The Denver Medical Examiner’s Office launched a $230,000 project a year ago to digitize death certificates, hard-copy autopsy reports and crime scene diagrams in preparation for its November move to a new building.

Along the way, the work by the six-member team also uncovered surprises, including bullets that had been dug out of bodies, hair samples from killers and gory murder-scene photographs.

The evidence — such as dental records or DNA on the bed sheet a woman was found on after her killer raped and stabbed her to death — could lead investigators to killers who have not been caught, said Dr. Jim Caruso, Denver’s coroner.

The evidence and information recovered also potentially have never been entered into Colorado Bureau of Investigation or national FBI databases, said Chief Investigator Donald Bell. Dental and fingerprint records will be added to state and federal databases.

“Who knows what all the possibilities are when we add all that to state and national crime databases,” Bell said.

The new system will be computer searchable and alphabetized by year. In many instances, the old paper records have been misfiled and for all intents and purposes lost for decades.

Caruso said digitizing the records will put valuable historical records online and make it easier for the public to search them. That could help medical researchers document morbidity issues specific to Denver’s population, he said.

The files tell stories of Denver’s past — of how people lived and how they died — including a period when street cars often collided into people crossing the road.

One of the important roles of the coroner’s office is preserving records that could document trends, not only the cause of natural deaths but the history of violent deaths including accidents and homicides, Castro said.

The work also has uncovered treasured possessions such as a letter from Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing that was one of the few keepsakes a Denver man possessed before he died of a heart attack July 3, 1950.

Pershing, commander of American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, wrote the letter April 26, 1919, commending the heroism of soldiers including the dead man, Sgt. Roy Stevens, who fought in Europe in World War I. But employees of the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office were unable to find Stevens’ family to return the letter. Instead, the prized heirloom has moldered inside an autopsy folder ever since.

Sixty-six years later a new effort is underway to find Stevens’ descendants so it can be returned.

At first it seemed it would be an easy undertaking.

The letter, which had been mailed from a field hospital in Germany, was addressed to his mother, Ida Stevens of Cokedale.

But finding Stevens’ family has proved elusive. Stevens never married and had no children. Since his birth March 1, 1895, his birthplace of Sopris in southeast Colorado became a ghost town after a mine closed in 1928.

And when Bell sought Roy Stevens’ military records at the Department of Veterans Affairs, he learned they had been destroyed.

Denver is moving its coroner’s office from 660 Bannock St. to a warehouse at 500 Quivas St. as part of a process to earn accreditation with the National Association of Medical Examiners, Castro said.

Since the coroner’s office moved from the basement of Denver Health Medical Center in 1995 to its current office, the staff has grown and some employees are crammed into small areas. The new facility will be 28,000 square feet, more than twice the size of the current building.