Author S.A. Taylor shares important and mind-boggling information about solving cold cases with forensic evidence as she reports from the Killer Nashville conference.
Lost and Found: Solving Cold Cases One Match at a Time
By S.A. Taylor
When you hear about a mass disaster, what event comes to mind? Earthquake? Tsunami? Terrorist attack?
That was my first thought until I attended the Killer Nashville writer’s conference in October. There I learned about what experts now call “The Nation’s Silent Mass Disaster” or the high number of missing and unidentified persons reported every year in the United States.
I walked into the session titled, Forensic Services for Human ID, hoping to obtain research for a story I was writing about a missing person investigation. The presenter, Todd Matthews (Director of Communications & Quality Assurance at the Forensics Services Unit UNT Center for Human Identification) did a stellar job highlighting this growing crisis. He also provided information about a free resource called National Missing and Unidentified Persons System or NamUs.
At the end of the presentation, my goal became more than writing this tool into a story plot. I was compelled to share this information with others.
Here are some alarming nationwide figures I found on a 2014 fact sheet reported on the NamUs webpage:
- 4,400 unidentified remains are found each year, 1,000 remain unidentified after one year
- 90,000 active missing person cases at any given time
Continue Reading at Sisterhood of Suspense: Solving Cold Cases: One Match at a Time #RSsos #MissingPersons @Stephitay
