Solving ‘Doe’mysteries

LIVINGSTON, Tenn. (AP) Four days a week, Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. After work, he drives home and spends the next seven hours immersed in a very different world.

The faces seem to float from his computer — morgue photographs, artist sketches, forensic reconstructions — thousands of dead eyes staring from Web sites as though crying out for recognition. John, Jane and Baby “Does” whose bodies have never been identified.

His wife, Lori, complains that Mr. Matthews, 37, spends more time with the dead than he does with the living. He wants to give “Does” back their names.

His obsession began two decades ago, when Mrs. Matthews told him about the unidentified young woman wrapped in canvas whose body her father had discovered in Georgetown, Ky., in 1968. She had reddish-brown hair and a gap-toothed smile. Locals named her “Tent Girl.”

Tent Girl haunted Mr. Matthews. Who were her siblings? What was her name?

Mr. Matthews began searching library records and police reports, not even sure what he was seeking. He started scouring message boards on the nascent Internet.

In the process, Mr. Matthews discovered something extraordinary. Across the country, people just like him were tapping into the new technology, creating a movement of amateur sleuths.

Today, the Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state. All hope that with enough time and effort, modern technology can solve the mysteries of the missing dead.

The unnamed dead are everywhere — buried in unmarked graves, tagged in county morgues, dumped in rivers and under bridges. National law-enforcement agencies hold files of more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S. and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.

The premise of the Doe Network is simple: If the correct information — dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs — is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law-enforcement agencies and medical examiners offices simply don’t have the time or manpower.

And so, in the suburbs of Chicago, bank executive Barbara Lamacki spends her nights searching for clues that might identify toddler Johnny “Dupage” Doe, whose body was wrapped in a blue laundry bag and dumped in the woods of rural Dupage County, Ill., in 2005.

In Kettering, Ohio, Rocky Wells, a 47-year-old manager of a package delivery company, scours the Internet for anything that might crack the case of the red-haired Jane Doe found strangled near Route 55 in 1981.

In Penn Hills, Pa., Nancy Monahan, 54, who creates floor displays for a discount chain, said her “real job” begins when she returns home, turns on her computer and starts sleuthing.

Miss Monahan’s cases include that of “Beth Doe,” a young pregnant woman strangled, shot and dismembered, her remains stuffed into three suitcases and flung off a bridge along Interstate 80 near White Haven in December 1976, and “Homestead Doe,” whose mummified body was found in an abandoned railroad tunnel in Pittsburgh in 2000.

“It’s like they become family,” Miss Monahan said. “You feel a responsibility to bring them home.”

Matches can be triggered by a single detail: a tattoo, a piece of clothing, a broken bone. It’s just a question of the right person spotting the right piece of information and piecing together the puzzle. The process can be tedious and frustrating; months or even years of late-night clicking on a dizzying array of sites often lead nowhere.

Still, Mr. Matthews and others say the rewards of cracking a case make the time worthwhile. The Doe Network claims to have assisted in solving more than 40 cases and ruling out hundreds more.

Successes are not entirely joyous, said Doe volunteer Kylen Johnson, a 38-year-old computer technician from Clarksburg, Md. “On the one hand, you are giving families the information they have been searching for. On the other, you are extinguishing all hope that their missing loved one will be found alive.”

“Nothing you find can be any worse than something that has already gone through your mind,” said Mary Weir of Palmer, Alaska, describing the sickening moment when she spotted an artist’s rendition of her 18-year-old daughter’s face on the Network.

Samantha Bonnell had been missing for 19 months. She was killed while running across a California highway in 2005, and buried in an unmarked grave — Jane Doe 17-05.

“Her name wasn’t Jane Doe,” Ms. Weir said, her words punctuated by sobs.

At his house in Livingston, Mr. Matthews has built a little nook next to the living room — his “Doe office,” he calls it. His desk is laden with pictures of dead bodies. He says he gets hundreds of e-mails about cases every week. Every night he scrolls down the lists, searching for new information.

Every few months, he drives to Kentucky, to a lonely plot in Georgetown to visit the “Doe” that changed his life.

Standing by her grave, he tells of the night in 1998 when, scouring chat rooms for the missing, he stumbled upon a message from Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Ark.

Miss Westbrook sought information about her sister, Bobbie, who was 24 when she disappeared 30 years earlier. Her sister had married a man who worked in a carnival, and she was last seen in Lexington. She had reddish-brown hair and a gap-toothed smile.

In his heart, Mr. Matthews knew. “Lori,” he cried, racing into the bedroom and shaking awake his wife. “I’ve found her. I found Tent Girl.”

E-mails were exchanged. Phone calls were made. When Mr. Matthews received a photograph of Miss Westbrook’s sister, he had no doubt. She looked just like the forensic artist’s portrait sketched years earlier — the one engraved on Tent Girl’s headstone, the one that had obsessed him for years.

Weeks later, the remains were exhumed. The match was confirmed by DNA.

The family reinterred her in the place that had been her resting spot for so many years. Beneath the stone etched “Tent Girl,” they placed a small gray one engraved with her real name. She was Barbara Ann Hackmann, now and for eternity.