Identifying the Missing

Two of the more difficult kinds of cases for a criminal investigator to handle are those related to missing persons and those involving unidentified human remains. Not surprisingly, the two often go hand-in-hand as a body or part of a body newly discovered turns out to belong to someone who disappeared days, weeks, months, or even years earlier. What might be surprising, however, is that our systems for matching the missing and the dead do not always work together.