Not sure where to put this...it goes here for now.
Program searches for the missing
Agencies team up to match unidentified remains with missing persons reports.
By NICOLE MARSHALL World Staff Writer
Published: 10/30/2010 2:22 AM
Last Modified: 10/30/2010 5:53 AM
For Jackie and Louis Heim, a new statewide project to match unidentified human remains found in Oklahoma with missing persons reports provides a glimmer of hope that they may learn the fate of their daughter.
Karen Heim, then 42, was last seen in Tulsa on Dec. 26, 2005. Her car was found abandoned on a rural road in Texas the next day, but she has never been found.
On Friday, several state and area law enforcement agencies announced the "Search for the Missing" project. The statewide collaboration was kicked off by the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner's Office and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations.
One of the main goals of the project is to encourage families of the missing to have their DNA profiles entered into a national database to try to find a match with unidentified remains.
"We do think that this DNA program is probably the best option that we have now because we don't have any witnesses to the crime. We don't have any current leads," Louis Heim said.
"I do hope that some day we will get some type of closure."
In May 2009, the Tulsa World published a series of stories about the need for a uniform state- and nationwide system to match unidentified remains with missing people.
The stories explained how, for several years in Tulsa, detectives have worked to find the families of the long-term missing to collect their DNA and enter it in a national database through a collaboration with the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.
The center conducts forensic DNA analysis for human identification using funding from the National Institute of Justice.
About three years ago, OSBI Special Agent Ray Homer started a state Cold Case Association to assist the Medical Examiner's Office in identifying remains.
Then in January, the state Medical Examiner's Office created an Unidentified Remains Unit in an effort to identify people who have been found dead in Oklahoma.
Currently, there are about 200 separate cases of unidentified human remains in the state. Many of the remains, discovered in the last several decades, are skeletal and incomplete.
Through this new project, the agencies are teaming up to expand their efforts.
"If a family does not know where their loved one is, they go to bed at night with a pit in their stomach not knowing," said Cherokee Ballard, spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner's Office.
"They may know that bones or remains have been found in a certain location, and, every time that happens, families might think, 'Maybe that's my loved one.' "
Homer said that the main goals of the project are to identify remains for victims' families and to determine if the deaths resulted from foul play.
"The identity of any homicide victim is paramount in the subsequent solving of the case, and if we don't know who the person was who was killed, the case basically languishes," Homer said.
Homer said some human remains may not have been identified because family members don't know that their own DNA could be the missing link.
"Technology has jumped leaps and bounds above and beyond what was available in the mid-'90s. If someone's relative went missing in the mid-'90s, they may not have been approached by law enforcement to even donate their DNA," Homer said.
"This project is to identify those people that may have family members missing and may not even know that their DNA is needed."
Tulsa Police Detective Margaret Loveall said that detectives have learned over the last few years how important it is to get DNA from family members in missing persons cases.
"It is extremely important to find these family members and get numerous samples from direct members of the family so that in that database out in cyberspace those DNA codes will match with unidentified remains that the Medical Examiner's Office has uploaded," Loveall said.
She said that there have been several matches in the database on Tulsa cases, including the recent identification of Patty Peterson, who went missing from an east Tulsa truck stop in 2006. A hiker found Peterson's skeleton near a rest stop along Interstate 40 in Lupton, Ariz., in April 2009.
This summer, authorities confirmed that DNA from the remains matched samples from Peterson's family.
B.J. Spamer from the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification commended the agencies for launching the project.
"This Oklahoma project will bring resolution to families of missing persons across the state, but not just across the state of Oklahoma. This will resolve cases nationwide," Spamer said.
On any given day, as many as 100,000 missing-person cases are active in the United States, National Institute of Justice statistics show.
More than 40,000 sets of human remains that cannot be identified through conventional means are held in medical examiners' evidence rooms across the country.
For relatives
Any family member of an Oklahoma missing person, regardless of the location or length of time that the family member has been missing, may contact the OSBI at (800) 522-8017 to inquire about DNA testing.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20101030_11_A15_CUTLIN976658 Read a Tulsa World series about missing persons investigations and view a video about one family’s struggle with a missing persons case.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/webextra/content/2009/missing_persons/default.aspxhttp://tulsaworld.com/missingpersons
