Often I’ve read reports of decomposed remains being identified by dental records. How does this happen? Do LEO’s send x-rays of the jaw to every dentist within x km of the last resting place of the deceased? Is there a central database that has every person’s dentition recorded?
Last time I REGULARLY saw a dentist was probably 40 years ago, and since then my dentist/orthodonist are well and truly decomposing themselves. How do the LEO’s go about matching records when the victim AND the practice are all dead as dodos?
Dental records are only checked when the police are 99.9% certain who the victim is, but the remains are too damaged/decomposed to make a visual identification. So basically, the remains are only shown to one dentist (assuming the deceased actually had one) instead of mass-mailing photos of teeth with the caption, “Have you seen this bicuspid?”
I would also imagine they’d only be checking for people who are actually missing, not someone who’s simply deceased and accounted for. (For example, if your grandmother is dead and buried in such and such cemetary, they’re not going to worry about checking her dental records)
It’s more for positive ID, as others have said. They need to be sure the body they found is the person they think it is. (I.e. body found in the woods, heavily decomposed. Sex and approximate age match, approximate date of death based on condition of body - but is this the missing person we think it is? Look, there are certain distinct dental characteristics - crooked teeth, or fillings, obvious orthodontic work, etc. (How many adults in our society have no fillings or dental work or other dental anomalies like missing teeth?) type of clothing may be a serious clue as to a missing person, but dental is a positive match.
There may not be a dental registry, but anyone who has a decent job where they have dental insurance, there will be a record of the dentist they visited, and that dentist will likely have an Xray of any tooth that needed work - and usually first visit, a full mouth Xray. I’ve done tech support for several dental offices, and they have walls of files of the work they’ve done on every patient going back years.
if the police have no clue who the person is, they will not be able to find the identity from dental records. If our serial killer kidnaps someone in Oregon and buries the body in Kansas, odds are the Kansas police won’t know where to look unless they find the Oregon connection. There’s no point in putting out the “have you seen this bicuspid?” bulletin unless the dental work is so incredibly distinctive that someone will remember it. AFAIK there is no easy way to search all those dental records for “filling on front right of first molar” unless the detail is included in billing and insurance records, even if you know the dentist but not the patient name. After all, if it comes down to “Gee Charlie, there are only three of you dentists in town…” then more likely the list of missing Caucasian males 30 to 45 in that town will also be short enough to check through them by name. And it’s not like the fingerprint database - there is no coding of tooth xrays to make a match to a random tooth easier to do because there is no reason for that sort of cross-reference, precisely because it’s unnecessary.
People who write scripts for bad movies (I’m looking at you, Time Chasers!) seem to think that the cops can just count the number of teeth in a corpse’s head, call 1-800-DENTIST and identify the corpse immediately, like looking up someone’s driver’s license number at the DMV. The fact is that you need to have a list of missing persons that are a possible match and then maybe, just maybe, you can rule out some of the possibles by requesting the dental records of those specific people and comparing them to the corpse in your morgue. Of course, that assumes you know who their dentist is and they haven’t gone to some other dentist on the side without telling the family members.
Yes, my dentist has huge numbers of files. Still paper, though they are working at converting them to digital. Some even very old ones left from the dentist he bought the practice from – most of those people must be long dead by now.
Even if the police knew that the unidentified body was a patient of his, unless they had a name, they wouldn’t be able to find the appropriate file among their ‘wall of files’. Once they were asked to see if they could match dental records, and were give 3 or 4 names of possible matches (all young women of about the same age). They pulled those files, and the dentist compared them, and identified the match.
But because of health privacy regulations, he couldn’t/wouldn’t even give the records to the police. They needed to get a court warrant to get a copy (which they needed anyway, for court record trail). He did tell them verbally that it was a match, and which name they should get the warrant for, but they couldn’t see the actual records without a warrant. (Not that the police needed them to continue their investigation.)