America is haunted by 100,000 missing persons and 40,000 unidentified sets of remains. One lab is connecting the lost and the dead--and it's revealing the secrets of serial killers in the process.
Copyright Jessica Snyder Sachs, as
first appeared in Popular Science
LIKE A COWBOY loosely holding the
reins, Larry Weatherman steers up Deer Creek Road with his left hand on the
wheel, his right arm ready at his side. His upper body rocks with the motion of
the pickup as he navigates the dirt road's gauntlet of potholes and rocks. Since
his retirement from the Missoula County Sheriff's Department in 2000,
Weatherman has adopted the bushy white mustache and Stetson of a gentleman
rancher. But on a snowy Saturday in March, he has driven 50 miles down from his
20 acres above Montana's Seeley Lake to take a visitor into the forlorn woods
that served, three decades ago, as the dumping grounds for Montana's most
notorious serial killer.
A gust of snow hits the windshield.
Through the swirl, Weatherman spots a narrow break in the pine and fir trees
lining the road. He pulls into a shallow ditch and opens his door. "He liked to
take his girlfriends up here to party," he says.
Weatherman was a young officer in 1974
when he investigated the first in a series of gruesome murders that ended a way
of life in Missoula, a place where people had left their doors unlocked and
women felt comfortable walking home alone from the local bar. The first victim
was a preacher's wife found gagged, bound, and shot in the basement of her
home, her husband's handgun jammed between her legs. In addition to questioning
the husband, Weatherman briefly suspected a high-school boy who neighbors had
spotted in the victim's backyard that day. A grand jury found insufficient
evidence to charge either suspect.
Over the next 12 years, the seemingly
random murders continued. Three teenage girls and a married couple were killed,
and the town suffered a spate of home intrusions thought to have been thwarted
rapes. Then the improbable happened. In 1986 a would-be victim, already trussed
and stabbed, managed to break free and kill 30-year-old Wayne Nance in a bloody
struggle. Nance, a baby-faced furniture deliveryman and part-time bouncer, was
the high-schooler Weatherman had suspected in 1974. Postmortem searches of
Nance's bedroom and his father's house uncovered evidence of at least three
additional murders and of other break-ins.
But hope for further information about
the murders died with Nance. Weatherman was left with the unidentified remains
of two young victims. One of them was "Debbie Deer Creek," a teenager whose
skeleton he had chiseled out of a frozen grave alongside Deer Creek Road some
21 months before Nance's death. Several strands of dyed hair enabled Weatherman
to connect her to a photo of a dark-haired drifter that bar patrons knew as
"Robin" before she disappeared a few weeks after moving in with Nance.
Weatherman sent out scores of bulletins to the FBI and regional law-enforcement
agencies. But the girl's picture and street name failed to locate family.
It would take more than hair strands
and a faded picture to identify Debbie Deer Creek. It would take
technology--still two decades away--that could extract minute amounts of
fractured DNA to reveal an indelible link to a victim's family. It would take
one brother's unceasing search to find out what happened to his runaway sister.
And perhaps most of all, it would take the U.S. Department of Justice's slow
but horrifying realization that there may be far more serial killers on the
loose in America than anyone had ever expected.
For two decades, a facial
reconstruction made from Debbie Deer Creek's skull sat on top of Weatherman's
bookcase facing that of another girl, "Christy Crystal Creek," discovered by a
hunter two miles farther up the same mountain road above Nance's home. "I knew
somebody once cared for them," he says.
The Silent Missing
Debbie and Christy are far from alone,
and the same might be true of the likes of Wayne Nance. In a recent issue of
the scientific journal Homicide Studies, criminologist Kenna Quinet
wrote that conventional calculations seriously underestimate the number of
serial murder victims. "The problem may be 10 times worse than we imagined,"
she says. Instead of 180 victims a year in the U.S., there may be as many as
1,800.
Quinet, a nationally renowned homicide
expert at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, bases her conclusions on
simple arithmetic. According to the Department of Justice, up to 40,000 sets of
unidentified human remains sit in police-evidence lockers and medical
examiners' offices across the nation. If resolved cases are any guide, the
majority are murder victims. Against this, Quinet factors the homicides
suspected in a significant proportion--as much as 20 percent--of missing-person
cases, more than 100,000 of which remain open at any time in this country.
Quinet bolsters her new estimates with
evidence of the lengthy careers of the serial killers who are eventually caught
and convicted. "Typically, these killers operate under the radar for years,
even decades," she explains. Studies show that male serial killers average six
to eleven victims over a nine-year period. Female serial killers (primarily
health-care workers) average seven to nine victims over the same window.
And that's just those who get caught.
"I would guess that at any given moment," she says, "there are at least two
people in each state committing serial murder"--more than 100 serial killers on
the loose. Washington State is currently tracking at least four: the so-called
22-Caliber Killer, the Index Killer, the Lewiston Valley Killer and the
Snohomish County Dismemberment Killer.
Meanwhile, other serial killers are
operating too randomly or infrequently to generate a pattern or are cunning
enough to prey on those unlikely to be missed. Quinet calls these possible victims
America's "missing missing," the tens of thousands whose disappearance is not
taken seriously by law-enforcement agencies. They include those that law
enforcement assumes to be "missing" by choice: runaways, transients,
prostitutes, and anyone who has an outstanding bench warrant. (The irony,
Quinet notes, is that the warrant can be for the missing person's failure to
appear in court.)
John Morgan, deputy director for
science and technology at the National Institute of Justice, the research arm
of the Department of Justice, believes that part of the problem is the
increasingly transient nature of American life. "We live in a more fragmented
society," he says. "A lot of homicides that occur involve strangers." And for a
greater number of the victims, living far from their hometowns and disconnected
from a social network, their absence won't be noticed, or they will be
dismissed as having simply moved on. As a result, Morgan says, it's now less
likely "that a particular homicide will be resolved and the killer brought to
justice."
The first step in solving these
crimes--even before a detective can start to connect the clues--is connecting the
bodies to the missing. "After all," Quinet says, "it's hard to conduct a murder
investigation when you don't know who the victim is."
One in a Million
Derek Bachmann was 14 in 1984 when he
helped his 15-year-old sister, Marci, pack her bags and run away from their
Vancouver, Washington, home. "She told me my stepfather was touching her,
making her touch him," he recalls. "I told her, 'You're right, you need to get
the hell out of here.' " That was the last time he saw her. "The fact that I
helped her pack has always haunted me," says Bachmann, now a Web marketer
living outside St. Louis. "I mean, there were five different serial killers in
the Northwest at the time." (In fact, there were at least eight.)
In 1991 Bachmann began to search for
his sister, if only to confirm his fears. "I think I knew that if Marci was
alive," he says, "she would have contacted me." He called and wrote to scores
of homicide task forces and vice squads across the country, the latter in case
Marci had fallen into streetwalking. "I tried everything," he says. "I tried
psychics. I hired a private investigator, spent $10,000 on him. Got nothing."
By 2000, Web sites such as the Doe
Network offered Bachmann a new resource. Maintained by amateur detectives and
families of the missing, these cyber-bulletin boards feature case histories
and, when possible, photos or artist re-creations of the unnamed dead,
typically gleaned from news and police reports. Bach-mann began spending
all-nighters at his computer. His obsession put a strain on a short-lived
marriage, he admits with a slow shake of his head. "The atrocities I've seen
looking for my sister."
Among them was a flower-adorned
memorial page dedicated to a girl named Robin, with a photo of a dark-haired
girl in glasses under the banner "Do you recognize this face?" Bachmann looked
again. There was something familiar about the mouth and nose. "I showed it to
my relatives," he recalls. "They said, 'No way. Marci never wore glasses.' "
Besides, the hair color was wrong. Still, a few months later, he dialed the
number provided for the Missoula County Sheriff's Department and left a message
for Captain Greg Hintz. No return call.
When Marci left home in 1984, Seattle's
Green River Killer was at the height of a spree that would eventually claim the
lives of as many as 49 women, mainly prostitutes and teenage runaways. Bachmann
wrote to King County detective Tom Jensen, head of the Green River Task Force,
who promised to compare Marci's dental records with the impressions taken from
the four unidentified victims in his custody. But no dental records were
available, and Jensen added Marci's file to those jamming his filing cabinets.
In 2001, King County sheriff's deputies
arrested 53-year-old truck painter Gary Ridgway for the Green River killings;
two years later, he was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms. The work of the
Green River Task Force was finished. But Jensen still had more than 100 missing
persons and suspected homicides in his files.
Jensen's captain assigned three
detectives from the disbanded task force to review the cases and make a final
effort to close them. And so, in the summer of 2005, detective Raphael Crenshaw
called Derek Bachmann in Missouri: Was Marci still missing? Crenshaw told him
about a new program that attempted to match family DNA against unidentified
remains. Bachmann was eager to supply his, but Crenshaw also needed samples
from his parents.
"I knew my dad would take a lot of
convincing," Bachmann says. But he did convince his mother, who still lived in
Washington. The next week, she rubbed a cotton swab against the inside of her
cheek, sealed it in a plastic baggie, and sent it to the sheriff, who shipped
it on to Texas.
Connecting DNA's Dots
When Nance and Ridgway were going about
their grisly business, no method was available to connect the missing, like
Marci Bachmann, to the dead. But there's now a lab, in Fort Worth, Texas, that
can close the gap.
It's another March morning, and a
steady rain has Fort Worth's Trinity River running high through the city's
cultural district. On the other side of Camp Bowie Boulevard, employees and
students are leaping over the ponds growing in the driveway of the University
of North Texas Health Science Center. The third floor of this beige stucco
high-rise is home to the university's Center for Human Identification, the only
academic DNA lab in the country dedicated to identifying human remains.
Photo of Dixie Hybki and Rhonda Roby at
the Center for Human Identification courtesy of the University of North Texas Health
Science Center
In 1989, molecular biologist Arthur
Eisenberg began using DNA to settle questions of identity in cases ranging from
paternity to homicide. For the next decade, Eisenberg developed many of the
procedures and standards used in DNA testing today. Around 2000, he began to
focus on missing persons, and in 2001, he and his staff built a state DNA
database. Since then, the center's capacity has grown to handle cases from
across the country.
The victim specimens that arrive at the
center range from well-preserved femurs (thigh bones) to broken slivers of bone
that have been sitting inside police warehouses for decades. It's far easier to
extract DNA from recent samples, and the center prioritizes easy
identifications. Well-preserved or relatively fresh remains for which a family
connection is already suspected take precedence over colder cases with no
leads. The center has been able to solve one in every four of its cases.
Still, it's the difficult cases--the
shots in the dark--that tantalize, says the center's project manager, Rhonda
Roby. She speaks from experience, having spent her career developing methods
for extracting DNA from severely degraded remains. In 1991 Roby began working
in the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, where she helped develop
methods for identifying the skeletal remains of American soldiers from Vietnam,
Korea and World War II. In 2001 she flew to New York City to help set up
protocols for the unimaginable task of identifying more than 20,000 pieces of
human tissue retrieved from the ruins of the World Trade Center. She has also
helped identify victims of Chile's Pinochet regime and, in a curious aside, the
remains of Nicholas II and the Romanov family of tsarist Russia.
In 2004, shortly before Roby's arrival,
the center achieved its first successful DNA extraction in an extremely cold
case. The remains--a slender, yellowing femur--had arrived by FedEx. Forensic
analyst Lisa Sansom cataloged the bone in the center's database as F2775.1EC
and carried it into the lab's bone room, behind a door flagged "Forensic
Low-Copy Area. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." The amount of genetic material
retrieved from old bone tends to be so small as to be easily overwhelmed by the
ambient DNA of a floating skin flake or a saliva droplet. Inside the Low-Copy
Room, analysts don full gowns, face masks and surgical gloves. A
positive-pressure system keeps "dirty" outside air from flowing in, and
analysts have their genetic profile entered into the center's DNA database so
that those will be excluded from target sequences.
The work differs from the kind of DNA
fingerprinting used to identify biological evidence left at a crime. It is
extremely difficult--sometimes impossible--to extract conventional nuclear DNA
markers from an old bone. The center has become skilled in extracting and
analyzing a hardier but less-known source of DNA: that of the mitochondria that
reside in our cells.
Except for identical twins, each
person's nuclear DNA is unique. But each of us has another set of DNA located
outside the cell's nucleus and inside the mitochondria, the tiny organs that
supply a cell with energy. We inherit mitochondrial DNA, known as mtDNA,
directly from our mothers, and we share it with our siblings. It's not unique,
but mtDNA is enough to narrow the search for a victim's family.
Sansom spent almost an hour scrubbing
and sanding the femur's surface before attempting extraction. Few of the bones
here contain marrow, which dissolves in the first two or three years after
death. F2775.1EC had spent some 20 years in a box inside a police warehouse, so
DNA would have to come from the scant cellular material inside the bone's white
scaffolding.
She used a woodworker's dremel to cut a
rectangular window in the thickened area of bone just below the femur's rounded
head, where the thigh muscles once attached. Next she chilled, pulverized, and
blended the sample inside a freezer mill loaded with sterilized ball bearings.
Using an automated chemical process, she broke open the bone cells, released
their genetic contents, and washed, concentrated, and purified the extract.
For genetic analysis, Sansom first had
to increase the DNA to detectable amounts using a process called DNA
amplification. Forensic software translated the results into a four-color graph
of peaks and troughs. Drawing on her training and experience, she translated
each graphic peak into one of the four nucleotide letters in the DNA alphabet.
It took her about a week to process sample F2775.1EC.
When the amplification signals aren't
clear, the chances for a reliable match plummet. In the worst case, the
sequence data prove ambiguous, and workers must repeat the extraction and
analysis. Sansom got her sequence on the first try. She uploaded it to the
center's DNA database. No hits. Then she uploaded the data to the FBI's
national missing-persons database. Again, no hits. Not yet.
Scaling the Backlog
In 2004 the center received a major
investment to help realize Arthur Eisenberg's goal of establishing a National
Center for the Identification of Human Remains. It was the first of several
National Institute of Justice grants given over a five-year period totaling
more than $7 million. The center's mission was to perform DNA testing on
unidentified skeletal remains and "family reference" samples free of charge for
any local or state law-enforcement agency that requested it. It's now a
clearinghouse at the heart of an effort to address the thousands of missing
persons and unidentified remains discovered each year--what the justice
department calls "America's silent mass disaster."
"The World Trade Center attack
devastated this country with its massive loss of life," Eisenberg says. "But if
people only knew how many more unidentified murder victims there are . . . If
you go back even 20 years, there are literally hundreds of thousands of
families who have missing loved ones." Even with generous funding, progress
will ultimately hinge on making identifications cheaper, faster and more
definitive, he adds.
Laboratories such as the Center for
Human Identification will be swamped now that more states mandate the
collection of family-reference samples with missing-person reports. The center,
Eisenberg says, must advance the technology used to identify human remains as
it goes. By way of example, he cites a new program that can use broken bits of
traditional nuclear DNA to identify weathered bones.
The tests scan some 40 lengths of
highly fragmented DNA for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs, pronounced
"snips"), one-letter variations in the genetic code. The SNPs are then combined
to create unique DNA fingerprints. If the center's tests are successful--and
Eisenberg says they're making rapid progress--SNPs will allow forensic analysts
to identify old bones more reliably than they can using mtDNA. "If SNPs pans
out, it will be another revolution in how we deal with homicide," the National
Institute of Justice's Morgan says. "There will no longer be a reason to have
unidentified remains."
In addition to testing such systems,
the Center for Human Identification is collaborating with other institutions in
the effort to improve identification. It is working with the University of
Tennessee, for example, to automate DNA analysis and speed up identifications
for all the investigators and families tortured by a cold case. Right now, the
center's tests produce a chart of several hundred peaks and valleys that a
trained forensic analyst must read one nucleotide "letter" at a time. A second
analyst then reads it again to verify its accuracy. Although complete
automation of the process remains a distant dream, Tennessee scientists have
designed a software program that can read "perfect" sequences, or unambiguous
graphics. Soon it may be able to replace the second read and thus slash
personnel costs and turnaround time.
But extracting and reading DNA from
unidentified remains is only half the challenge. That DNA must get linked to
the right missing person. What the country has sorely lacked, Morgan says, is a
central repository for information such as photos, fingerprints, dental
records, DNA sequences and other identifying information on both missing
persons and unidentified victims. Make that database searchable, and it becomes
a profitable tool for homicide detectives. Open it to the public, and it
becomes a merciful resource for the thousands who currently spend their nights
combing disturbing Web sites.
In 2005 the U.S. Attorney General's
office formed a Missing Persons Task Force to develop the National Missing and
Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs (identifyus.org). In 2007 the
first part of the system--a searchable database of unidentified human
remains--went live. Last year, the program opened up a national database of
missing-person reports. And later this year, NamUs plans to connect the two,
with a cross-searchable database that automatically matches the missing and the
dead.
The Match
Before the NamUs database is complete,
though, researchers at Fort Worth's Center for Human Identification have to
rely on meticulous information-gathering and luck. The center has put together
a DNA-collection kit for family members of the missing, which it sends out free
of charge to the nation's police and sheriff's departments. Law-enforcement
officers mail cheek swabs collected from the family back to the center, where
workers analyze them in batches of up to 80 to yield both nuclear- and
mitochondrial-DNA profiles of parents and siblings.
As each family member's DNA fingerprint
comes off the line, it too goes through the databases to search for approximate
matches among the dead. The process is spellbinding, claims forensic analyst
Melody Josserand. Any of thousands of mysteries could be solved at that moment.
"Even though I do searches 30 or 40 times a week, I've never walked away," she
says. "I sit here with bated breath."
Josserand remembers the day in March
2006 when Unidentified Person F2775.1EC flashed across her screen. She had just
uploaded family-reference sample F3352.1US, submitted by the King County
Sheriff's office. Like the reels of a slot machine, twin columns of numbers
rolled down her monitor. The rows for six out of six mitochondrial-DNA base
pairs flashed green. A perfect match. But mtDNA alone, she knew, wasn't
definitive. Fortunately, back in 2004, Sansom was able to pull seven markers
for nuclear DNA from the victim's bone sample. Josserand compared the
family-reference sample with that. All of them matched.
Josserand retrieved the folder for
Unidentified Person F2775.1EC and checked it against the file for the
family-reference sample. "The metadata all matched," she says of Debbie Deer
Creek's physical descriptors: female; approximate age, 17; weight, 125; height,
5'7". Estimated date and place of death: 8/19/1984, Missoula, Montana.
From the missing-person report,
Josserand read the name: Marcella Bachmann. Last contact: 5/1984, Vancouver,
Washington. "All I could think was, 'I wonder how this poor girl got from here
to there?' " she says. Still, certainty depended on more family samples,
ideally from the biological father. So the call went out to Derek Bachmann
through Detective Crenshaw in King County. Crenshaw didn't say anything about
the bone from Missoula. "I gave him the spiel I give everyone, so as not to get
hopes up," he says. " 'The lab wants more DNA samples to make sure that if
there's a hit, they can narrow it down.' "
"I called up my dad," Bachmann says,
"and flat-out told him, 'You have to do this. I have to know.' "
On March 22, 2006, the Center for Human
Identification received two FedEx envelopes, one containing a cheek swab from
Bachmann, the other from his father. The father's nuclear DNA matched all of
Debbie Deer Creek's nuclear-DNA markers. To underscore the identification,
Derek's mtDNA, like that of his mother, proved identical.
Following protocol, the Center for
Human Identification relayed the news to the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children, which in turn called Missoula and Captain Hintz, who had
submitted Debbie Deer Creek's femur after Larry Weatherman's retirement.
"I'll never forget his call," Bachmann
says. "I was in a poker tournament and had to step outside." As Hintz spoke,
Bachmann suddenly realized that he didn't want "closure" after all. "I
instantly grasped the idea that he was finally calling back about the Web-site
photo. I told him I'd been thinking about it, that the picture couldn't have
been my sister," he recalls. "Well, he disabused me of that."
Photo of Derek and Marci in 1971
courtesy Derek Bachmann; Photo of Wayne Nance and "Robin" courtesy of Missoula
County Sheriff's Office
The Final Identification
Almost exactly two years later, on this
snowy March day in Missoula, Weatherman waits for Derek Bachmann to step out of
the county truck they have borrowed for their second visit to the place where
Weatherman unearthed Marci's frozen remains on Christmas Eve 1984.
Bachmann shivers inside his leather
jacket. The snow quickly saturates his sneakers as he follows the retired
lawman a quarter of a mile through the woods to a bluff above the Clark Fork
River. A grove of spindly conifers still surrounds the mossy depression that
once held Marci's body. "It was a lot harder the first time," Bachmann says of
the visit. "Yeah," Weatherman acknowledges. "That was a hard one for you."
From beyond the bluff comes the
rumbling sound of construction--or rather, deconstruction--echoing up from the
Milltown Dam below. A strip of orange and yellow surveyor flags marks a path
past Marci's gravesite to what will be a viewing platform directly above a
river-restoration project. In addition to tearing out the old dam, the county
plans to build a small park. Construction is due to begin in the spring.
Bachmann has come back, in part, to ensure that nothing desecrates Marci's spot.
Perhaps he can even persuade the county to raise a small memorial, he proposes.
Weatherman nods in agreement.
"I suppose you're ready to put all this
behind you," Bachmann offers as the men head back to the truck. "I don't
suppose it ever will be," Weatherman says, "until we get Christy identified."
At press time, DNA from Christy's femur
had been entered into the Center for Human Identification's database of
cold-case remains, as well as the national DNA database. She's ready to be
found.
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