Gary Craig

@gcraig1

For Deborah Halber, the intrigue started with "The Lady of the Dunes."

She saw her photo in 2010 in The Boston Globe, sensing a certain familiarity in the visage of the "woman with well-shaped eyebrows and a sensitive mouth."

"She had deep-set eyes and luxurious auburn hair swept back off her high forehead in a ponytail," Halber writes in her 2014 book, The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases.

There was also something unsettling about the photograph, something lacking, an unmistakable lifelessness to the image.

"Then I realized what I was looking at wasn't a photograph at all," Halber writes. "It was a digitally constructed approximation of what a murder victim looked like before her face decomposed."

The photograph "had an almost cartoonish quality," Halber, who lives in Boston, said in a telephone interview this week. "It was a digital reconstruction of a woman found brutally murdered in Provincetown (Massachusetts) in the 1970s and never identified. She was only known as 'The Lady of the Dunes.'"

That photograph and accompanying news story sparked Halber's interest, and questions about how many other unidentified remains had been found across the country. The answer: thousands. The discovery was disturbing, and the motivation for her book.

"I came to realize this wasn't an isolated case," she said.

Our fourth episode of the podcast Finding Tammy Jo goes online Sunday, and Halber is one of those interviewed. In her book she writes of the case of "Caledonia Jane Doe," the girl found fatally shot in the Livingston County cornfield in 1979 and not identified until last year. As Halber has written, "Cali Doe," as she became to be known in some circles, "was one of the apocryphal cases."

When a bunch of citizen sleuths found each other online, and created a network dedicated to finding missing people and identifying unidentified remains, the Caledonia girl was the first case they tackled.

"It was the very first case and over the years it just prompted endless speculation among the members, trying to make matches and trying to determine where she might have been from and what part of the country she may have traveled through," Halber said. "... There were probably thousands and thousands of posts related to Caledonia Jane Doe."

Halber's book tracks the work of many of these online investigators, an occasionally eccentric group of personalities who sometimes can become obsessed by what they see as their duty for the dead.

"There is an active and driven subculture," she said.

The federal National Missing and Unidentified Person System, or NamUs, was launched in 2007 and has helped give names to hundreds of unidentified bodies. The ultimate identification of Cali Doe, in fact, required a convergence of law enforcement, online detectives, and NamUs.

On Sunday evenings, my reporting partner, WXXI's Veronica Volk, and I host a Twitter chat about the latest episode of Finding Tammy Jo and the project in general. Deborah Halber has agreed to join us at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 22, so, if you have questions about her work, please join us. And we highly recommend her book.

You can find our Twitter chat at hashtag #tammyjo.

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We have a few more public events in the offing connected to the podcast. On June 1, we'll have an evening live Facebook chat at WXXI. And, on June 13, WXXI will be hosting an event at The Little Theatre where we will record an episode with audience questions and guests. More information on both events to come.

Also, thanks to all who attended the "Roc This Podcast" event at the Democrat and Chronicle on Monday.

(To subscribe to email notifications of the Law and Disorder blog, click here. Notifications also will be sent via my Twitter account @gcraig1 and posted on my Facebook page — facebook.com/GaryCraigPublicSafety).