I learned today that… as of June 1, 2026, the federal NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) had more than 15,000 active unidentified-decedent cases. These are people whose remains have been found but whose identities have not been established. That number doesn’t include the unidentified persons who are found but never get reported to NamUS.
To me that sounds like a lot of dead people in he US that they have no idea who they are. Are you surprised by this number or is it just me?
I’m starting to work on a screenplay and the premise is about someone who is kidnapped and killed, and when their body is eventually found there is no id and nobody is out there looking for them.
It doesn’t surprise me. I know that tens of thousands of people go missing every year. And just because remains are unidentified doesn’t mean that no-one is looking for them. A body found in one location could belong to someone who lived far away. Their family or friends may have lodged a missing persons report but if they have no fingerprints or DNA on file, are found with no personal papers or identifying objects, how hard would it be for police to make an identification.
For the purposes of your screenplay, how could you even know that no-one is looking for an unidentified body?
ETA. Unless, of course, there is something so distinctive about the body that it would stand out.
You are correct. If the body is disposed of 500 miles away from where they lived, people may be actively looking for them near where they lived because they assume they will be found locally, when that’s not always the case.
I wonder if they do fingerprint and DNA checks on the body to see if it matches someone in a national database, assuming such a thing exists. I also assume there is a national missing persons database that they can try to find a match with.
No, not really. There are around 330 million people in the US, I think, and it seems totally plausible that one person in 22,000 ends up as an unidentified corpse. Considering how many people are homeless or otherwise in a situation where people might not notice if they disappeared, I’m honestly a bit surprised it’s not higher.
NamUS is just the database of unidentified bodies. Are there national fingerprint or DNA databases they can try to match a body to if nobody locally has reported someone missing that matches the unidentified body?
I guess I need to research what happens when law enforcement encounters a dead body and what tools they have to match it to a known living person besides looking at the known missing persons cases/database.
Sounds distressingly accurate to me. There are a lot of homeless people. Many of them aren’t in contact with any family or friends, and even if they do have friends, they’re likely to know them by a “street name”, or to have only intermittent contact with them. And a lot of those friends would have minimal or no contact with the authorities.
When the cops find a homeless person frozen to death on a park bench, what avenues would there be for them to find the person’s identity?
Fingerprint databases are generally focused on people with criminal records; I believe they are not even supposed to include people who were arrested for a crime but never charged; on the other hand, I believe they may or do include people who were charged with a crime but acquitted. Those beliefs are both based on things I have heard in passing and not on anything I can point to. The main point is that the majority of people would not be captured in any national or local fingerprint database that is based on criminal charges.
DNA databases, so far, come in two categories: where DNA is criminal evidence, however that might be stored (national, local, I don’t know). Think CSI, what happens to all those DNA samples they get? Then the voluntary DNA that people pay for, like 23andme. Even supposing that all of these are willing to be open to search for missing persons, that is still a very restricted number, and would again exclude most people.
So I think the short answer is, No. On the other hand, if it is relatives who are searching for a missing person, I would imagine that most of those people would be willing to have their DNA taken at least for the purpose of the search. And they may possess items that belonged to the missing person from which DNA and/or fingerprints could be derived. So I wonder if all the DNA and fingerprints of missing persons are stored in any central repository, making these searches a little easier, at least for people who are being actively searched for? And could the same repository contain the DNA and fingerprints from all unidentified bodies? This seems like it would be useful, if it is not already being done.
The government now has my father’s DNA in a database somewhere (at least I assume so) to go along with his fingerprints from the days he held a clearance. Though the DNA was used to identify the remains of an uncle of his that was MIA presumed KIA in the Italian Campaign in WWII. 83 years later and the Army was still looking to close out the books.
You obviously don’t watch Forensic Files. Just about every episode has someone checkin them databases.
I can’t recommend the show. In a 30 minute episode, there is about 6 minutes of actual content. 3 commercial breaks, and the story up to that point is rehashed again. And again. And again.
Millions of government employees with clearances, current and past, have their fingerprints on record. If you’re current or past military, on record for prints and DNA. Civilians who deployed or transfered overseas have their DNA on file. US passport, your fingerprints are required for background checks.
The expansion of Familial DNA techniques might help to clear up some, many or most of these unidentified bodies. Extraordinary successes have been achieved so far, mostly in cold murder cases.
Thing is, if the investigators found that a body found in 1992 was probably your long-lost great uncle who you never met, and who disappeared onto the streets with the express intention of forgetting his past and becoming anonymous, who benefits from this knowledge?
I assume records aren’t removed from the database until the people are identified. That is, the cases don’t age out. The database was created in 2003, so in the 23 years of its existence, about 652 people have been added to it each year. About 3.1 million people die in the U.S. every year. So about 0.02% of dead people go unidentified each year. That doesn’t seem high to me at all.
Over what period of time? Roughly 3 million people die every year in the US, so 15,000 is 0.5%, or 1 in 200. That seems absurdly high.
Once we get out of a single year, we start getting into very plausible numbers. Let’s say that’s over 5 years. Then that’s 0.1%, which is 1 in 1000, which I could believe, considering the number of people who were just unlucky enough to die in a place or way that left them unidentifiable (in the practical sense of no wallet or anything, not mangled to the point of unidentifiability)
Then we’ve got undocumented immigrants, people who are deliberately trying to hide from the government, and so forth.
Thanks for the answers. I guess I was surprised by the number because I thought it would be relatively easy to match a body with a known person, but that isn’t the case.
There is no national fingerprint or DNA databases they can search, although there are criminal databases, such as CODIS, which is the FBI’s national computer database used to store and compare DNA profiles for criminal justice, and there are now familial ways to use DNA to find living relatives. Either way, it’s still expensive and time consuming to match an unknown body just using DNA. I need to do a lot more research on how it’s usually done, especially in smaller rural communities, so my fictional screenplay is as accurate as it can be.
Tammy Jo Alexander was a body dump about 5 miles from my house, they finally identified her 30 years later. [was glad they discovered who she was, it was the huge news item my junior year in HS.
