Without A Trace

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He and other officers canvassed door to door in the area where the woman was found, a fertile river bottom where flowers, grapes and corn grow late in summer. No leads were found.

Fingerprints from the body were entered in the national crime information computer.

Local doctors were asked whether any pregnant patients had disappeared.

Catholic churches up and down the Interstate 5 corridor were contacted. Shelters for battered women were checked.

Fliers were distributed across the West, with particular care to reach all Indian reservations.

Press releases were sent to a migrant workers' newsletter, to Mexican consulates, to Mexican police, to the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Nothing came of it.

"No one was ever able to find a missing person -- let alone a missing woman and child, which around here should have stood out pretty well," Engler says.

Engler also asked the FBI for a list of all missing women and children -- thousands of pages of printouts. None matched.

It would have been a miracle if it had.

The National Crime Information Center's database of missing people has a big limitation that is little known among local law enforcement. It is designed to search for precise matches -- something impossible to get when there's no way to accurately peg the height, weight and hair color when only part of a body is found. And there is no reliable way to search for relationships between missing people such as a mother and child.

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Part 9: After 21 years, the bones get a name

By LEWIS KAMB
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

DANVILLE -- Just before dark one early October day in 1991, two hunters found a skull just south of here, wedged beneath a log in the river's floodplain.

Investigators soon gathered along the winding Kettle River near the Canadian border, unearthing more pieces of a woman's torso.

An autopsy was performed, dental records charted and the information was entered into a national database to search for matches among reported missing persons.

When a match wasn't found, the bones were boxed and stored in a basement evidence room.

Time, distance and a deep flaw in the FBI's National Crime Information Center computer would conspire to hide the identity of a beautiful young woman whose dream was to make movies, but who vanished more than a decade before her remains were found. Another decade would pass before those remains were identified.

The bones might still be on that shelf had a young detective relied only on the vaunted nationwide computer database that doesn't work as well as the public -- and many police officers -- think it does.

Federal officials who operate the NCIC system say they can recall just one case in 20 years that the system made a match on dental records.

In its yearlong investigation of state and national systems for handling missing-person reports, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found that nearly all states depend on the NCIC computer system when trying to identify bodies through dental records.

Many state identification officials said they were unaware that the computer they trust simply doesn't work.

In Ferry County, Detective J.R. Sharp, who is still working the long-cold case of the woman found in the Kettle River, said, "If the NCIC system worked, this thing would've been solved 10 years ago.

"What good is it to put the information in the system if it doesn't work?"

Sharp was a young volunteer deputy still wondering what to do with his life when the bones were found in 1991. Much later, after he had become a full-time cop and the only full-time detective on the eight-deputy force, he still wasn't aware of the bones, which had long been boxed and mostly forgotten. He learned of the case only because a Teletype from a national computer crossed his desk in 1998.

Investigators from another agency were trying to determine whether any unidentified bodies anywhere in the nation could be a woman missing from their area. They had fed information about her into the FBI computer that links police departments nationwide, and the NCIC computer had spit out a possible match with Ferry County's remains.

Sharp compared the two cases and quickly determined that the woman from the Kettle River was a routine "false hit." Then he got curious.

"Officers had worked the body recovery really well," he said. "But the case wasn't really followed up on after they couldn't find a quick match."

Investigators had assumed they belonged to a woman who had vanished a few years earlier from the Republic area. But when the dental records from the body didn't match those of the missing woman, the investigators "kind of lost interest," Sharp said.

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Sharp began exploring ways to put a name on the anonymous bones.

"The driving factor was we had some human remains in our evidence room and a family out there," Sharp said. "It's our responsibility to that family to do all we can to make an identification."

The best way to do that, the detective thought, was to have an expert re-examine the bones, looking for anything missed in the initial autopsy. Sharp located a forensic anthropologist, but had to call in his boss when he learned the steep price.

Sheriff Pete Warner and Sharp petitioned the Ferry County Commission for money to solve the case.

"We didn't want to push the envelope too much," Warner recalled. "We're a department out here in the sticks, working on a shoestring budget. But they finally agreed to give us $3,000."

In March 1999, the forensic anthropologist examined the bones and tried to reconstruct the woman's face based on the contours of her skull. He conducted a more detailed autopsy, offering information the first post-mortem didn't provide.

The woman was likely 25 to 35 years old and white -- or a Caucasian-Asian mix. She was short and stocky, and likely left handed, he concluded, based on the few remains he had to work with.

A sketch artist then created a composite drawing of what the woman may have looked like in life.

Armed with this new information, Sharp asked the state's Homicide Investigation and Tracking System to send a new alert on the case to other police agencies around the Western United States and Canada. The bulletin drew about 100 calls.

"I was overwhelmed," Sharp said. "I'm only one person, and it consumed me for a couple of months."

With each call, the detective compared details of his case with others, ruling them out one by one. Sharp also sent out meticulous packets that included full dental charts and other information about the remains.

Still, there were no hits.

"I still had the desire to get the identification," Sharp said, "but I was running out of hope."

Then, about a month after he sent out the alert, California's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit asked for the dental records.

"I assumed California was a long-shot," Sharp said. "It was so far away . . . I didn't see the connection."

But Sharp sent a packet to Sacramento. With 25,000 missing-person reports and 2,000 unidentified bodies at any given time, California leads the nation in sheer volume of such cases. To manage its caseload, the state in 1995 adopted the "Computer Aided Postmortem Identification" system -- a dental comparison program developed by the U.S. Army to help identify war dead.

But when Sharp sent the dental records to Sacramento in 1999, technicians there were still slogging through a huge backlog to update the new system. Sharp's package sat for more than 18 months before it was entered into the California database.

By then, the detective was out of leads.


Teeth offer best clues

The CAPMI system works because of a basic fact of death. When decomposed bodies or bones turn up, teeth are often the best way to bring the dead back their name. Even a single tooth can be linked to dental records of a missing person.

Enamel is the hardest substance in the body, said Gary Bell, forensic dental adviser for Washington's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit.

"Teeth are the last thing to go, if they go at all."

The Washington state identification unit reports that dental records account for about 70 percent of all positive identifications in this state, and fingerprint matches yield most of the remaining 30 percent. The state has no database for DNA of missing persons, and a new national DNA system is still in its infancy. Police nationwide have been required to collect dental records to match missing and unidentified-dead cases since a national dental record database was started 20 years ago.

But from the very beginning, there were problems.

In 1982, Congress passed the Missing Children's Act mandating stricter police reporting for missing and runaway children.

The new law also requires the FBI's National Crime Information Center -- a sort of computer filing cabinet containing dozens of information files that links police agencies nationwide -- to be expanded to help connect the missing to the dead.

The law ordered that the system's Missing Persons File, established in 1975, include more descriptive case information. And for the first time, a federal registry of the unidentified dead was created to compare cases with those in the missing persons file.

For the first time, critical data to help identify the unnamed dead -- heights, weights and ages; scars, marks and tattoos; jewelry and clothing; and medical and dental records -- could be stored into one database that linked cases in every state.

About the same time the new computer file was established, a grisly string of slayings in the Pacific Northwest became one of the first cases to expose the system's failures.

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Green River

Women in the Seattle area were disappearing. By the time their bodies were found, little more than teeth and bone remained.

In turn, a task force investigating the Green River killings was having trouble putting names to remains. With little else to go on, they focused on victims' teeth.

Aiding the investigation, forensic dentists Bruce Rothwell and Tom Morton turned to the new federal database for help. With dental records of several victims entered into NCIC's Unidentified Persons File, they hoped to find links to the reported missing.

But later, after the dentists identified some remains by manually comparing dental records, they learned a disconcerting truth:

"We were told that the individual victim's information was in the system, but it wasn't making matches," Morton said.

By 1989, Gary Bell was well aware of the problems with the FBI system. But he also knew of another search program that worked.

In less than a second, the Army's CAPMI system could sort up to 5,000 dental records, compare them to teeth of a missing serviceman, and spit out a short list of likely matches. The name at the top of the list was often correct.

Recognizing its potential, Bell helped implement CAPMI in Washington, painstakingly entering dental records for all missing- and unidentified-persons cases on record with the State Patrol.

Not long after the program was running, Bell noticed that CAPMI was making connections in Washington cases that had long languished among the tens of thousands of records stored in the NCIC files. He contacted FBI officials and was granted permission to test the national system by using records of four murder victims he recently had identified through CAPMI:

Diana Hopkins, 22, found in Kittitas County in 1990; Dawn Jennings, 37, found near North Bend in 1991; Brenda Gere, 12, found in Snohomish County in 1991; and Tammy Blair, 26, whose skull was found in Pierce County in 1991.

Bell put each case in NCIC's missing- and unidentified-persons' files just as it was entered when the cases were active. The FBI's computer was then asked to match the records to the dental charts made from the remains of the four women.

NCIC didn't make a match.

"It just doesn't work," Bell said. "No one I know has ever told me of a single time that it did."

In NCIC's sprawling steel and glass headquarters near Clarksburg, W.Va., analyst Susan Davis does recall one case in which the computer's dental system may have worked. Though vague about details, Davis said it involved a body found in the Mississippi River linked to a man reported missing in New York.

One case in 20 years -- tens of thousands of searches.

"The system is user-generated," said Davis, who has been involved with making improvements to the national system. "If something isn't working, the users (local police agencies) need to tell us that."

But FBI officials have long been aware of the system's problems. NCIC officials were alerted to the Green River examples and about Bell's test.

Bell had even published an article about his findings in one of the nation's leading forensics journals, and had personally notified FBI officials about them.

That was a dozen years ago. Still, the system remains unchanged.


Complicated system

Twenty years ago, when NCIC's dental program was established, the computer was programmed to sift through all information available. Everything from hair and eye color, stature, age, gender, scars, marks, tattoos, dental characteristics and other features were mixed into one search, with the computer told to pay more attention to physical descriptions than to dental information.

"Scars, marks and tattoos, we know they do generate positive hits," Bell said.

The problem is, a person's physical characteristics can change drastically from the time they go missing to the time a body is found.

The computer reports a match only if the points of similarity add up to a threshold score, but because of the weight placed on other factors, a perfect dental match alone won't meet the minimum score.

The results often mean that a computer search yields long lists of potential, but incorrect, matches -- say 50 blue-eyed, blonde-haired women about 25 years old. Often, the dental records for candidates clearly do not match the teeth of the victim. Local police typically must check each potential match by making time-consuming and usually futile phone calls and other inquiries.

Simply assigning more points to dental comparisons might not fix the problem. Nationwide, dentists chart and submit dental records to the national computer. Such entries are consistently riddled with mistakes.

That's because even experienced dentists without forensics training come up with far different interpretations under NCIC guidelines when charting the same teeth because the form is complicated and subjective.

Years after learning about the system's flaws, the FBI in 1996 appointed Bell and other experts to a task force to examine improvements.

Three years later, NCIC's policy advisory board approved the panel's recommendations to upgrade the system by creating two separate searches -- one of physical descriptors and another involving a more simplified dental record comparison.

But because missing and unidentified persons represent only a fraction of the data in NCIC, criminal information deemed more pressing -- everything from alerts about wanted criminals to the license numbers of stolen cars -- took precedence in a 2000 upgrade. The FBI now says it plans to add a stand-alone dental search program in December, although all states must update their own systems by then to use it.

"The advisory board had to make priorities," Davis said.

According to a P-I survey, 47 states depend entirely on the NCIC system when using dental records in trying to make "cold hit matches" by computer to identify bodies. Many state identification officials said they were unaware that the computer they trust simply doesn't work.

In the meantime, no one knows how many of the roughly 5,000 unidentified bodies and 100,000 missing persons the NCIC has on file are good matches the computer cannot spot -- just as it did not after a skull was found beneath a log in the Kettle River's floodplain, just before dark one early October day in 1991.

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'Out of the blue'

"I'd kind of given up," Deputy Sharp said of the long-cold case. "Then, out of the blue, they called."

On Nov. 22, 2000, California's CAPMI system gave a name to Ferry County's Jane Doe.

When that state's identification unit called to break the news, Sharp was in Olympia for a State Patrol training program. The deputy who was filling in as the department's detective "came running into the lunchroom, yelling, 'We got a hit, we got a hit,' " Sheriff Warner recalled. "I said, 'What the hell are you talking about, a hit? Someone got hit? We've got ourselves a homicide?' "

Warner's first call was to Sharp.

"I didn't jump up and down and holler, but there were good feelings," Sharp recalled. "I felt satisfied that she was identified, but now I was looking more long-term. We had a homicide to investigate."

What Sharp didn't know then was that the bulk of his work -- getting the bones re-examined, the skull reconstructed, a composite sketch made -- did little to solve the puzzle. In fact, much of the new information from the second autopsy and composite sketch was dead wrong.

But simply by realerting other police agencies about the case, Sharp helped to draw the attention that would ultimately get an ID. The information needed to solve the case already was in the national database -- and had been for years.

The missing woman's dental information had been on file in California since 1981, said Greg Truax, supervisor of that state's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit. The records were added to NCIC in the late 1980s, he said.

No one seems to know why the FBI system failed to make a match when Ferry County first entered dental records from the remains in 1991, though computer failure or human error are common.

"It's not a routine occurrence -- returning positive hits like that on cross-jurisdictional cases between different states," said Truax. "It's fortunate we have our CAPMI system."

Four months after California's CAPMI hit, a dentist in Washington confirmed the findings by comparing hard copies of the dental records.

In Republic, an evidence technician replaced an old label reading "Jane Doe" with one that said "Valerie McDonald."

Finally, more than two decades after the crime, a homicide investigation could begin.


A stunning beauty

Five-foot-6 and slender, Valerie McDonald was a stunning beauty with almond-shaped eyes and a model's bone structure. At 26, the strawberry blonde already was working as a movie extra in San Francisco, and dreaming of one day directing.

In June 1980, she moved into the Tower Apartments -- a converted hotel in North Beach, a funky neighborhood of trendy boutiques, bohemians, actors and artisans. She had come to live among others with similar dreams, some of them friends she'd met while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Less than five months later, she was living in fear.

Michael Hennessey, John Abbott and Phillip Thompson had met while serving time in California prisons. When they took over management of the building where Valerie lived, several tenants were driven out.

"Val called and told me she was frightened," said her mother, Dee Dee Kouns. "I told her to get out of there."

On Nov. 9, 1980, Valerie and some friends were moving her belongings to a new apartment when Hennessey told her that he could get her a job in a movie. The script, he said, involved a detective played by Dustin Hoffman who was chasing a serial killer down the coast -- a killer with a taste for blondes. Hennessey claimed he was supplying cocaine to the director, who had asked him to find a pretty blonde for a bit part -- the role of a murder victim.

Valerie and her friends were leery of the story. Her best friend asked Hennessey if she could escort Valerie to the film shoot, but he said no, the set was closed. To persuade Valerie, Hennessey paid her $200.

But the story about the movie was a lie -- there was no film being shot. When Valerie had not returned home by the next morning, her friend called police.

"They said to me that she's an adult and there's really nothing they could do," Valerie's friend said recently. "At first they told me I had to wait 72 hours before they could even take a report."

Valerie's friend spent nearly a week searching for Valerie, pleading with authorities and trying to reach her parents in Oregon. When she finally did, the woman was "frantic because San Francisco would not let her file a missing-person report," Dee Dee Kouns said.

Valerie's parents arrived in San Francisco early the next morning and went straight to the Police Department -- where a detective dismissed their concerns. They say the detective, who now disputes their account, suggested that Valerie likely had run off to Las Vegas.

"He said to me, 'If you think something's wrong or she's dead, forget it,' " Dee Dee Kouns recalled. "And he laughed."

Outraged by the response, the couple hired private investigators to uncover information about the lives of the three ex-cons. They learned about a warehouse the men were renting, and began tracking their recent activities.

On Nov. 26 -- 17 days after Valerie disappeared -- Abbott and Hennessey turned up in Trail, B.C., where they shot it out with Mounties who ran a routine check of their car and discovered that Abbott was wanted in California. Hennessey was killed. Abbott was arrested.

Authorities determined that Thompson had also been in Trail, but had flown back to California before the shootout.

A search of the men's belongings turned up Valerie McDonald's ID card and address book and a leather jacket like the one she was wearing when she vanished, said Constable John Hudak, who was involved in the incident.

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Six weeks later, San Francisco police found evidence from robberies and plans for other crimes in the men's rented warehouse. They theorized that Valerie was killed because she stumbled across evidence of the men's criminal enterprises, but neither Thompson nor Abbott have ever been charged in relation to Valerie's disappearance or death.

Retired Inspector Anatole Balmy said San Francisco police could do nothing because they could find no body, determine where a murder might have happened or even prove Valerie was abducted.

More than 10 years would pass before any remains would be found, and another decade would pass before they were identified.


A long wait

Bob and Dee Dee Kouns had waited two decades for news about their daughter. By the time Ferry County authorities showed up at their home in suburban Portland in March 2001, the Kounses had become prominent victim advocates.

Over the years, they'd met murder victims' families, interviewed ruthless criminals and helped shape justice policies in Oregon. Little shocked them anymore.

But, when they listened to what the officers told them, the couple were stunned. They had come to believe Valerie would never be found.

"When we found out they had found her remains nine years prior, it drove me crazy," Dee Dee Kouns said.

Over 20 years, the Kounses had spent thousands of dollars and hours accumulating documents, tapes, receipts, letters, even journals to piece together a theory of what happened:

Valerie was abducted and killed in the warehouse. Her feet were cemented in a tub, her body loaded into the car and driven north. Somewhere along the way she was dumped in a stream.

They note that John Abbott, in a journal Mounties found after the shootout, had written:

"The Ice Maiden in her fallen beauty also what a dream.

Flying in the air flowing with the stream."

"It's pretty clear what they did to Val," Dee Dee Kouns said. "Especially now."

The theory makes sense to Sharp, who notes that investigators found only bones from her upper body.

"There were no legs," he said. "Someone possibly could've anchored them in concrete or something else. She could've been dumped in the river in Canada and floated down to Ferry County. Or, she could've been dumped here.

"Those are things we just don't have all the answers to yet."

Complicating the investigation is the status of the suspects: Abbott was deported to Britain after serving a prison term in Canada; and Thompson is now in a California prison for unrelated robbery and kidnapping convictions in 1983. Neither could be reached for comment for this article.

And while Valerie was obviously young and healthy when she vanished, examinations of her remains have been unable to determine a cause of death -- a necessary factor in any prosecution.

Both Sharp and the couple know that bringing Valerie's killers to justice is a long shot.

"There's been no information for 20 years," Sharp said. "The case sat cold, and we have a lot of work to do."

The lapse is maddening to Valerie's parents. If only the identification had come when her bones were found 10 years earlier.

"There would probably be a prosecution by now," Bob Kouns said

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Part 10: Experts list ways to improve system

By LEWIS KAMB
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

As Washington's official forensic dental adviser, Dr. Gary Bell has helped nurture an obscure state records repository into what one top FBI official called a national role model in the field of identifying the dead.

What's more remarkable, the unit he assists has no dedicated funding, limited staffing and no investigative authority. Yet, FBI records show Washington ranks well above most states with large caseloads in obtaining dental records for missing people -- about 13 percent, compared with a national average of about 4 percent.

"We are, without a doubt, the best-kept secret advocates for those that die in anonymity and those that live with wonder and worry," Bell says.

The "we" Bell refers to is the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit, a part-time operation with a heavy caseload operated under the Washington State Patrol.

With Bell, a volunteer, and two identification technicians on loan part time from the Criminal Identification Division, it is the statewide repository for about 2,000 active missing-person cases.

The unit also tries to track all unidentified bodies found in Washington state -- usually about 90 at any given time, involving suicide, murder, accident or death from natural causes. Each is a mystery unsolved by local police and coroners.

All of the cases matter, Bell says, and many haunt him:

The body of teenage girl found near a missile silo in Bothell in 1986. "Multicolored hair, nice teeth," he says. "Somebody is missing their daughter."

The body of young male pulled out of Lake Stickney in south Snohomish County. "Bullet hole through his head. Nice big crowns" on his teeth.

They are haunting, Bell says, because it would be easy to identify these remains if the proper records could be found -- records likely stored away in the office of a dentist who has no idea that a patient has died.

Instead, the dead remain known only by number. And without names of victims, about 50 homicide cases are stalled.

"We've got the tools, and we've proved that the system works," Bell says. "But missing persons just aren't given much attention."


Problems resurface

Although Washington has long been considered a model for handling missing-person cases, identifying the dead and tracking serial killers, decades-old problems continue to resurface.

In a yearlong investigation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found that missing-person reports are often ignored and police often place little emphasis on such investigations. Those who need help may never get it, the anonymous dead remain unidentified and killers get away with murder.

Money could fix some of the problems -- especially the flawed databases and understaffed units that track missing-person cases.

But experts say changing the attitudes of police -- overcoming indifference, bias and territorialism -- is just as important as adequate funding.

The P-I asked experts nationwide to suggest ways to improve missing-person investigations, methods for identifying the dead and the search for killers. Here's what they said:

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TRAINING AND INVESTIGATIONS


Problem: Police often refuse, neglect or "dodge" missing-person reports.

Solution: Add adults to the federal law that bars waiting periods for accepting missing-person reports about children and requires police to immediately enter them into state and national databases.

Civil libertarians may see the reports as an infringement on privacy rights -- it's not against the law for an adult to go missing -- but the benefits of quick intervention when there's a crime could outweigh those concerns.

Although the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., has been the federal resource center for missing children since 1984, there was no equivalent for adults until 2001. Congress provided $1.6 million to help finance an adult resource component at the nation's Missing Children's Organization and Center for Missing Adults. Legislation for further funding is pending.


Problem: Omission of important information when taking reports.

Solution: The Washington State Patrol created a standard report form in 1995, but few local police departments use it. If they did, information needed to verify identity, including physical descriptions and the name of a missing person's dentist, would be more likely to be on file months or years later, if a body is found.


Problem: Reports get little attention by officers and civilians.

Solution: Missing-person investigations should be a long-term specialty assignment housed in a department's homicide unit so that cases quickly attract expertise of major crime investigators.

Only a few of the nation's largest police forces can afford to have detectives screen missing-person cases.

Beat cops, dispatchers and clerks are often the first authorities to learn of a disappearance, but few have specialized training to recognize clues that a missing person might be a crime victim or could be in need of immediate help.

Even departments that have detectives look at the reports usually assign officers with limited training who are reassigned, promoted or retire before they gain needed expertise.


Problem: Police fail to get dental or medical records for long-term missing persons.

Solution: Better training could increase compliance, but the law needs teeth.

Police departments either don't know about or routinely ignore state and federal laws that require them to seek dental or medical records for missing people to help identify anonymous bodies. In Washington state, police have failed to check for or obtain such records in 60 percent of all long-term cases.

Theoretically, agencies that fail to follow up on cases can only be penalized by purging cases from tracking systems, but removal of valid records would be counterproductive to investigations.

Yet, many experts said they are unsure exactly how police should be penalized.

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TECHNOLOGY, SYSTEMS, POLICE COMPLIANCE


Problem: Old and unreliable tracking systems.

Solution: More than 94,000 agencies nationwide can access the FBI's National Crime Information Center computer to help link missing persons to the unnamed dead, but the system is plagued by rigid and unreliable search capabilities.

A simplified and reliable system for dental comparisons is to be implemented by the end of this year, but each state must still modify their systems to conform to it. Other improvements -- including new forms that will tell whether DNA samples are available, and where they're located -- also are scheduled.

But continued vigilance is needed to ensure improvements happen. Some argue that NCIC should be replaced with a modern, Web-based system that medical examiners and coroners can access.


Problem: Missing and incomplete reports.

Solution: Every two years, federal auditors check how well local police use NCIC to check for everything from fugitives to files about missing people.

But the auditors check information already in the system only to see whether entries are complete and whether agencies remove cases after they are solved. They don't ask why a case has been purged to determine whether it should have been.

The P-I found that more than 100 long-term missing-person reports filed in Washington state were never added to the system, despite signs of possible foul play, and that many cases are improperly deleted.

The audits also are limited. They don't look at the NCIC unidentified-persons file, which is a repository of information about 4,000 unidentified dead people, to see whether they are accurate and complete.


Problem: DNA analysis is not widely used in missing-person cases.

Solution: All states now feed DNA information to an FBI national database used for criminal investigations, but an 18-month-old counterpart for missing people and the unidentified dead is not widely used. Only a handful of states have initiated missing-person DNA systems, and there is no federal law requiring police to seek DNA samples for missing-person cases, limiting the fledgling system's effectiveness.


Problem: Lack of police participation in crime-tracking programs.

Solution: In Washington, the Homicide Investigation Tracking System tries to track patterns in violent crime and suspicious disappearances. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program does the same, on a national level. But local police are not required to supply HITS with reports, and few states require reporting to the FBI database.

Without the information, experts miss cases that can keep them blind to patterns in abductions, murders and other crimes. Some experts favor mandatory reporting.

Participation in the FBI program is low, although some states -- New York, for example -- recently passed legislation making it mandatory.

"I think you're going to see a lot more states moving toward mandatory reporting . . . to make us more effective," said Kevin Crawford, a ViCAP supervisor.


Problem: Privacy concerns prevent agencies from sharing information.

Solution: The state Department of Corrections, which houses 15,500 prisoners, has dental and medical records from inmate examinations. The Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit would like to add them to its database after an inmate is released.

The logic is simple: People on the fringes of society often die anonymous deaths. Inmate records no longer needed by Corrections could help identify them.

Gail Kreiger, a DOC health services manager, said privacy laws prohibit such an information exchange. Legislation at both the state and federal level would be required, she said.

[The Tracker]

MONEY:


Problem: State identification unit has limited staffing and resources.

Solution: Better funding is needed for programs such as the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit and HITS. Neither have a dedicated funding source, and neither gets much attention in the never-ending battle for a share of the state general fund.

The Washington State Patrol picks up the slack for the missing-person unit, for example, but last year spent just $52,600 on it, mostly to pay two WSP technicians on loan from another division. Only $4,800 was for "goods and services" needed to maintain unit operations.

Dr. Gary Bell, the unit's volunteer dentist, has sometimes been forced to supplement the work himself -- even buying a fax machine to receive records from local police and coroners.

HELP FOR FAMILIES


Problem: Families who are frustrated with police response have no place to go.

Solution: A state panel has talked about starting a toll-free public hotline for people wanting to file missing-person reports who've been rejected by local police. The idea didn't go beyond discussions, as state officials said more money and a mandate from the Legislature was needed to run the hot line.

Washington's missing children's clearinghouse operates a toll-free line, but only for use in reporting missing kids. Without funding and a state law, a comparable state hot line for adults remains unlikely.


Problem: Lack of communication between families and authorities.

Solution: Some experts suggest citizens who report someone missing should automatically get a standardized information sheet from police telling them what they can do to help. Police often fail to ask families where they can find dental or medical records for missing people, but if families knew the information is needed, they often would provide it.

Family & Friends of Violent Crime Victims, a non-profit group based in the Seattle area, has developed informational pamphlets for families of missing persons, but there is no standard information offered by law enforcement agencies.

Citizens, schools and social services programs can also work actively to spread awareness on missing-person issues, said Wayne Lord, head of the FBI's Child Abduction-Serial Killer Investigative Resource Center.

"What I'd like to see is more steps taken toward prevention," he said. "That means better cooperation among law enforcement, social service programs, parents and schools. . . . Teaching people the signs of how and why people disappear or runaway."


Problem: Missing persons have few advocates for reform.

Solution: Lobbying by friends and families of missing people can prompt local, state and national reform.

It was a father's perseverance that led to the watershed Missing Children's Act of 1982. After his son's abduction and murder, John Walsh, now host of TV's America's Most Wanted, pushed for reform -- and got it with the federal law that called for stricter reporting, an enhanced FBI database and the establishment of a national missing children's clearinghouse.

The same can happen for adults, experts say, if families and friends insist."If the families of the missing got together and became a significant lobby, maybe something would be done," said Bell, the forensic dentist. "But . . . right now, they just don't have a voice."