Robert Riggs
They were daughters. Mothers. Sisters. Strangers. Their lives ended violentlyāand their names were lost to time.
For more than half a century, Detroitās forgotten dead lay buried beneath weeds and silenceāunidentified 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 remarkable five-year journey of a team of relentless female
investigators who pledged to identify more than 200 victims of Detroitās
outstanding murder cases.
Led by Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones and FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen, this group of dedicated womenādetectives, agents, forensic anthropologists, and scientistsāliterally 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.
Robert Riggs
Katherine Schweit tells the story of this unprecedented, five-year mission in her book, Women Who Talk to the Dead.
Schweit is a former FBI Special Agent Executive, Chicago prosecutor, and journalist.
She wrote the FBIās seminal report on mass shooters and is a recognized expert in crisis response and workplace violence.
Hereās my interview with Katherine Schweit.
Robert Riggs
Katherine, start with this, paupers 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?
Katherine Schweit
So let me give you just a little bit of the backstory. The deal is, it, Detroit is like every other town through the years, people get murdered, and whether you know who would 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 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 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 cemetery. And that's what we've done for centuries across, you know, not just in Detroit, but across the world, in here in Detroit, since, uh, there were probably 300 cases of unidentified murder victims that had been buried in Detroit since 1959 in Wayne County. In the Wayne County area, which is what Detroit is part of. And there is a in 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 victims 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 Larsen 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.
Robert Riggs
And so she knew there were all these paupers graves out there to be explored. What was the challenge of trying to get the bureaucrats to approve all of this that had to be, you know, you're spending money. Yeah,
Katherine Schweit
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 Larsen has the blonde hair and Shannon has the dark hair. Tenacity, Shannon is the most tenacity. Ancient. 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 want to dig up 200 people. We can. How do we dig up 200 people. The FBI has 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 kept 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 talked about in the book.
Robert Riggs
So Leslie believes these victims are speaking to her.
Katherine Schweit
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, and they it turned out it took five years to dig up these 200 some bodies. And I said, you know? Well, what you know? How do you know when you're digging up a casket, right? You know, there's a body in the casket and 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, you know, I 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 kids 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, how is that possible? She said, I don't know it just it, just is we we can feel it. And we know when we walk out there that there's somebody underground, because I think we can hear them. They're asking us to speak for them. And she was very sincere, you know, in saying that. And she's not new at this game, she's been picking up bodies for a long time.
Robert Riggs
Describe this kind of makeshift graveyard, because it's not like a cemetery with memorials and headstones. It's is it mass vaults and just a stake marking place? No,
Katherine Schweit
no, no, this isn't No. I mean, to be clear, this is these are bodies that were buried over a 70 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 spun it 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 they're down in a ditch. They're above they're 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're thinking 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, that 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, which means the water, the bags or the boxes, are sitting in water all the time. It's a really I think that's one of the things too, that I wanted to bring in on the book. I don't want to 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 going to be exhumed, and no one would ever want to go there to dig up a body.
Robert Riggs
Well, they called it operation united, and that that first exhumation they called dig day. What was that first day of exhumations like?
Katherine Schweit
Yeah, 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, as you mentioned, there's 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 going to 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, and 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. I think it's a shallow well. And 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. They're 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?
Robert Riggs
And you need the bones to extract DNA from. And at some point, there's a bone tent. And what an archeologist plays a crucial role, because the bones can really tell you a lot about how the person perished.
Katherine Schweit
So in order to Yeah, the reason that you would exhume a body is if you want to positively identify somebody forever, right? You right. Now, what we know is that you need DNA, and DNA has been more commonly used for identification since kind of the 80s and 90s, 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, there are some bones that have very limited ability to pull DNA out of even though that what you need for DNA is less, way less than us the grain of salt, you just need a tiniest thing for DNA. But in order to get a good quality of DNA, you you're not going to pull up finger bones. You know, if alanji is not going to 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 Leslie and Shannon can't pick up the bones and say for sure, these bones have DNA in them. The. Forensic anthropologists can so they tap forensic anthropologists who work in 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 Larsen 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.
Robert Riggs
Well, the the forensic anthropologist, I guess, plays a key role in the chapter it was titled, he was fileted open, which is just a disturbing, brutal but describe what they found with this, this murder victim
Katherine Schweit
for I think this really speaks to who Leslie is. Leslie Larsen 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 archeologists, and she thought she would become an archeologist 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 an intern at the 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 say, Well, I want to be a crime scene, you know, evidence collector. Most of those jobs, 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 ER T. You might work national security and you're on the ERT. So Leslie, who now runs the Detroit er T evidence recovery team, who is a response team, who is, which is like a 40 member team, third busiest team in the United States. Leslie is back, if you 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 fileted 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, Wilson, do 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 case, but I think that really solidified that she, first of all, has a stronger stomach than I do and and she didn't in 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 who did it.
Robert Riggs
And both of the investigators receive great satisfaction from identifying remains and then being able to tell their family, what happened? And there's, there's the case of a teenage girl who disappeared after school, and body was later found in an abandoned building. But, you know, the forensic genealogy and all didn't exist. What happens in that case?
Katherine Schweit
Yeah, a lot of those cases are out there, and Shannon, and you're absolutely right, Shannon Jones is is changing lives today. I mentioned that we, 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 different or a missing cousin or an uncle, somebody has to have your DNA in order to be able to identify that missing person. And that's, that's a also, there's also some other techniques. Genetic Genealogy 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 in there, and they there for so long, there wasn't this additional step that allowed them to match these people together. So, you know, somebody disappeared 40 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 and 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 is your natural 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 was 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 some year old adult, she knows the answers, and she knows where he's buried. That's changing lives.
Robert Riggs
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 these graves, unidentified graves at a cemetery?
Katherine Schweit
Yeah, they were actually just the files and the pic, the photographs and the other evidence 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 tied back to a file that nobody's looked at, that was a paper file that you know, that nobody had looked at in 50 or 60 or 70 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, was in a file, a photograph that nobody followed up on. Maybe the photograph was 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, very what others might say is disgusting to look at pictures or scary pictures, but for her, it's reality, the idea that these are people's brothers and sisters, you know, family members
Robert Riggs
to date. How many of the remains have been identified?
Katherine Schweit
There. I haven't talked to the ladies this week, but I think we're about at 35 of the 200 and some, which is a really high percentage rate. These are people whose entire lives, their family members and distant family members have changed forever because they've been able to go and say, This is who this person was.
Robert Riggs
Have they solved any the cause of their deaths in any of these 35 cases of who murdered them?
Katherine Schweit
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 20 years in the FBI, 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? It takes time. And sometimes say, you have a brother and he kills his brother, and that was 30 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 addition to that, some of these cases are children, many of these cases are children, babies, right? Babies who were left, who were 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 going to testify against because that person has a new life now, and they don't want to 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 dug up, 200 Cold Case murders solved, because life isn't that way.
Robert Riggs
Well, at some point desert, the investigation moves into a forest, finding bodies in a forest,
Katherine Schweit
you know, not the 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. It's just a 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 something. It's like a 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 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
Robert Riggs
cool. They can find, they can find, 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,
Katherine Schweit
right, right, yeah, and 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 the door and say, somebody will say, my family member is missing and and in 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 want to give you any DNA, a DNA cheek swab. And then, then they'll tell her in the same sentence that they've already done [email protected] 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 is trying to find your missing loved one, right? So a little bit, a 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 talked 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 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 50 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,
Robert Riggs
it sounds to me like we need a DNA registry for missing persons. You
Katherine Schweit
know what? There is one. The DOJ Justice Department set one up not too many years ago, 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 is DNA database is for criminals, right? So the Justice Department said, All right, we're going to set one up from a civil standpoint, called, it's called NamUs. You can set it up from a civil standpoint, and it's how to find people who are missing, how 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. 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 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 a shame. It's, it's, 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, what? Why? Why do you point out that it's women who are doing these investigative work? Why? What's the big deal about putting out women? Why do you have to bring gender into it? And, and 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 it is gender issue here, the people who did this work, 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, 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 want to give up. Maybe they see their loved ones as missing. But whatever the circumstances are, it's factual that 70 years 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 going to solve these cases. And it's an incredible story of how of the hurdles that she had to overcome to do that, and the successes that they've had because of it.
Robert Riggs
Your book concludes with finding Anita.
Katherine Schweit
Oh, don't give don't know, spoiler alerts, though, yeah, but go ahead so
Robert Riggs
without spoiling it, kind of give me the headline on the story.
Katherine Schweit
You know, 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. A story to tell, because I was there, you know, through that time, a little bit about her background and the people who were looking her for her from the beginning,
Robert Riggs
the you know, I've talked to families of cold case victims that mean they have a body in everything, but it's the case is cold. I mean, in Fort Worth alone, there are 1000 cold cases nationally, 300,000 It's like a It's a silent scandal.
Katherine Schweit
I think that's true in 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 were 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 there are a lot of people who die, some by natural causes, some by nefarious purposes. Who's looking for them, 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 had an uncle who, you know, we just kind of lost track of him because it 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 a hold 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 paupersā grave somewhere. I mean, that's the thing, right? You like you're saying. 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 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 paupersā graves, and nobody knows it, because they disappear, right? They're underground. Who would look? Who would know.
Robert Riggs
The women of Operation UNITED didnāt 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 victimsāand theyāre 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, thereās 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, coroners, 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 servicesāat 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 ReporterĀ® Podcast.
