The Skeleton Crew

by Deborah Halber

  He signaled, turned at an intersection. His eyes didn’t leave the road. After a bit he said, “Someday we’re all going to pass through the coroner’s office. And we understand that and that’s not a problem; when you pass through it when it’s your time to go. Nobody’s going to live forever. But when you have people your age or younger, a fourteen-year-old girl, whatever the case is, those people shouldn’t be dead.

  “When you see bodies lying on a gurney with toe tags hanging out, it’s kind of a reality check,” he said. “All of a sudden you realize: This could be me.”

  * * *

  Murphy okayed the website. Jones and other colleagues sifted through case files for any identifiable features of the bodies in the cooler, or any of their known histories, or any clothing or jewelry found with their bodies. Like Jane Arroyo Grande Doe, some had photos, good likenesses of what they must have looked like in life. Some had striking tattoos. Jones was careful not to release sensitive information about ongoing investigations that law enforcement wouldn’t want shared.

  There were other hurdles. For one thing, the coroner’s office had no website and no budget to build one. County officials told Murphy if he wanted a website, get in line—for up to two years. Instead, a part-time employee on Murphy’s staff used Building a Web Site for Dummies to develop one on his own time. Then there were the images themselves. Jones tried to be careful. Knowing he and his colleagues were jaded, they showed the photos to the administrative staff and brought them home to their spouses. If the guinea pigs yelped or cringed, Jones said okay, maybe not that photo.

  For the unacceptable images, or for decomposed bodies, they substituted sketches or clay models. They included disclaimers: “No decomposed remains will be shown. Some of the photos and information in this section may be disturbing to some viewers.” Users had to click through several pages to make sure they didn’t inadvertently see something gruesome.

  In November 2003, the website was ready to go live. Murphy sent out a press release, feeling hopeful. Finally, after years of stagnation, it was time for progress.

  Murphy, like Rick Jones, speaks of “honor” and “privilege” when he talks about being entrusted with a family’s dead loved one. Murphy always reminds visitors to the morgue that no matter whether a person has just succumbed or consists of a single bone found in the desert, they’re somebody’s child. Murphy believes that it’s especially important to bring closure to families of the missing. “We know where he is” are the words he’s had to say to mothers and fathers. “Your son has died. He’s here with us in Clark County. What would you like us to do?”

  “My stepson went missing a couple of years ago,” Murphy told me that day in his office. “I spent a period of time not knowing where he was. Every day I went to work, scanned daily reports on boards. My greatest fear was that I was going to find him on that board and have to go tell his mother. It gave me just a glimpse of what some of these families go through. It gave me a new insight.” Until the young man resurfaced, he said, “that was not a pleasant place to be.”

  Within hours of going live, Las Vegas Unidentified got its first hit.

  Sure enough, as Murphy had anticipated, the phone started ringing. E-mails poured in. Reporters worked on stories. They asked coroners and medical examiners in other parts of the country what they thought of the Clark County coroner’s experiment.

  Sacrilegious, said one. Inappropriate. Offensive. Indecent. What if children saw it? Messages from reporters seeking interviews piled up on Murphy’s desk. Twelve hours after the site went live, Murphy’s elation had turned to horror. Ruh-roh, he recalled thinking. What the hell had he done?

  * * *

  “Don’t you think this is rather macabre?” The reporter from the BBC sounded as if he had gotten a whiff of something nasty through five thousand miles of phone line. London calling was the just the latest in a series of incredulous, outraged inquiries since the website—the damned website, as Murphy was beginning to think of it—had gone live. Murphy posted photos online because, he claimed, he needed access to more eyeballs. Whether he knew it or not, he was onto something.

  Imagine standing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, taking a photo of the mass of runners pounding the pavement toward you. The lead runners’ faces are the most distinct, but you can also make out the faces of those farther in the distance. Zoom in on that distant runner and there’s very little intrinsic face-related information, such as eyes and a nose. It’s just a diffuse blob. Yet, somehow we can classify that blob as a face, says Pawan Sinha, a brain scientist at MIT. What’s more, the human brain can pick out a face much more reliably than even the most technologically advanced recognition systems. Maybe, Sinha concludes, we’re born with the ability to recognize faces.

  Just a glance at Las Vegas Unidentified was enough to pick out someone you’d known—someone like Jane Arroyo Grande Doe who, as Rick Jones put it, was “facially recognizable.” That, anyway, was the hope.

  * * *

  At first, Murphy was horrified at the reactions he was getting to the website. Then he recalled something a mentor had once told him: As long as you’re doing the right thing for the right reason, everything will work out.

  Murphy thought about the day he visited reefer 2 with former coroner Ron Flud. Flud seemed regretful but resigned to the idea that these cases were dead ends and would always be dead ends. Murphy had trouble accepting that. Helplessness was counter to every action-oriented bone in his body, but he knew some of these cases didn’t get as much attention as they should. It was easy to get a lot of media play for a cute little girl, for instance. Not so much for a rebellious-looking teen with a dozen facial piercings. Nobody except a family member might miss someone whose background was riddled with arrests. In Murphy’s view, that didn’t make them any less dead or any less unidentified. And it certainly didn’t make them any less important to him.

  Later, Murphy polled religious leaders—Jews, Mormons, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics—for their reaction to the site. They assured him they knew his intentions were good. He asked lawyers: Is this legal?

  Who’s going to sue you? they responded. The dead?

  He phoned families and asked: Is this offensive? People looking for a missing family member were pleased that the coroner’s office had taken a bold step. Their only objection was that after a case was solved, the photo remained on the site with “solved” plastered over it. (The site removed those photos.)

  Murphy regained some of his swagger. Maybe other coroners were okay with having unidentified remains in their closets, he told reporters. He was not. Maybe other major cities had just as many unidentified remains as Las Vegas and he was the only one publicly acknowledging the problem. But the stress got to him. He developed Bell’s palsy and stood in front of TV cameras with half his face paralyzed.

  Looking like Droopy the cartoon dog on national television didn’t brighten his mood. But something else did. Within twenty-four hours of the site going live, a corrections officer recognized one unidentified Las Vegas man as a former inmate. Forty-eight hours later, web sleuth Daphne Owings, a mother of two, sifted through the Doe Network’s catalog of the missing, using her knack for retaining visual images to absorb dozens of faces, including that of a man missing from Torrance, California. Soon afterward she spotted him on the Clark County site.

  The UID’s hair color, eye color, and weight were off; dates didn’t match. John David Clough was last reported seen July 1, 1988, while the Clark County John Doe was supposedly killed on June 27. “Everything I’m seeing in terms of black and white said this was not possible,” Owings said later. “But I really felt like I was looking right at him.” Owings was right: the John Doe turned out to be Clough.

  Within a year Murphy started getting calls from public agencies, including three that had initially spoken out against Las Vegas Unidentified, asking for help setting up their own web pages. As of 2011, there were
sites devoted to the unidentified—managed by law enforcement, public safety departments, coroners, and medical examiners—in Florida, Kentucky, California, New York State, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.

  Many of these sites used sketches or other artist reconstructions. The city of Milwaukee joined Las Vegas in using real photographs.

  Las Vegas Unidentified helped ID nearly thirty bodies, including that of a man from Ireland who had hanged himself in Vegas and was spotted on the website by his sister in Ireland. By 2009 the site had had more than one million hits. That year Las Vegas Unidentified, along with several of the other independent sites, was rolled into NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, pronounced “name us”), a searchable online national database accessible to medical examiners, coroners, and the public. This was the initiative that Las Vegas Unidentified helped inspire; the one that Murphy, Fierro, and others had spent years lobbying for.

  While I sat across from Murphy in the Vegas hotel where he was attending a conference for medical examiners and coroners, he finished relaying what he viewed as his greatest success story and straightened the cuff links in his perfectly starched shirtsleeves. “God shines on fools and drunks,” he grinned. “I won’t tell you which one I am.”

  A year later I heard that Murphy cut a deal with Discovery Studios for ten episodes of a new reality TV series based in the Clark County coroner’s office.

  * * *

  Clark County never cremates its John and Jane Does, in the hope that some future technology will help ID them. Back in 1980, in the case of Jane Arroyo Grande Doe, the teenage girl who inspired Murphy and Rick Jones to launch Las Vegas Unidentified, DNA testing wasn’t available. They kept no samples of her hair or nails, Jones told me.

  With no budget for DNA analysis of Jane and John Does, the coroner’s office applied for and received a grant that paid for Jane Arroyo Grande Doe to be exhumed in 2007. Forensic specialists collected X-rays, dental information, and DNA. She was reburied and twenty Henderson police officers attended a service at the mortuary. They stood with their heads bowed under a tent, gathered around the young woman’s gray casket, and asked for God’s help in finding out who she was. “We recommit her spirit to you,” Henderson police chaplain Gary Morefield intoned. “We hope you help reveal the identity of this person that you care about very much.”

  At one point Jones thought he had a match for her DNA; it didn’t pan out. Along with two hundred or so Las Vegas unidentified, the identity of Jane Arroyo Grande Doe remains a mystery. “We’re crossing our fingers that one day we’re going to find her,” Jones said. He still spends hours every month poring through missing-person records.

  Every so often, Jones gets a phone call or an e-mail from a web sleuth. These callers are used to being hung up on, but never by Rick Jones. He knows there are growing numbers of them out there, spotting clues the professionals have missed.

  7

  THE PERKS OF BEING ORNERY

  Part of me badly wanted to match a missing person with unidentified remains. I anticipated the moment I’d spot the specific details that aligned like stereoscopic images and drew an object into sharp 3-D focus. I imagined making a match might feel like scanning the crowd in Grand Central station until the familiar silhouette of a friend emerged from the crowd. But I knew that the chances of making a match were slim, especially for me, because I hadn’t put in the hours, developed the eye, formulated the tactics.

  Probably the bigger hurdle was that I had no skin in the game. I wasn’t searching for someone I knew, like Betty Dalton Brown was. For Betty, it all started with a missing brother.

  * * *

  Betty Brown’s father had been abandoned as an infant. A West Virginia hospital volunteer brought the sickly two-pound preemie home to make his last days comfortable. He slept in a shoe box heated with coals and suckled milk from an eyedropper.

  Within six months, he had gained thirty pounds. The volunteer and her husband adopted him. As an adult, John Dalton moved to Newport News, Virginia, married Mary Jane Campbell, and fathered seven children, including Betty. John had promised his adoptive mother he wouldn’t seek out his birth parents while she was alive. After her death, he approached his second-oldest daughter for help finding his biological family.

  Through articles, obituaries, and county property records, Betty tracked down her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and great-grandparents, all dead. Only a few of her father’s nieces and nephews remained alive. But the endeavor proved to Betty that she had a knack for detective work.

  Betty studied business at a community college, got married, and took a job with a company that ran fifty hog farms in several states. She worked her way up from production worker to technician to farm manager to assistant office manager. She trained new employees and managers. After seventeen years, she figured she’d be with the company until she retired.

  One day in 2004, Betty was in the office when the man who was supposed to give the baby pigs their anti-pneumonia vaccinations didn’t show up. Betty decided to do it herself. Inside the pen, jostling, grunting piglets circled her ankles as she held up the airgun-like syringe.

  The floor of the nursery was constructed of metal slats through which manure fell into a pit below. Days earlier, she’d noticed some of the struts were loose. She’d called maintenance but the floor still sagged.

  She was about to stick a pig when a strut gave way. She pitched headlong into a tumble of squealing pink bodies and the entire length of the needle plunged into her left hand. With blood running down her wrist, she yanked the needle free, washed up, and kept working. She noticed her hand getting numb, then her wrist. She thought she’d better go home.

  The next thing she knew, her teenage son was on the phone, calling for help. “Am I dying?” she asked emergency medical technicians in the helicopter that airlifted her to Richmond.

  She had contracted a bacterial infection that only animals get. The infection attacked the tendons in her fingers. Doctors pumped antibiotics directly into her heart for six weeks. She vomited continually. Six months of physical therapy helped her regain the use of her fingers, stuck together like a claw.

  She returned to work and got neither the sympathy nor acknowledgment she expected as the thirteenth person hired in a multimillion-dollar business with which she had spent almost two decades. They treated her, she said, like yesterday’s trash.

  She quit, took a job at a paint factory, divorced at age forty, remarried, and moved with her new husband and in-laws to Winston-Salem. She worked as a waitress at the Golden Corral and then for the big-box chain store Lowe’s. But during all those years of upheaval her real passion was finding tidbits of potentially useful information tucked in obscure corners of the Internet. She’s helped police close the files on at least five cases in three states; one case had not much more to go on than a pen inscribed with words in an unfamiliar alphabet.

  When are you getting paid? Betty’s husband asks her. One day, she says.

  As we drove together through her North Carolina neighborhood, she confided, “He doesn’t understand. I do this because I want to do this, whether I get paid for it or not.”

  * * *

  Phone on shoulder, ankle propped on knee, foot jiggling, Betty tapped away at a keyboard on the desk of a den in a white clapboard house in a Winston-Salem subdivision. A photo of the brownish skull of Christmas Jane Doe, a little girl found dead behind an I-95 rest area in 1983, shared a bulletin board with snapshots of blond, grinning, bespectacled six-year-old Jonas, Betty and Joe’s son.

  Betty’s genius is in unearthing ephemera. Using Ancestry.com and a host of other sites, Betty can find anything, a friend and colleague said. Other web sleuths and, increasingly, law enforcement agencies, have asked Betty to troll for their missing pieces.

  On a typical day, someone from Idaho calls to tell h
er that a suspected serial killer may have moved to the Carolinas. Todd Matthews questions something about one of the hundreds of missing people and unidentified remains cases she’s input into the database NamUs that compares DNA and other identifiers in an attempt to solve unidentified and missing-­person cases. It provides family and friends access, for the first time, to their missing-loved ones’ official records. Web sleuths and missing-person advocates use it as a resource.

  A sudden, high-pitched “Say whaaaa” leaps into Betty’s low, lazy Newport News drawl when someone exceeds her tolerance for foolishness, but on the phone she’s all business. She promised the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification she’d collect a cheek swab from the family and told the Idaho caller warning that a serial killer may have struck North Carolina that she’d keep an eye out for any cases that fit the MO.

  Yet, one mystery she can’t solve is the whereabouts of her own brother.

  In the late 1990s, when her dying aunt confessed to Betty she had an older brother no one ever told her about, Mary Jane Dalton refused to talk. Combing through birth certificates county by county, Betty eventually found one with her mother’s name on it in Hancock County, West Virginia. Betty had never heard of the father.

  According to the document, in February 1957, Betty’s mother, eighteen-­year-old orphan Mary Jane Campbell, married a Yemeni citizen named Khalid Mahssen Saleh. Khalid, around twenty-four years old, from the village of Murissi in the seaport city of Aden, had emigrated to the United States to take a job with Weirton Steel in West Virginia.

  The couple had a son they named Seif. Khalid took five-month-old Seif to his family in Yemen. Mary Jane never saw her husband and infant son again.