Our goal with The Lost & The Found was to streamline the process of matching missing persons with the unidentified dead and create a tool could lead to more cases being solved.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy announced that he plans to introduce “Billy’s Law,” a bill that would provide $2.4 million in funding each year through at least 2020 for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Previous attempts to pass the legislation failed three times in Congress.
In this episode of Reveal, we crisscross the nation tracing Jane and John Doe cases, showing why so many bodies remain unidentified despite new and powerful forensic tools.
We created a new Web tool – using information from the NamUs database – in order to make it easier to match missing and unidentified people . Senior data editor Jennifer LaFleur explains how it works.
For its investigation, Left for Dead, Reveal examined information collected from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, which contains more than 10,000 unidentified cases across the U.S.
In an upcoming investigation, reporter G.W. Schulz examines cases of the unidentified dead – many of which have languished for decades – and reveals how the disorganization, neglect and indifference of state and local authorities contribute to the problem.
