They were daughters,
mothers,
sisters,
strangers.
Their lives ended violently,
and their names were lost to time.
For more than a half century,
Detroit's
forgotten dead lay buried beneath weeds in silence.
Unidentified
murder victims dumped into paupers' graves,
sometimes stacked in vaults three deep,
known only by numbers in crumbling cemetery logs.
No names,
no justice,
no answers.
This is the story of a remarkable five
year journey of a team of relentless female
investigators
who pledged to identify more than 200 victims
of Detroit's outstanding
murder cases.
Led by Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones and
FBI Special Agent Leslie Larson,
this group of dedicated women,
detectives,
agents,
forensic
anthropologists,
and scientists,
literally dug through the past to bring closure
to families
and justice to the murdered.
Their quest became known as Operation
United,
the largest coordinated
exhumation of cold case murder victims in FBI
history.
Katharine Schweid tells the story of this unprecedented
five year mission
in her book, Women Who Talk to the
Dead.
Schweid is a former FBI Special Agent Executive,
Chicago prosecutor and journalist.
She wrote the FBI's seminal report on mass
shooters and is a recognized expert in crisis
response and workplace violence.
Here's my interview with Katherine
Schwhite. Katherine,
start with this
pauper's cemeteries
in Detroit. What happened? How do 150
bodies
kind of anonymously
end up in it? If you'll give me
the background of what takes place, how does
this happen?
So let me give you just a little
bit of the backstory. The
the deal is Detroit
is like every other town. Through the years,
people get murdered,
and,
whether you know who it the name of
the person who's murdered or you don't, you
still have to put that body into the
ground,
because you can't leave bodies in the MA's
office or the coroner's office for a long
time, medical examiner's office.
So people, it's part of the process. Right?
You scoop up a body someplace and you
I hate to sound so callous about it,
but,
you know, you you pick up a body,
you take them to the medical examiner's office.
The medical examiner says this person died. This
is what fills out a form. This is
what this person died. Uses little, you know,
the the little, operation sheet, you know, that
shows a person laying on the table, makes
x marks where the bullet holes went in
the body, things like that. And then the
body goes out, and it's buried in the
cemetery. And that's what we've done for centuries
across,
you know, not just in Detroit, but across
the world. And here in Detroit,
there are probably
300 cases
of unidentified
murder victims that had been buried
in Detroit since 1959
in in Wayne County,
in the Wayne County area, which is what
Detroit is part of.
And there is a and this whole story
begins because there's a police detective, Shannon Jones,
who gets assigned to the missing persons cases.
And Shannon realizes
that sometimes she's looking for a missing person,
and the way that she's able to find
them is to go back and find them
in the murder victim's cold case murder files.
She begins to see this crossover,
but most of the cold case murders
are unidentified
victims, so she can't match a missing person
to it unless she has DNA.
About 200 of the 300, she has DNA
on. She begins to see connections between missing
people
and between murdered victims,
but she doesn't have the DNA
for all of these other people. So she
starts pulling files, and she goes
to Leslie Larson at the FBI, who is
an expert digger,
who's a who's an who's a forensic specialist.
She runs their their forensic team at Detroit,
and she says, hey, Leslie. Let's just dig
these 200 some bodies up and get DNA
from every one of them.
So she knew
there were all these pauper's graves out there
to be explored.
What was the the challenge of trying to
get the bureaucrats to approve all of this?
That might have to be, you know, you're
spending money.
Yeah. No kidding. And so I think part
of it is,
I would say if I had to put
one word
to,
this is, you know,
if I had to put one word to,
this is Shannon at the Shannon in the
top corner of the book,
it would be, Leslie Larson has the blonde
hair and Shannon has the dark hair.
Tenacity. Shannon is the most tenacious.
She's the most tenacious person ever. And she
her she does doesn't believe in the word
no.
So
she comes up with this idea, and first,
she has to convince
Leslie it's a good idea.
And Leslie is like, what? You wanna dig
up 200 people? We can't. How do we
dig up 200 people? The FBI's never dug
up 200 people before.
And so it is, as you say, it
is kind of this logistical
crazy nightmare
of, well, they decide to do it, but
then how do you execute that? And that's
really why I want to write the book
because I think it's it's the story that
we never hear. We hear about DNA. We
hear about somebody digging up, and DNA identifies
a murder victim, and then some murderers
murder is solved.
200 cases. 220
cases. It turns out they 220
bodies they actually dug up, but I capped
my book at when we got to a
certain point.
So they did have a lot of, a
lot of roadblocks. I mean, a lot of
roadblocks. That's part of what I I talk
about in the book. So Leslie
believes these victims are speaking to her? Yeah.
Leslie
and Shannon
work on cases like this a lot in
their own capacity, in their own jobs. And,
you know, when I first started this effort,
they decided to do this digging.
It took five years to dig up these
200 some bodies.
And I said, you know, well, what how
do you know?
When you're digging up a casket, right, you
know there's a body in the casket.
And Leslie said, well, look, you know, I
go out on the scene all the time.
Somebody will call us, somebody will call Shannon,
and say,
the guy that I, I got a guy
in my office, and, he told me that,
he's confessed that he killed his kid, and
the kid is buried here. Can you come
out and dig the body up and come
out and see if the kid's buried there?
Leslie says to me,
you know, early on, she's like, you know,
Shannon and I, when we go out to
a scene, we can just tell. We can
feel whether or not there's a body underground.
We might still have to dig and look,
but when we get there,
we know. I go, how how is that
possible?
She said, I don't know. It just it
just is. We we can feel it, and
and we know when we walk out there
that there's somebody underground because I think we
can hear them. They're they're asking us to
speak for them.
And she was very sincere, you know, in
in saying that.
And she's not new at this game.
She's been giving up bodies for a long
time.
Describe this
kind of makeshift graveyard, because it's not like
a cemetery with
memorials
and headstones.
Is it mass faults and just a
stake marking
places? No, I mean, to be clear, these
are bodies that were buried
over a seventy year period. Right. Every time,
you know,
the coroner's office or the medical examiner's office
would have, you know, five or six or
seven bodies, they drive them out to the
county cemetery
and there's places where,
you know, when you bury a loved one,
you go to the cemetery, and you pick
out, you know, a sunny spot at the
top of a hill, underneath a beautiful tree,
where you can put a bench, and so
you can go out and sit there and
reminisce and talk to your loved one.
Those, these are not the burial plots that
are for, at the top of a beautiful
hill, you know, underneath the sun each,
with the tree and everything.
These are burial areas in the cemeteries
that nobody's buying a plot in because
they're
down in a ditch.
They're above,
they're running along the cattle fence
that's tacked in to separate it and keep
the, you know, deer from running across from
the highway onto the cemetery.
And so,
it's not the desirable places
and when you go and stand there you
think to yourself, how can there people, how
can people even be buried under here? And
in some cases,
you know, as we talked about it,
it's not just,
you know, someone buried in a box under
the ground, which is what we see on
television and we think about in the movies.
But in reality,
these people are buried sometimes
four caskets deep,
sometimes
four bags deep.
And, sometimes the water level in Michigan
is all the way up
to the top of the ground. Mhmm. Which
means the water,
the bags or the boxes are sitting in
water
all the time.
I think that's one of the things too
that I wanted to bring in on the
book. I don't wanna be so gross, but
I want people to understand
the challenges involved
with digging up bodies that are buried in
places that no one ever thinks
are ever gonna be
exhumed
and, and no one would ever want to
go there to dig up a body.
Well, they called it Operation United and that
that first
exhumation they called Dig Day.
What was that first
day
of exhumations
like?
Well, a little bit of spoiler alert here,
just, not too much. But, you know, the
first dig, it did not go the way
they wanted it to. You know, as you
mentioned, there was a lot of questions about,
you know, how do you overcome this challenge?
And they they brought a lot of resources
to the table. They asked for volunteers to,
you know, bring food to the people who
were digging, and
the FBI flew in a lot of experts
to do the digging.
And,
the Detroit police, of course, provided a lot
of experts.
And
they got there, and they set everything up,
and the plan is to dig all week,
and they're there in the month of May.
And there are
ponds
of water over the spaces that they are
thinking they're gonna dig up.
Now they have excavators they've borrowed
and
pumps to pump water out of out of,
we know that when you dig underground, experienced
people who who know when you dig underground,
you may have to dig water out. Water
the state of Michigan is surrounded
by lakes, the Great Lakes. Right. So the
water table is very,
high in Michigan. You can dig a well
in Michigan,
and get fresh water at probably 25 feet
in a lot of places,
which is really a shallow well. So they
get out there, and
they are trying to dig, and they are
putting
pumps lines in the in the in the
holes, and they can't keep up with the
water that is coming back in.
And then the
cemetery
records
don't really seem to match.
And they were looking for, I believe they
were looking for 18
bodies,
and and they had been there for a
whole week,
and they had found one.
So that's how they started.
And I think at that point,
as you can imagine,
the supervisors are saying, what are we wasting
all our time doing?
And you need the bones to extract DNA
from.
And at some point,
there's a bone tint,
and what an archaeologist
plays a crucial role, because the bones can
really tell you a lot about how the
person perished. The reason that you would exhume
a body
is if you want to positively identify somebody
forever, right, you you right now, what we
know is that you need DNA.
And DNA has been more commonly
used for identification since kind of the eighties
and nineties. Right?
And but it's expensive to get DNA because
imagine digging up a body. So
the value, though, is that if you can
pull,
a body up, if you can find somebody's
bones,
the there are some bones that have
very limited ability to pull DNA out of.
Even though the what you need for DNA
is
less way less than a the grain of
salt.
You just need the tiniest thing for DNA.
But in order to get a good quality
of DNA,
you,
you're not gonna pull up finger bones. You
know, a phalanges not gonna help you out
so much. Right?
You need certain bones like an ankle bone,
or maybe a thigh bone, something that's,
in your clavicle,
maybe.
So there are certain bones that are better
that even over time, they won't have degraded
and you'll be able to get DNA out
of. And so that's where they bring in
forensic anthropologists.
And there are,
and that's what I tried to I wanted
to weave into the story is the idea
of how and what you do with DNA,
where you get it, and who can help
us find it. Because land Leslie and Shannon
can't pick up the bones and say for
sure these bones have DNA in them. The
forensic anthropologists can't. So they tap forensic anthropologists
who work in the the finest places in
the country,
at the Frost Center up in Northern Michigan
and at the Body Farm in Tennessee, which
has also has a real name. But those
places have forensic anthropologists
who,
imagine the Frost Center and the Body Farm.
What those places are are places where people
like Leslie Larson
train
to dig bodies out of the ground and
safely get bodies and other evidence out of
the ground. And that's what The Body Farm
is in Tennessee, where Leslie now actually does
some training too, provides the training because she's
such a world expert.
And the Frost Center, the only place in
North America where you can try to dig
up a frozen body.
Well, the forensic
anthropologist, I guess, plays a key role in
the chapter it was titled, He Was Filleted
Open,
which is just a disturbing, brutal, but
describe what they found with this this murder
victim.
For I think this really speaks to who
Leslie is.
Leslie Larson
started out as a farm kid in Wisconsin,
and she is as nice as a farm
kid in Wisconsin would be. And she always
was fascinated by archaeologists,
and she thought she would become an archaeologist
in working in Egypt,
possibly or someplace else.
But she really,
also was fascinated by serial murders and
the people who solve serial murder cases.
And she had an opportunity,
while she was in college to work and
intern at the f internship at the FBI
in our behavioral unit, the profiling unit, if
you can imagine how cool that was.
And that really cooked her, like, she had
to do this. She had to come to
the FBI to work, she decided.
In the very first
you know, when she first started working at
the FBI,
the idea of working on the forensics teams,
a lot of people come to me and
ask. I'm sure you hear it too in
your business. People will say, well, I wanna
be a crime scene,
you know, evidence collector.
Most of those jobs and and all of
those jobs in the FBI, they're what we
call ancillary jobs. You don't do that. You
might be a, you might work bank robberies
and you're on the evidence collection team, right,
on the ERT.
You might work national security and you're on
the ERT.
So Leslie, who now runs the Detroit ERT,
evidence recovery team, who is response team, who
is, which is like a 40 member team,
third busiest team in in The United States.
Leslie is back if you day take it
back to when she was a kid,
she didn't even know these teams existed.
She just
knew that it would be really cool
to dig people up and that she really
loved working mass murders, and she put those
together. So she goes to the FBI office
and her first job is just very minor,
but she volunteers to work on the team
and ends up her very first time she
goes out,
she's with her team leader, Ken, and he
says,
look down there, and she sees a body
that's filleted open.
And another one of her team members is,
like, throwing up on the side.
And, he turns to her, and he says,
like, that doesn't bother you. And she's like,
no. It's cool. She said it was the
first body she'd ever seen.
And so he said, well well, since you
think it's cool, go down the steps and
get it. And so she did. Now this
was a local murder case, in Milwaukee at
the time. It was, you know, it wasn't
the FBI's case, but I think it that
really solidified that she, first of all,
has a stronger stomach than I do. And,
and she didn't and that she found that
how people are killed
and why they're killed fascinating, and that's really
what led her to where she is today.
She just can't do dig up somebody. She
wants to know how and why they died
and and who did it.
Both of the,
investigators
received great satisfaction in it from
identifying
remains and then being able to tell their
family what happened. And there's the case of
a teenage girl who had disappeared
after school.
Body was later found in an abandoned building,
but
forensic genealogy and all didn't exist.
What happens
in that case?
Yeah. A lot of those cases,
are out there. And Shannon and you're absolutely
right. Shannon Jones is
is changing lives today.
You know, I watched as they spent five
years digging up more than 200 bodies.
All of those cases have to the DNA
the bones have to go to a lab,
and then the lab has to get good
DNA, and then the DNA has to be
identified and matched to somebody. And, otherwise, you
don't have an identification.
You know, if you have a missing brother
or a sister,
somebody needs to have your DNA
or a diff or a missing cousin or
an uncle. Somebody has to have your DNA
in order to be able to identify that
missing person. There's also some other techniques. Genetic
genealogy is a is a technique that I
describe in the book. I won't go into
here. But these incredible ways that we can
identify people, and the
idea that somebody is missing,
how do you find them,
is is so
it's such a challenge, and they're and they
they're for so long, there wasn't this additional
step that allowed them to match these people
together.
So, you know, somebody disappeared forty years ago.
Now through genetic genealogy, through the work that
the kind of work that Shannon and Leslie
are doing, they can do that, and then
they can make they can positively identify somebody
who's buried in the ground. And then what
we're seeing now and hearing now, I'll talk
to Shannon
or Leslie, and they'll say, I knocked on
a door.
I asked this woman, where is your father?
She says, oh, he's ill. He's inside.
Where's your your biological
father? Oh, he left my mom when my
mom was pregnant.
And and Shannon Leslie have to say,
well, he didn't actually leave her.
He went down to Detroit, and he was
murdered.
And so here's a woman who is an
adult taking care of her her ill father
that that raised her.
And
and they are changing lives because this woman,
for instance, her father was
one of
the only
unidentified person who was buried buried unidentified
of 11 people killed by a serial murder
in Detroit at that time. Guy was convicted,
went to jail,
but one person was never identified. It turns
out it was this woman's father,
and she had spent her whole childhood wondering
about who her father was, where he was,
why he left, what was he like, would
he come home.
And now, you know, as a 30 year
old adult,
she knows the answers, and she knows where
he's buried.
That's changing lives.
And you talk in the book about a
box castle,
which was a temporary warehouse
where
hundreds of unidentified
remains were stored.
Is this this is an addition to what
you're finding in the
these these graves, unidentified graves at a cemetery?
Yeah. They were actually just the files and
the pic the photographs
and the other evidence that that that Shannon
needs to solve these cases.
So she would maybe they could get bones
out of a box, but the bones are
just unidentified. But the bones are, if they
can find the right body,
tie back to a file
that nobody's looked at that was a paper
file
that, you know, that nobody had looked at
in fifty or sixty or seventy years that
maybe had one sheet of paper or 10
sheets of paper. But information includes that now
Shannon said,
you know, Shannon and Leslie say,
you know, we have to close this case.
We have to solve this murder,
or we have to know that we can't
solve it. It's unsolvable.
What's in the file that maybe law enforcement
didn't look at seriously enough?
What kind of clothes were on the person?
What kind of, as we call it, you
know, in the business, pocket litter was taken
off of them? What kind of stuff was
in their pockets that might have that did
somebody follow through and find out if there
was pocket litter from somebody's,
jacket that they were, you know, wearing and
they were buried with their clothes?
You know, people, are buried with their possessions
in those circumstances.
Is there something that
that was mentioned in the file
and then or or was in a file,
a photograph that nobody followed up on? And
then maybe the photograph was a an a
picture at a park,
that you can identify where the park is
or a neighborhood with a sign in it
or an address behind the house.
When somebody went missing, they came and brought
a picture,
to the police and said, my brother's missing,
but now there's no more information.
All that stuff is disintegrated.
So I think that the challenge that they
had, and I think that's I guess the
reason I said a box castle is that
Shannon found herself,
most comfortable with surrounding herself with those files,
those faces, those pictures, even if they were
pictures
taken from the medical examiner's office in very
a very what others might say is disgusting
to look at pictures or scary pictures.
But for her, it's a reality, the idea
that these are people's brothers and sisters,
you know, family members. To date, how many
of the remains have been identified?
There I haven't talked to the, ladies this
week, but I think, we're about at thirty
five,
of the two hundred and some, which is
a really high percentage rate. These are people
whose entire lives,
their family members and and distant family members
have changed forever because they've been able to
go and say, this is who this person
was. Have they solved any
the cause of their deaths in any of
these 35 cases of who murdered them? A
lot of them are pending. Right? They're pending
where they haven't released that information.
I think they have, many cases where they
have a pretty good idea of who it
is.
But it's actually, if you think about it,
you know, it's kind of early on in
terms of an investigative stand standpoint.
And some people,
you know, I think it's I think it's
also
helpful, you know, especially in the in the
true crime business.
You know, we all want a simple answer
to,
you know,
Sally was murdered and this guy murdered her,
and now he's going to jail.
You know, and I think as an FBI
agent, you know, I spent, twenty years in
the FBI. I spent many years, as a
prosecutor in Chicago.
We want that, but we also know in
the business you worked in the business long
time to know
true crime is never that is that never
that straightforward. Right? No. It takes time. And
sometimes,
say you have a brother and he kills
his brother,
and that was thirty years ago.
Does the family want that brother convicted? Probably
not. Right? So I think that it's more
complicated, it's more messy.
In in addition to that, some of these
cases are,
children. Many of these cases are children. Babies.
Right? Babies who are left, who are abandoned,
left to freeze to death.
Even if we identify the baby
and we can get to possibly the person
who might be,
responsible,
that might be a person who no one's
gonna testify against because that person has a
new life now, and they don't wanna
tell. Nobody wants to ruin the lives that's
existing now.
In some cases, they're finding that,
the person who they think committed the murder
has is deceased.
Yes.
So I think it still allows for closing
cases,
and it still allows for connecting family members.
But boy, it's not, 200 bodies bought dug
up, 200 cold case murders solved, because life
isn't that way.
Well, at some point, does there the investigation
moves into a forest,
finding finding bodies in a forest?
The people in,
in Pennsylvania, law enforcement who came back after
them in Pennsylvania
asked,
hey. We've got bodies. They're buried here. We
think we have a five or six.
Leslie, can you and your team come in
and do that? And so they do just
the same thing there. And so now they're
beginning to hear from other police departments
to say, hey.
We think we have this. Could you help
us to figure out how to do this?
So it's pretty fascinating. And also changes in,
a term, that, you know, is it was
new to me at the time, genetic genealogy,
where they don't even have the DNA.
They have the DNA of a person they
can't identify,
but they have other people
that they can match until they find it's
like a math equation. They have the DNA.
They don't know who the person is, but
they can tear the DNA apart
in terms of the qualities of it until
they can go back to find somebody
on, who who is related to these people.
And then when they do that, they're able
to actually piece together
and identify a person even though they don't
have a direct match to that DNA. It's
crazy stuff they're doing. Yeah. They can find
somebody on the family tree
Right. Through like a
23andMe,
although I don't know if they allow.
Some of the DNA registers
like that
permit law enforcement to examine, others don't. So
Right. Right. Yeah. And I yeah. And I
think that's part of it. It's kind of
funny. I know that, as you can imagine,
they need search warrants to do things.
Sometimes they'll knock on a door and say
somebody will say, my
family member is missing, and and Shannon will
say because she's works the missing person cases.
And she'll say, well, can you give us
a DNA swab so we can see if
there's any matches that we can find out
there? And they'll say, oh, yeah. No. We
I don't I don't wanna give you any
d n a DNA cheek swab.
And that then then they'll tell her in
the same sentence
that they've already done that at ancestry.com.
You know? She's like, you'll give millions of
people in ancestry.com
your DNA, but you won't give it to
the law enforcement department that's trying to find
your missing loved one. Right. So
a little bit of little bit of thinking
it through out there. But I think that
the you know, overall, the thing that's fascinating
to me about and the reason I decided
to write, you know, women
who talk to the dead, this book, is
because,
you know,
the idea that
the idea that there are so many people
who,
who are unidentified
and buried is just the nature of things
that we've done things for years that way.
And and and even when Shannon started, you
know, she she said, why aren't we taking
DNA before we put anybody into the ground?
Well, we couldn't do that years ago. Right?
But we can do it now. But who
else is doing it now? And do people
know
that if they have a loved one who's
missing, who maybe was went missing fifty years
ago, they might be able to find that
person
if they're willing to do the kind of
genetic genealogy efforts
that they're doing in Detroit today. It sounds
to me like we need a
DNA registry
for missing persons.
You know
what? There is one.
The DOJ
justice department set one up
not too many years ago,
and and just for that reason. Because
there were so many people who didn't know
and didn't know what to do with theirs.
And there are independent organizations,
but,
but they would come to law enforcement and
say, well, put my put my DNA in
your registry, and the FBI's DNA database is
for criminals.
Right. So the justice department said, alright. We're
gonna set one up from a civil standpoint,
called it's called NamUs. You can set it
up from a civil standpoint,
and it's it's how to find people who
are missing.
How and and, actually, if you are missing
somebody if you were missing your brother,
you could go into NamUs yourself, put information
in there, and search for it yourself.
Mhmm. It's not a FBI controlled or DOJ
Department of Justice controlled database. It's a database
that's designed,
paid for by the government, set up to
the benefit of everybody who's out there who
would do anything they could possibly do
to find their love missing loved ones. And
I think that's
the attitude that Shannon and Leslie have is
we will do anything to help people find
their missing loved ones if they're looking for
them because it's
unexplainable
how much agony these people suffer for years,
not knowing when when somebody just disappears. Right.
I do think and I let me just
say this one other thing. You know, I
call this book Women Who Talk to the
Dead.
And
I had a guy say to me once,
why why why do you point out that
it's women who are doing this investigative work?
Why what's
the
big
deal about putting out women? Why do you
have to bring gender into it?
And
and I I said,
you know, at first, I was kind of
like, oh, well, maybe I'm being, you know,
non PC or something.
But in fact, you know, it it is
a gender issue here. The people who did
this work,
who who spearheaded this, who led the whole
effort for who is who are continuing to
lead it today, a female FBI agent, a
female detective in master sergeant
now in Detroit,
female,
anthropologists,
five female forensic anthropologists, female prosecutors,
female
Michigan State Police
Inspector who's in charge of missing in Michigan.
Every time I called somebody, they'd say, you
should call so and so. You should call
so and so. So whatever the circumstances are,
maybe it's because women don't,
you know, they they they maybe are more
nurturing
nurturers,
and they don't wanna give up.
Maybe they see their loved ones as missing.
But whatever the circumstances are,
it it's factual
that 70 of police files
were ignored,
you know, for a long time, 300
cold case murders that nobody did anything about
until Shannon said, I'm gonna solve these cases.
And it's an incredible story of how
of the hurdles that she had to overcome
to do that and and the successes that
they've had because of it.
Your book concludes with Finding
Anita.
Oh, don't give don't no spoiler alerts though.
Yeah. But go ahead.
So
without spoiling it,
kind of give me the the headline on
the story.
You know, I I wanted to make sure
that the readers knew some of the some
of the victims,
some of the people who disappeared were found
and reconnected with family members.
So,
Anita is one of those individuals.
And
And, and I thought that was a really
important
story
to tell because I was there, you know,
through that time,
a little bit about
her background and the people who were looking
for her from the beginning.
The,
you know, I've talked to,
families
of cold case victims. I mean, they have
a body and everything, but it's the case
is cold. I mean, in Fort Worth
alone, there are a thousand cold cases, nationally
300,000.
It's still like a Right.
It's a silent scandal.
I think that's true.
And and I think that we mix them
together because
imagine, you know, what we dealt with, during
COVID.
Imagine how many people were buried
after COVID,
during the time of COVID. And many of
those were people who are picked up off
the street. And, you know, who's looking for
those people? And I think that's part of
what this story speaks to is Mhmm. There
are a lot of people who die, some
by natural causes, some by nefarious purposes. Who's
looking for them? And and what are we
what are we doing about that? But like
you said, it's kind of a silent
it's a silent story because those people are
scooped up, you know, whether they're murdered or
or you know, in the case of these
cases in Detroit and so many other cities,
they're scooped up, they're they're the medical examiner
says, oh, this person was shot to death,
this person was killed, this person was stabbed
to death, this person was burned to death,
this person was drowned on purpose. And then
they're they're put into a they're put into
a box, they're a bag in the ground,
and and they're never heard from again, and
nobody ever thinks about it again. But the
numbers continue to grow and continue to grow
across the country.
And, you know, as I tell this story,
I was out not too long ago talking
to, people about this new book, and,
and it's so
fascinating how many people say to me I
mean, this this is fascinating.
How many people say to me, yeah, you
know, I have an uncle who, you know,
we just kinda lost track of him because
he was a little bit of a drifter,
and then,
you know, he used to write to my
my dad, but then, you know, after a
while, he wasn't writing anymore, and my dad
didn't really know how to get ahold of
him, and then he just disappeared.
There are so many people who have said
that to me.
And it's like, well, okay, your uncle,
what happened to him? I mean, if he
was still alive,
he would have probably been at least dropping
his brother a note if he was on
friendly terms with him all that time.
So maybe something bad did happen to him,
and he's buried in a pauper's grave somewhere.
I mean, that's the thing. Right? You you
like you were saying I I mean, I
urge people to think, who is missing from
your family?
Because you may be able to
heal that part of your broken family tree
if you do a little bit of digging,
if you do a do a little bit
of the things that, you know, I talk
about in the book.
Because there are people all over the country
who are buried in pauper's graves, and nobody
knows it. Because they dis right. They they're
underground. Who would look? Who would know?
The women of Operation United didn't set out
to make history.
They set out to give names back to
the nameless,
to speak for the murdered when no one
else would.
In muddy cemeteries and cluttered evidence rooms, they
rewrote the narrative for more than 200
forgotten victims,
and they're not done. Their work reminds us
that behind every cold case is a family
waiting,
a truth buried, a name lost.
If you or someone you know is searching
for a missing loved one, there's a tool
that can help.
The National Missing and Unidentified
Persons System, or NamUs,
is a centralized nationwide resource
that bridges the gap between the missing and
the unidentified.
At any moment, more than 100,000
people
are reported missing across The United States.
Medical examiners, corridors, and investigators are working to
identify over
11,000
sets of human remains
right now.
NamUs connects those dots.
It offers families, law enforcement, and forensic experts
a way to match missing persons with the
unidentified.
And it provides critical forensic services at no
cost.
To learn more or submit a case, I
have included a link to the NamUs website
in the show notes.
Because
justice begins with a name,
and closure begins with knowing.
This is Robert Riggs reporting for the True
Crime Reporter podcast.