Identifying the nameless

Julia Young was 68 when her daughter, Tina D'Ambrosio, went missing while living near 19th and Northern avenues in Phoenix.

In one of their last conversations, D'Ambrosio asked her mother to travel from California to Arizona for a visit.

"We hung up, and then she called me right back five minutes later," Young said. "And all she said was, 'Momma, I love you.'"

That was in June 1996.

D'Ambrosio was 34 when she disappeared and has not been seen since.

Young, now 86, believes her daughter is dead and would like her remains. Based on the suspicious nature of D'Ambrosio's disappearance, a lack of evidence that she is still alive and the fact that no one has had contact with her, police began treating the case as a homicide last year.

"It's like, I want to find her," she said. "I'm going to live to 100 so I can find her."

D'Ambrosio's is one of dozens of cases that Phoenix police Detective Stuart Somershoe is trying to solve.

Somershoe's job is to identify the anonymous dead and locate missing persons for the Phoenix Police Department.

His caseload includes the unidentified remains of more than 70 persons and about 130 long-term missing people, which he shares with another cold-case detective. His oldest missing-persons case dates to the 1950s.

Among the unsolved: the 1997 case of a suspected transient woman whose charred body was found inside a burning vehicle; the 1999 case of a man found dead in the desert near Pinnacle Peak with a 12-year sobriety coin from Alcoholics Anonymous; and the more than 30-year-old case of the torso of a young woman found rotting in a dumpster.

Somershoe, 45, said he periodically wakes in the middle of the night to scour old police reports for overlooked details or to read crime-fiction novels that help him approach his work creatively.

"If somebody saw my Amazon reading list, they might think I was a serial killer," he said. "But the reason I read all that stuff is because of what I do."

Investigators are constantly searching for ways to provide resolution to families and loved ones of missing and unidentified persons. With increased access to new technologies, as well as improvements to older ones, Somershoe said law enforcement is at an "amazing crossroads of opportunity" to solve these cases.

One of the newer gadgets in detectives' toolboxes is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. It is a database that allows the public to access information on missing and unidentified cases, creating a digital space where investigators and the general public can join forces and share information.

The Phoenix Police Department is trying to bring more attention to NamUs and encourage public use.

"Instead of watching CSI, be a part of CSI," Phoenix Police Sgt.Tommy Thompson said.

The more than 70 human remains in Phoenix that have yet to be identified figure into the more than 200 unidentified-persons cases in Maricopa County, nearly 1,300 in Arizona and about 40,000 nationwide — an epidemic that the National Institute of Justice has dubbed "the Nation's Silent Mass Disaster."

Historically, differences in the way law enforcement and medical examiners documented missing persons and unidentified remains made it difficult for police to gather information from other jurisdictions, Somershoe said. Those holes, he said, were enlarged by a public perception that, because a person's remains are unidentified, nobody cares about what happened to them.

"These families exist in a horrific limbo of not knowing where their loved one is," Somershoe said. "They just want answers, even if it is bad news."

Now, authorities are equipped with better tools — fast, cost-effective access to DNA testing, improved fingerprinting, facial recognition, digital composite capabilities, as well as social media — that increase the chances of identifying a John or Jane Doe.

Since 2007, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. have had access to NamUs, a product of the U.S. Department of Justice, to create and maintain unique profiles for each missing and unidentified-persons case. Included in some of the profiles is password-protected information — like dental and fingerprint records and DNA profiles — restricted to law enforcement only.

The NamUs unidentified-persons database contains information on 11,125 cases across the U.S. Users can search by state, gender, race and age, and can also cross-search unidentified persons data with the NamUs missing-person database, which contains 17,264 individual cases.

Only medical examiners have the ability to create an unidentified-remains case in NamUs, Somershoe said. Anyone can create a missing-person case in NamUs, but all publicly generated cases are vetted before they're added to the database.

NamUs has helped Somershoe solve roughly a dozen cases since he started using it three years ago. Nationwide, investigators have reported using NamUs to help close about 11percent of more than 7,000 missing-person cases, according to the website.

"That number is in constant flux," said Todd Matthews, national director of communications and case management for NamUs at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. "We have little control over that number. It's totally up to the agencies to decide how much we've assisted."

The remains of all unidentified people found in Maricopa County eventually end up in downtown Phoenix at the Medical Examiner's Office. Christen Eggers works to identify them as a medicolegal death investigator and unidentified-decedent coordinator.

Typically when a body is found, Eggers said, teams of two go to the scene to retrieve the body and schedule a forensic examination to determine the cause and manner of death.

In cases where there are skeletal remains, the forensic odontologist and anthropologist work to determine age, gender, race and other identifying characteristics.

Eggers analyzes the outward signs and characteristics that hint at the unidentified person's medical or social history, and "then I'll take that information and work with the police department to try and figure out who these individuals are," she said.

If there are no identifying features and no DNA profile on record in state or national databases, the remains may be kept in a mausoleum at the Medical Examiner's Office until authorities can determine whom they belong to. Eggers said the majority of people they're unable to identify are buried at the White Tanks Cemetery in Goodyear.

"I couldn't imagine someone just not having their name when they die because they have family," Eggers said. "Every unidentified person is a missing person."

Legal and medical investigators in Maricopa County have been attending informal meetings aimed at improving collaboration and information sharing in recent years.

Representatives from the Phoenix Police Department, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and the Medical Examiner's Office have begun meeting occasionally for informal brainstorming sessions at which they share information and try to match unidentified remains to open missing-person cases. Somershoe said officials from the FBI, Mesa Police Department and Coconino County have also attended. Eggers represents the medical examiner at the meetings.

"The communication between departments is a huge thing, and I think that's probably a reason why these people go unidentified... because that strong communication was not always there," Eggers said. "It's now there, but you have to talk."

Toinette Benson's brother Todd Mertes left Snohomish County, Wash. in the mid 1980s.

The family had brief contact with him in California and then he was never heard from again.

As time wore on Benson came to believe her brother was dead. Thens she started visiting the Valley for her daughter's gymnastics meets and eventually moved here.

"I could feel like I was supposed to be here," she said. "Now, of course, I understand it quite fully. He was down the road all of these years and I didn't even know."

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, provides law enforcement with free access to forensic odontology and anthropology as well as fingerprint and DNA analysis on unidentified remains and family samples.

In 1988, a man's skeletal remains were found in the desert near Tonopah. Analysis determined he had been murdered. But investigators couldn't determine who the man was and his remains were kept in a mausoleum at the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner.

"We could see the stab wounds in the ribs," Christen Eggers, medical legal death investigator, said.

In January 2012, Eggers, who also does special duty as an unidentified decedent coordinator, submitted a sample of the victim's right tibia bone to the Arizona Department of Public Safety for DNA analysis. The profile, financed through a National Institute of Justice grant to take advantage of technological advancements since the 1980s, was then uploaded into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

CODIS is a national database containing DNA profiles submitted by federal, state, and local forensic laboratories.

Benson said Snohomish County authorities previously worked with the Phoenix Police Department to gather and submit DNA samples from the family to NamUs for analysis.

"The DNA eventually matched in CODIS," Eggers said.

"NamUs did play a huge part."

Almost 30 years after her brother disappeared, Benson and her family received closure. The process changed her life, she said, restoring her faith in humanity.

"I think every human being deserves to have a resting place," she said. "He is back where he originated—back in the Pacific Northwest—and I have a place to go see him."

Before police and coroners started regularly sharing information about missing and unidentified persons, many families were left without answers because, depending on the agency, cases were sometimes closed or purged without notifying the family, Somershoe said.

But the Internet empowered people to continue searching for missing loved ones long after the trail went cold for authorities.

Web-sleuthing is how Matthews, 44, ended up in his current job. He used the Internet to research the Kentucky case of "Tent Girl," whose body was found in the late 1960s. He eventually helped identify her as Barbara Ann Hackman-Taylor.

"I was the first person to solve a case using the Internet," he said.

Matthews later helped build a missing and unidentified persons database called the the Doe Network, which he said got the Department of Justice's attention and it asked him to help build one of three databases for NamUs and later decided to hired him full time.

"This is the first government database that the civilian user has been allowed to create a case," he said. "They're very carefully vetted."

The NamUs unidentified persons database has been available since 2007, but the ability to cross search that data with the NamUs missing person database didn't come until two years later, Matthews said.

NamUs has helped Somershoe solve roughly a dozen cases since he started using it three years ago. Last year, he used the database to help identify the remains of Susan Cook, a mother two children who went missing in December 1996.

Cook had called her grandmother living in Yuma and said that her marriage wasn't working out, Somershoe said. But when Cook's grandmother couldn't locate her at the family's apartment, she reported Cook missing to Phoenix police.

In 1997, human remains were discovered just outside of Phoenix near 83rd Avenue and Baseline Road. MCSO conducted the investigation, but because of differing jurisdictions, investigators did not make a connection between the cases.

Using NamUs, Somershoe compared Cook's missing person report side by side with MCSO's unidentified person, he said. The unidentified person was a white woman with blonde hair and so was Cook. Somershoe called Eggers and asked her to submit a DNA sample that was later matched with Cook's family members that were already on file.

Only medical examiners have the ability to create an unidentified remains case in NamUs, Somershoe said, and there typically has to be a law enforcement report for any publicly generated case to be published.

It's possible that D'Ambrosio's remains are one of the approximately 40,000, but an unidentified person profile hasn't yet been entered into NamUs.

Young said that despite having an empty feeling, she believes in miracles. She keeps all her records from D'Ambrosio's disappearance in a folder and has never changed her phone number because D'Ambrosio could call or someone may come forward with more information.

"I think of her every day," she said.

NamUs is the first national database that allows the public to submit information and help create a missing person case. Here's a brief tutorial on how to use the site, www.namus.gov.

Missing persons database

First, register for the database to be allowed to submit information on missing persons.

After you register, you will receive a login and password via email, sign in to the missing person database and click "New Case" on the banner across the top of the page.

You will be guided through a series of pages with distinct fields. All starred boxes must be filled out in order for your information to be sent to a case manager.

Your information is then verified before NamUs creates a case. If a case is created, it will appear in the "My Cases" folder under the banner link "My Dashboard."

To search for someone in the missing persons database, click on the icon on the left side of the homepage. Fill out the fields for the person's first and last name, they're sex and state.

Registering also allows you to save a missing person search so that you can track them using the banner link "My Dashboard."

Unidentified persons database

To search the for unidentified persons, click on the icon on the left side of the home page.

Fill out the fields for sex, race, ethnicity, date, state and age range for when the person was last known alive.

Coroners and medical examiners can input information to create new unidentified remains cases. The public cannot.

Like the missing persons database, registering for the unidentified persons database allows you to track cases that are stored under the banner link "My Dashboard."

Unclaimed persons database

To search for unclaimed deceased persons, click on the icon on the left side of the home page.

Enter the person's name and birth year in the search field on the top right corner of the page.