Gone and forgotten: Australia's lost souls

Updated

For years, they lived in our communities, walked our streets and went about their lives. But in death, they are nameless. They are Australia's lost souls.

On a cold winter night in 2008 on the outskirts of Melbourne, peak-hour congestion is over.

In a near-empty train carriage, security cameras record a lone passenger embarking on what will be his final journey.

Dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized jumper, the man watches as the doors close and the train pulls away from the platform.

At first he seems calm. Briefly, he paces, burying his head in his hands.

With his back to the camera, he takes a seat.

At around 9:15pm, the train arrives at Pakenham station, 56 kilometres south-east of Melbourne's CBD.

The lonely figure disembarks.

Minutes later he is hit by a city-bound train. Emergency crews rush to the scene, but there is nothing they can do.

He has no identification on him, no tattoos, no identifying marks.

It is now up to police and forensic experts to figure out who he is.

Throughout Australia, there are hundreds of unidentified bodies stored in mortuaries and buried in cemeteries.

While DNA can help confirm who someone is, experts say solving the mystery usually relies on having someone missing them.

Working out the identity of 'the Pakenham man' — as authorities have named him — initially seemed relatively simple.

CCTV provided police with the information on where he was and what he was doing in the hour leading up to his death.

As officers searched missing persons notifications, the man's body was taken to the mortuary at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne.

There, a team led by forensic expert Dr Jodie Leditschke worked to determine each aspect of his final moments in a bid to uncover his identity.

"Most people are easy to identify," Dr Leditschke said.

"Most people have connections in the community, they have a driver's licence … they have friends, support people."

But it quickly became clear that this was not the case for the Pakenham man.

The man no-one missed

The forensic team took samples, ran tests and collected DNA in a futile effort to give the man a name.

As time went on, hundreds of other bodies came to the mortuary and were laid to rest by their loved ones, but he remained, entombed in a drawer kept cool at four degrees Celsius.

"I can't believe there is no-one out there looking for him, missing him, thinking 'where is he?'" Dr Leditschke said.

"Even when he was originally admitted here, and the months later when the police were adamant of circulating his photo, you always think someone's going to come up and say, 'I know this person'."

Dr Sloren Blau, a forensic anthropologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, works alongside Dr Leditschke and her team at the mortuary.

She has worked on countless cases to identify human remains but said there was one in particular that had stayed in her mind — the mystery skeleton she and her team referred to as 'the purple scarf man', found in scrubland in the Dandenong Ranges in 2006.

"In this case the young man was found associated with clothing, and one of those items of clothing was quite a distinct purple scarf, hence the name we have attributed to him," she said.

While she was able to provide police with his gender, height, ethnicity and an age bracket, authorities have never been able to match him with a missing persons profile.

Dr Blau said there was a common misconception that people were easy to identify, but she said that was only the case when forensic teams had information from relatives, including items that might have the person's DNA on them, such as dental records and medical history.

"Identification really rests on being able to have good information from a relative," Dr Blau said.

In the Pakenham man's case — where DNA was available — Dr Leditschke said it would only lead to identification if a family member came forward, or if someone who had access to his personal belongings, like a toothbrush or hairbrush, supplied them to authorities.

"What people don't realise is DNA is not always the answer," Dr Leditschke said.

"We don't have a database of DNA. Some people we just can't identify, and we just don't know who they are."

An unmarked grave

Armed with a composite sketch of the Pakenham man, police embarked on public appeals to identify him, including searches overseas.

New leads appeared and tests were done, but they came to nothing.

After four years, authorities had to make a decision: keep his body in refrigeration at the mortuary, or bury him in an unmarked grave.

It is a decision that is never easy for authorities to make, and remains are sometimes left to languish in cold storage for years.

But sometime between March 14 and April 4 in 2012, the Pakenham man was laid to rest at Melbourne's Springvale Botanical Cemetery.

His body — and the bodies of other lost souls — are buried in unmarked graves, with no location recorded for their final resting place.

Unlike other parts of the cemetery, there are no headstones.

Few flowers adorn their graves — there is simply a large rock placed nearby where people can pay their respects to the many unknown people who are buried there.

It's as if they never existed at all.

Widening the net

In 2016, a national database of missing persons was created.

The aim was to forge greater connections between states and territories, in the hope of solving the mystery surrounding hundreds of people whose remains are stored in mortuaries or have been buried.

There are now 2,962 entries in the National Missing Persons and Victim System (NMPVS), listing both missing persons and unidentified human remains, some of which could be as small as a bone fragment.

But the database is still not fully operational and there are calls for it to be improved to reunite more families with their loved ones, whether they be dead or alive.

The Australian Federal Police has previously said there were more than 500 unidentified human remains in mortuaries and laboratories across Australia.

However, updated figures on the current total were not provided by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, despite multiple requests from the ABC.

"The nature of the investigation of unidentified human remains and long-term missing persons has to have a national approach," Dr Blau said.

"For that reason, we have to have a system where we can very freely and openly communicate data about these cases across the system.

"The reality of that is there is still some work to be done in order to make that system work efficiently."

It has been 11 years since the Pakenham man died and Acting Sergeant Mick Van Der Heyden has taken over his case.

"Early on in the investigation, we had people nominated coming from Canada and from Colombo [Sri Lanka]," he said.

"A number of tests were conducted in relation to DNA and those persons were … eliminated."

Sergeant Van Der Heyden said he believed the man was likely homeless, partly because of what he was wearing when he died.

Police traced the jumper to its previous owner — a construction worker who had thrown it in a bin in the local area just weeks before the Pakenham man's death.

They are also looking at a new avenue of investigation.

It includes a list of 294 names of Indian men who have entered Australia and whose whereabouts are unknown.

"They've arrived in Australia before the time of death and have since been declared unlawful citizens and they match the age range we believe this male to be," Sergeant Van Der Heyden said.

"All it takes is just that one phone call, or that one person to see an image that triggers something in their mind, to say 'actually I know that guy'."

Topics: death, community-and-society, missing-person, law-crime-and-justice, crime, australia, melbourne-3000, vic, adelaide-5000, sa

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