by Carole Moore
Miller has had striking successes with this technique. A woman watching an old television show, Unsolved Mysteries, saw an age-progressed photograph that resembled her half sister. She called to her to come look, saying, “This is about you.” “I sure hope I look better than that,” responded the sister. As it turned out, she was the child in the photo, missing since her noncustodial mother ran away with her from their home in Hawaii and established a new life in California. The photo had been age progressed from seven years old to age forty-five, using a photograph of the woman’s biological brother at age thirty-five to help create the face later recognized by her half sister.
Another success story for Miller and NCMEC was the case of Alexander Hillman, who was abducted from West Tisbury, Massachusetts, at age eight. Hillman, along with eight other abducted children, was featured in a piece about Miller and age progression that appeared in a 2002 issue of People magazine. Someone recognized Hillman, ten years old at the time, from the photo, leading to the little boy’s recovery.
It doesn’t matter to Miller how much the photo he doctors looks like the person being sought, as long as it’s good enough to lead to his or her recovery. For him, his job is not about being good at what he does; it’s about connecting with a witness, because that’s what brings children home.
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When the Boy in the Box was autopsied by Philadelphia Medical Examiner Dr. Joseph Spelman, he discovered the child had been beaten. Dark bruises covered his head, chest, arms, and legs. Moreover, the person who committed this crime has managed to conceal the boy’s identity for more than five decades.
Thirty-one years later, when the Boy in the Bag was found, an autopsy revealed that human beings had not outgrown their enormous capacity for cruelty: he, too, had been beaten. The autopsy reported the child died from wounds inflicted by a blunt object on his neck and head, but it was obvious from the proliferation of old, fractured ribs that the preschooler lived with nightmarish violence.
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Across the country, medical examiners and coroners’ offices hold thousands of cases of unidentified, recovered remains. Historically they stand little chance of positive identification. For the families of these silent, missing dead, each new sunrise brings fresh anguish.
Until recently, no national protocol existed for handling the dissemination of information in regard to recovered bodies. Instead, each jurisdiction dictates its own rules, which translates into a general dearth of information in the national pipeline and reduces the number of people outside a jurisdiction with access to that information. The fewer people who know about a case, the less likely the chance of resolving it and bringing the deceased back home.
According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), about one hundred thousand open and active missing persons cases are on the books in this country each day. Many of them are resolved, but as old cases are cleared, new ones spring up to take their places, so the numbers remain nearly constant.
Medical examiners and coroners’ offices hold more than forty thousand sets of unidentified remains. To put this in perspective, that number is large enough to represent a small city.
In the last century alone, thousands of other recovered bodies were buried, cremated, or otherwise destroyed—a tragedy that cannot be rectified. This forever leaves some grieving families without the tools to identify or recover their lost loved ones’ remains. Part of the problem is that states don’t all use the same medical examiner system.
A 2004 Bureau of Justice report showed that there are about two thousand medical examiners or coroners’ offices in the United States, but the staffing levels, qualifications, duties, and budgets vary, from elected coroners with no medical training covering large rural areas with miniscule budgets, to large, modern facilities with statewide jurisdiction, manned by forensic pathologists with staffs of investigators and budgets sufficient to do the job.
Considering that these offices receive almost a million cases annually (and accept about half of them), it’s easy to see that the system is overworked and understaffed. What falls through the cracks here are the nameless dead.
For decades, medical examiners and coroners were not allowed to place unidentified remains on NCIC, the national database accessible to police across the nation. As a result, positive identifications were mostly the result of dogged determination or luck.
Enter the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). In 2005, the NIJ sponsored a conference convened to look at this issue. Organizers pulled together a vast sampling of individuals involved in missing persons investigations. Medical examiners, coroners, detectives, and family members of the missing and the found joined with scientists, criminologists, and others to hash out a plan to bridge the critical gap that would link unidentified remains to reported missing persons.
They made many recommendations. Out of those came a system that has already helped resolve at least three cases. And what is so revolutionary is that the mail carrier and the store clerk, the lawyer and the cab driver, the student and the readers of this book all have access to a lot of information once only available to law enforcement agencies. It can be viewed now on one central Web site, www.namus.gov.
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Had the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) existed back when the Boy in the Box was found, his story might have had a different outcome. But that child’s body was found more than fifty years ago, a month after the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and six months before state and federal troops faced off in Little Rock, Arkansas, over racial integration.
On February 25, 1957, there was no DNA database available to detectives, nor much in the way of communication between agencies. As a result, missing persons were identified most often because they were local, because someone in their family had reason to believe they were in the area, or because the case received massive publicity that paid off.
The Boy in the Box received massive publicity, but it was fruitless. Over the years, investigators continued to follow up, engendering new leads through shows like America’s Most Wanted and by asking the Vidoq Society, a distinguished national crime-solving group, to investigate. But the fact remains that if two things had been possible in the days before President Richard Nixon betrayed his office and pilot John Glenn flew fighter jets instead of spaceships, the child might now have a name. Those two things are the extraction and use of DNA for genetic comparison and the creation of NamUs.
To explain the thinking behind NamUs, consider the history behind the first fast-food chain, McDonald’s. The restaurant started as a drive-in, quite traditional for that era, with carhops serving customers in their cars. But when the brothers who opened the first restaurant took a closer look at their business, they saw a way to maximize profits by simplifying the menu and speeding up service. They dumped the carhops and broke the menu down to hamburgers, fries, and drinks.
NamUs does something similar: it creates a simpler, faster, and more efficient way to conduct the business of connecting human remains to their identities. To speed things up, NamUs allows direct access to its database.
Rather than wait for all components of NamUs to go online, its developers smartly went active on an incremental basis, says Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice. It’s sort of like McDonald’s perfecting its hamburgers and selling them before they have the fries down pat.
As a result, cops, medical examiners, coroners, families, and those with an interest in the plight of missing persons can now access the database. Here is how Rose describes the problem and solution.
“Victims’ families, members of the public who had missing loved ones . . .
had to go to all kinds of offices: law enforcement, medical examiners, coroners’ offices. The need was identified to create a central repository of those missing persons and unidentified dead and coming up with a technical solution to make those databases speak to each other so that matches could be [made] when data was entered into the database
.”
Medical examiners, police, and civilians can all enter information into NamUs. The information is quality controlled by NamUs supervisors. In addition, families of the missing can submit DNA profiles, as can medical examiners and coroners.
The DNA profiles are created at no cost to the DNA donor by the Center for Human Identification (CHI) at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
All the information goes into the huge, searchable database. The system itself looks for matches, but like any system, it is fallible.
Consider the case of a sixteen-year-old boy who was thought to have disappeared in 1995. Missing persons posters were created, DNA samples were taken, and law enforcement conducted massive searches for the youth.
“There were no good leads, no good hits,” says Rose.
In March 2008, the Virginia Medical Examiner uploaded a case into the NamUs database. The description of the deceased was a man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. He had been found on June 6, 1995, prior to the date the young man had been reported as missing.
Then the Doe Network got involved. Members of this private organization that seeks to reunite the missing with their families search online for matches. A Doe Network member was scrolling through NamUs and saw the boy’s case.
“Even though the information showed that the unidentified decedent’s case actually came before the missing person report, there was so much . . . that was similar, they went ahead and contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” Rose says.
It was a match—a match based on a hunch, persistence, and a unique public-private partnership. And although the fledgling agency’s efforts are still evolving, the program had three matches in the first full month of its operation.
“There are three families that we were able to bring some information and give them—I don’t want to call it ‘closure,’ because closure doesn’t really exist in these types of cases—but it certainly helped them to understand what happened; now they know where their loved one is,” Rose says.
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As the Boy in the Box rests nameless under a tombstone etched with the words “America’s Unknown Child,” another Philadelphia grave holds the other little boy who suffered such a similar fate. But more than time separates the two slain children—one has a name, one still does not.
In the case of the Boy in the Bag, despite investigators’ efforts and widespread media coverage, it took eleven years before the sweet-faced child was identified. The year was 2005; that’s when an uncle who had been out of town for many years began to ask questions about the boy’s whereabouts.
Looking through online databases, the uncle found the Boy in the Bag case and told officials the child was Jerell Willis, a Camden, New Jersey, resident who lived with his mother and her boyfriend.
The brutalized four-year-old died after undergoing terrible beatings, and even more disturbing, not one person, official or otherwise, appeared to notice when he disappeared. If not for his uncle and the online database, the boy might have remained a John Doe forever.
Later, the child was linked to his mother through his mitochondrial DNA. The mother, Alicia Robinson, pleaded guilty in connection with his murder, but she received a light punishment. The other individual charged in connection with the child’s death was scheduled for trial in 2009.
Little Jerell’s story is poignant because it also proves that even in the face of the worst that humanity has to offer, there are also many good and caring people. The child’s body remained unidentified and housed in the morgue until 2001, when an elderly Philadelphia woman, the late Mary Peck, concerned that he continued to be unclaimed, paid for a funeral and headstone. When he was identified, a new headstone carved with his name replaced the first one.
The Boy in the Bag and the Boy in the Box lived and died about forty years apart. One case was solved, but the other continues to challenge investigators and scientists today. The difference between the two cases can be found in the time frame in which they took place.
Yesterday’s science fiction has become today’s reality.
• 5 •
Running Away from It All:
Missing by Design
He’s not missing. He knows exactly where he is.—an old police expression
On the day John Stonehouse, British Labour Party member of Parliament, folded his clothes and placed them into a neat little pile on a beach in Miami and then walked away, he was doing more than reacting to a troubled life: he was trading it in, much the same way one would swap an old car for a new one. To the rest of the world, including his wife and political allies, Stonehouse drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. To police, who nurtured a suspicion based on past experience, he was missing. To Stonehouse, however, the act of disappearing represented the key to a new start as a different person, unencumbered by the detritus of his previous life.
The British politician chose drowning because it is difficult to produce a suitable corpse while the “dead” person still inhabits it, as evidenced by many fake suicides before and since. The convenient thing about large bodies of water is that they are unpredictable: they either surrender remains or conceal them forever. The nature of a watery grave helps those who stage their own deaths get around that pesky question of what happened to the body.
A former postmaster general and the son of a mayor of Southampton, Stonehouse appeared to possess a brilliant future. He studied at the prestigious London School of Economics and served as the secretary to the minister of aviation; however, the young man whose rise to prominence under Prime Minister Harold Wilson had been steady as a drumbeat planned to climb even higher, aspiring to Wilson’s office. Every move Stonehouse made in his early days supported that trajectory, but when problems in his personal and political life arose, his real agenda played out. Instead of making history as Britain’s prime minister, Stonehouse would be remembered as one of the world’s most infamous missing persons.
The circumstances of that disappearance would rival the plots of one of Stonehouse’s favorite authors, Frederick Forsythe. In fact, Stonehouse drew inspiration and more than a little practical help in leaving behind his former life from Forsythe’s novel, The Day of the Jackal.
In the book, the main character, an international assassin, creates a new identity by stealing that of a dead child. Stonehouse copied the technique Forsythe described when he created his own alternate identity: A. J. Markham. Later, the Parliament member masqueraded as Markham, trying out his new persona before slipping into it on a permanent basis. Stonehouse planned to evolve into Markham after staging his death by pretending to drown.
Trapped in an unhappy marriage and longing to join his lover and secretary, Sheila Buckley, Stonehouse obtained a passport under the new, false identity and opened foreign bank accounts to channel hidden funds. Then, on a trip to Florida in November 1974, he staged his disappearance, leaving those stacked clothes on the fine white sand.
Everyone bought it at first. His wife, Barbara, and other family members were inconsolable. Police searched the ocean but found nothing. Although some expressed early doubts, the public and members of Parliament believed him dead. However, police both in the United States and Great Britain were more suspicious. Rumors floated that Stonehouse might have been involved in espionage.
Meanwhile, near the same time Stonehouse staged his disappearance, another prominent Brit, Richard John Bingham, the wealthy and troubled seventh Earl of Lucan, also vanished. Descended from the third Earl of Lucan (held responsible for the deaths of six hundred cavalry during the Crimean War’s infamous Charge of the Light Brigade), Lord Lucan attended Eton College and lived a life of privilege. He married and settled into the tony Mayfair area of London with his wife, Veronica.
Veronica, who had given birth three times, suffered from postpartum depression and had difficulty adjusting after each of the births. Lucan, however, was more concerned with feeding his growing gambling habit—a habit that became both his obsessi
on and profession.
Lady Lucan sought treatment for her depression, but the couple grew apart, as Lord Lucan’s gambling drew them deeper in debt. In 1972 they separated, prompting Lord Lucan to attempt to obtain custody of the couple’s children. Despite his efforts, the children remained with their mother, in the care of their nanny, a woman named Sandra Rivett.
According to British newspaper reports, Rivett was similar in build and height to Lady Lucan, which police believe may be the reason the nanny was beaten to death in the basement of Lady Lucan’s residence on the night of November 7, 1974. Reports say Rivett was struck multiple times with a blunt object (later determined to be a length of pipe covered in tape). Lady Lucan told police that she, too, had been attacked that night and identified her attacker as her husband, Lord Lucan.
The not-so-noble lord didn’t help his case. He claimed he stepped in a pool of Rivett’s blood while aiding Lady Lucan. Several individuals received calls from Lord Lucan the night of Rivett’s slaying, and investigators, following Lucan’s known trail, found bloodstains. The lord himself vanished.
Not long after Lord Lucan disappeared, a teller at an Australian bank became suspicious when a new customer made a sizable deposit. The police were brought in, and soon the suspicious man, John Stonehouse, was under surveillance. Police noted that he read English newspapers and suspected he might be the missing fugitive, Lord Lucan. When they requested photographs of Lucan, they also requested a photo of John Stonehouse, just in case.