FIRST OF FOUR PARTS

It’s as if she doesn’t notice the beep-beep-beep of a ground-penetrating radar machine being tested in her kitchen.

Or the 80-pound tortoise clomping past her collection of 3-D holograms.

Or the carved Tibetan skull on the coffee table.

Because this time, DNA detective Colleen Fitzpatrick is stuck. Really stuck.

“Benjaman,” she says, of her latest case, “is the ultimate exception.”

Fitzpatrick, who drives a dented Camry and rocks a pet parrot to sleep each night, is not one to brag. But if pressed, she’ll tell you, over lemonade and bananas from her tree: “I can find anybody in the world.”

Until now.

The mysterious case of Benjaman Kyle has stymied the nuclear physicist who solves mysteries no one else can. When the U.S. military found a severed arm from a 1948 plane crash, they called Fitzpatrick. When Titanic experts exhumed the remains of the Unknown Child, they too called Fitzpatrick.

She once tracked down a homeless woman in Buenos Aires; a widow in Estonia; and a whistle-blower from the 1920s Teapot Dome Scandal who’d changed his name and moved to Australia. And died.

Finding people is her thing.

“I’m an avid genealogist,” says Fitzpatrick, 54, of Fountain Valley. “And I have a knack for finding people that others have given up on.”

This time, however, the person’s already been found. This time, the question is: Who the heck is he?

MYSTERY MAN B.K. DOE

There is a short prayer that goes: St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come down, something is lost, and can’t be found.

If anyone ever needed the Patron Saint of Lost Things it is “B.K. Doe,” a man who thinks he’s in his 60s but, like everything else about his life, isn’t certain.

In 2004, he was beaten, stripped and dropped by the dumpster of a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia. It wasn’t until he landed in a Savannah hospital that anyone realized just what he’d lost: his memory.

The hospital nicknamed him Burger King “B.K.” Doe, and that’s who he remained. With no family. No home. No paper trail – a big problem for Fitzpatrick.

“I don’t have a last name to go by,” she says. “I don’t have a previous address. I can’t look up any birth, marriage or death records. He’s a mystery – a living, real mystery.”

Without a Social Security number, B.K. – who now calls himself Benjaman Kyle – can’t get a job. Or unemployment. Or health insurance. He can’t open a bank account, get a driver’s license, board a plane.

The first person who saw him as more than a curiosity was nurse Katherine Slater who met him at a homeless clinic in 2007.

“I realized no one would help him,” she says.

So she took him in and became his advocate. Together, they began a quest to find out who he was. They’ve tried hypnosis; nothing. FBI fingerprinting: nothing. Missing-persons’ reports and military databases: nothing. Psychics: nothing. The Dr. Phil Show: nothing.

In February, someone suggested forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick.

Suddenly… something.

THE DNA DETECTIVE

Things usually do happen around Fitzpatrick.

It doesn’t hurt that she speaks five languages; is a puzzle-master who writes for Games magazine; or has a puppy-dog quality that makes people like The Great Throwdini – holder of 21 world records in knife throwing – pop in for coffee and knife-tossing lessons.

In high school, she was a nerd – the girl brainiac who won the science fair every year. The pressure of Duke University’s Nuclear Physics Lab, however, almost made her quit – until she had an epiphany that guides her to this day.

While working as a nuclear physicist at Rockwell in Seal Beach, she built an optics lab in her garage – for fun! And she used that to start her own business.

Later, as DNA testing became common, she turned her hobby of genealogy into a profession – writing three books. And becoming the DNA detective.

“She arguably is the best in the world at finding people,” says Andy Yeiser, 84, of Huntington Beach – biased because they’ve been companions for five years, but himself an intellect who worked on the Polaris submarine and Apollo space programs.

“B.K.,” the man with no history, was about to put her skills to the test.

LESSON LEARNED

She built databases and geographical grids of where B.K. might be from. She put stories in several newspapers where he might have grown up. She even got DNA tests from people he might be related to.

Still, no one claimed him, until July – when Fitzpatrick turned her gaze to Boulder, Colo.

B.K. remembered reading the trade magazine “Restaurants & Institutions” in a library there. He also recalled an unusual aspect about a Boulder restaurant called “Round the Corner” where diners ordered meals by telephones in each booth.

So Fitzpatrick told the story to the Boulder Daily Camera. Immediately, calls poured in.

I know who it is, said the first caller, and I have a picture.

It was a 1980s-era photo of a softball team, sponsored by a local restaurant – Round the Corner. Smiling, in back, was a popular Round the Corner manager named Ken who looked like a young B.K. Doe.

Before Fitzpatrick could hang up, her phone was beeping with another caller saying the same thing. And another.

“Oh my God,” she thought. “We have it!”

Except they didn’t. She tracked down the former owners of the now-closed restaurant, who tracked down Ken’s best friend.

Ken was still around. Not lost. Not B.K. Doe.

It was not their first false lead. Nor last. Just the closest – and the biggest reminder of the lesson she learned in college.

“I realized if I quit, I’d always be a quitter,” she says. “And I’m not a quitter.”

She turned her gaze to a new lead in Kansas.

And she remembered that, once, she’d helped crack the case of the Severed Arm in the Snow…

Next in the series: Solving the coldest of cold cases: the ‘Arm in the Snow’