, 1979. Died as a result of severe brain hemorrhage caused by a gunshot wound to the head. Estimated age: 13-19.”

In one illustrative case, a database in Florida was used to identify a missing person from Iowa, Ronette Lynn Peterson. The family in Iowa contacted a detective who searched the Florida database during his investigation, and that database contained information about a woman with a blue tattoo on her pelvis, a match with Peterson. Her killer has yet to be identified, but at least her identity is known.

A sister organization of the Doe Network is the North American Missing Persons Network. The vast majority of its cases are about people who went missing after 1994, but one case dates back to 1957. They accept cases of people reported missing to law enforcement; a picture of the missing is required.

Pennsylvania Missing, another group in the Doe Network, has a website that includes a list of missing children from Pennsylvania. It can be searched by family members to find the missing people they love. For example, the phrase “heart tattoo” returns a list of unidentified bodies found in Pennsylvania that have that physical characteristic. What is returned is a more complete description of the body and in some cases a drawing, which helps the family member identify the body.

The National Center for Missing Adults is a non-profit organization that works with the Justice Department. According to their website, “NCMA operates as the national clearinghouse for missing adults, providing services and coordination between various government agencies, law enforcement, media, and most importantly – the families of missing adults.” The organization includes a support group to aid those whose loved ones are missing.

According to Nancy Ritter of the National Institute of Justice, there are some 100,000 missing persons in the U.S. at any given time, and some 40,000 remains in the medical examiner’s offices had yet to be identified as of January, 2007.