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Resolving cold cases important to Clark County coroner
Updated  November 29, 2013 - 6:31am


By ROCHEL LEAH GOLDBLATT
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

 

It started with a young, pretty girl.
 
She was found face down and nude in the middle of Arroyo Grande Boulevard in 1980. Her cause of death was multiple stab wounds in her back and blunt force trauma to her head.
 
She should have been easy to recognize. But no one identified her.
 
The Clark County coroner’s office took X-rays, finger­prints and dental samples but couldn’t find a match in any existing databases.
 ::snipping3::
In November 2003, the 14- to 20-year-old girl remained unidentified. The Clark County Coroner’s Office had exhausted all techniques available at the time.
 
Except one: the Internet.
 
“Some people came up with the idea of putting dead people’s photos on the World Wide Web,” Murphy said. “I said, ‘We’ve done everything else. Why not this?’ ”
 
The initial reaction was not positive.
 
“I was convinced I had made a big blunder, and I thought I would lose my job,” he said.
 
But then reports from family members started coming in, and people started identifying their loved ones.
 
“Within 24 hours, we had identified our first decedent,” Murphy said. “The response that we got was amazing. That started to kind of give us a boost. Within 72 hours, we had identified another one. A week later, another, and we were off the ground running.”
 
In the 10 years since the November 2003 inception of the online program, the coroner’s office cold case unit has identified 67 people. About 200 open cases remain.
 ::snipping3:: ::snipping3::
A federal grant in 2009 allowed the coroner’s office to exhume 54 bodies from the county cemetery for identification.
 
The exhumations began in 2010 and lasted 18 months while the coroner’s office retrieved DNA samples and other data, such as fingerprints if available, from the bodies.
 
The first exhumed body, a man, was identified in October.
 
But an unidentified woman exhumed during a different project looms over the office.
 
A 3-D printout of her head sits on a desk in the forensics office. She is missing a tooth. She watches the coroner and his staff work every day.
 
No one knows who she is.
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