Given this particular story (warning: sad), I always wanted to know: just what are the standard methods for identifying a body (w/o documentation, of course)?
I mean, of all the dental clinics in an area, of all of the doctors offices, how does a coroner/investigator go about starting the identification process? Now, I’m going to advance the question ahead by saying that through whatever means, the coroner has figured out the approximate age, sex, and race of the person. But still, that leaves a lot of ground to cover.
How do they start, and what do they look for?
Tripler
No, this is not a Need help quick! thread. I promise.
[ul]
[li]Fingerprints. See if the deceased has a criminal background.[/li][li]News. Put a photograph of the deceased on the news and see who calls in to ID the body.[/li][li]Witnesses. If anyone saw the person in the area before they died, they might know the person.[/li][/ul]
In most cases you know the general description of the person and when they died, so you can cross reference that to missing person cases. Most bodies turn up within a few months of the death and within a short distance of where the person went missing so the list isn’t that long, even in a major city. We did a thread recently on dental records that you can look up, but basically you need to have a suspect to fit with the dental records. They are a way of confirming a guess, not a means of producing a suspect.
In cases where you can’t match the body to the local list or a specific date, you look at at other factors to try to narrow down a broader search. For example condition of the teeth will tell you whether the person grew up in a time/area with fluoridated water, which can identify a person as being a stranger in a location. Dental work, medical procedures, injuries and so forth can all be used in a similar manner to reconstruct where the person lived and help match them to a national missing person’s database.
The type of case that you linked to is potentially the worst possible case for the investigators because the person was never reported missing and so could never be linked to a name on a database. Such a body could never be traced successfully if it didn’t come with its own identification. The article notes that the child died of a medical condition, so it seems possible that the body contained some sort of prosthetic. A lot of prosthetics come with serial numbers that are indexed to patients, so that may be how the child was identified.
In most cases, the police already have a pretty good guess of who the person is, and just need to verify it. So if you think it might be Jane Smith, then you go talk to Jane’s dentist, ask her relatives, etc.
The article didn’t give many details, but I know there are places where caskets have to have an ID capsule in them (I remember them making that a rule at least locally after a lot of cemeteries flooded during the Albany, GA flood several years back). So it’s possible that in this case the remains included an identifier like that.
Of course, a lot of dead people still have their wallets, too.
I once worked for an engraver. We engraved all sorts of run-of-the-mill things. Name tags, signs, brass plates. One day, we had a big job of the smallest engraving tasks I’d ever seen: hundreds of silver-colored metal tabs about the size of a rolled oat. After running a few dozen of them through the engraving tool, I finally asked what they were for.
I was told they were identification tags for workers at a nearby chemical plant. When I expressed astonishment that anything so small could possibly be used for identifying workers, it was explained to me that they would be to be put in the employee’s teeth for post-mortem identification.
Y’know, in the event Spartanburg, S.C., were to become the next Bhopal.
From a friend who is a senior cop:
[ul]
[li]Look up who lives at this address, and see if the body matches.[/li][li]See who owns this car, and see if the body matches.[/li][li]Look for ID bracelet/chain, Medic Alert tag, etc. on the body.[/li][li]Look in their wallet/purse for their ID.[/li][li]Ask the person who found the body.[/li][li]Ask the person who killed them.[/li][li]Ask other people who live nearby if they can identify the body.[/li][li]Publicity about the body (including photo, if presentable) and ask for someone to identify the body.[/li][li]Check the list of missing persons, and see if any match the body.[/li][li]See if the fingerprints from the body match any in the FBI database.[/li][li]Check dental records (but you need a tentative ID first – there isn’t any big database of all dental records, nor any way to search it if it existed).[/li][li]Check for implanted medical devices, hearing aids, etc.[/li][li]Check for DNA match (but you need a tentative ID first, to have some relatives to match to).[/li][li]Have a forensic effort rebuild the face from the bones, photograph that and then try to match to photos of missing persons; or publicize it & ask for people to come forward.[/li][/ul]
These are roughly in order of frequency. The vast majority of bodies are identified from the first 3 or 4 of these, usually by the police on the scene. The last few might be done by the coroners office later. But they cost a lot of both time & money, and are done only when really needed, like in the case of a major unsolved crime.
For a death from natural causes, like a homeless person who died of exposure, if the body can’t be identified by one of the first few of these, it’s likely to be buried as a ‘John Doe’ by the County. (Homeless people are often easy – they tend to have all of their important papers with them.)
