Women Who Talk To The Dead

What You Will Learn

• How a missing-persons investigation led Detroit Detective Shannon Jones and FBI Special Agent Leslie Larson to plan the exhumation of unidentified victims.
• What Operation UNITED uncovered in Detroit’s pauper cemeteries and how forensic specialists worked to identify victims.
• How DNA genealogy and the NamUs registry can help reconnect unidentified remains with missing-person cases.

The True Story of 200 Forgotten Murder Victims and the Relentless Pursuit of Justice by an FBI Agent and a Detroit Detective

By Robert Riggs

“I always let the ground talk to me. The dead know I’m there to help them. Sometimes they give us hints to help. It’s our job to speak for those victims who don’t even have a name.” FBI Special Agent Leslie Larson

That conviction—spoken without an ounce of melodrama—launched the largest coordinated exhumation of cold case murder victims in FBI history. 

Over the span of five years, a relentless team of women led by Larson and Detroit Police detective Shannon Jones dug through decades of neglect to give a name to the nameless and voice to the voiceless. Their mission was christened Operation UNITED.

More than 200 unidentified murder victims, buried in Detroit’s pauper’s graves since 1959, became the focus of a forensic resurrection. I interviewed Katherine Schweit on my True Crime Reporter® Podcast.

Schweit is a former FBI Special Agent and Chicago prosecutor who followed the five-year mission and whose stories she chronicles in her book Women Who Talk to the Dead.

Schweit has appeared on the podcast twice before, discussing her seminal work investigating mass shooters and reviewing the flawed response of officers at the school mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Birth of a Mission

It started with a discovery both banal and horrifying. Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones was combing through missing persons cases when she began noticing a disturbing overlap—victims reported missing sometimes turned up as unidentified murder victims in old case files. But there was no DNA to confirm those connections.

“She realized that to find the missing, she might have to dig up the murdered,” Schweit explained.

Jones brought the idea to Larsen, head of the FBI’s Detroit forensics team. “At first, Leslie was like, ‘You want to dig up how many bodies?’” Schweit said with a laugh. “It had never been done before on this scale.”

What followed was part detective work, part forensic archeology, and all heart. Together, they plotted an audacious plan to exhume 200-plus unidentified victims.

Graveyard Without Names

What they unearthed was more than remains—it was a buried legacy of institutional neglect.

Paupers’ cemeteries in Detroit are not what most of us imagine. Forget memorials and flowers. “These are ditches along the fence line,” Schweit said. “Sometimes bodies were stacked four deep, encased in vaults that sat in water year-round.”

Most were anonymous—known only by a number on a crumbling ledger.

Schweit painted a bleak picture: “No sunny hilltop under a tree. Just muddy trenches next to cattle fences. You stand there and think, how could people be buried here? But they were. And they were forgotten.”

Dig Day

The first official dig—dubbed “Dig Day”—was a logistical and emotional nightmare.

FBI specialists flew in. Volunteers brought food. Excavators and water pumps groaned into action. But Michigan’s high water table had its own plans.

“They were hoping to find 18 bodies in the first week. They found one,” Schweit said. “The water was pouring in faster than they could pump it out. The cemetery maps were unreliable. It was a disaster.”

Still, the women pushed forward.

Science of Silence

Why dig up bones? Because bones don’t lie.

With modern forensic science, even the smallest fragment can yield truth—but only if you know where to look.

“You need the right bones,” Schweit explained. “Finger bones? Forget it. You need a clavicle, an ankle, a thigh bone. Bones that shield their DNA over time.”

Enter the forensic anthropologists. Recruited from elite institutions like the Frost Center in Michigan and the Body Farm in Tennessee, these experts knew how to coax identity from the long-dead.

And sometimes, the bones tell you more than a name.

Schweit recalled one victim: “He was filleted open. Leslie saw that and didn’t flinch. Another agent threw up. Leslie just said, ‘Let’s get him.’ That was her first body. She’s been digging ever since.”

The Cases They Solved

One by one, the identities emerged.

Among them, a teenage girl who vanished after school. Decades later, her DNA matched with living relatives through forensic genealogy.

And a man murdered by a serial killer whose body had never been named. His daughter, raised by a stepfather, had spent her life believing her biological dad had abandoned her.

“We told her he didn’t leave,” Schweit said. “He was murdered. She finally had an answer.”

As of this writing, 35 of the 220 exhumed have been positively identified. Not just names on a file—they’re stories brought full circle.

The Files That Mattered

Beyond the graveyards, the women found themselves immersed in a different kind of burial ground: Detroit’s cold case archives.

“They called it the Box Castle,” Schweit said. “A warehouse full of forgotten evidence. Photos. Police reports. Pocket litter. Maybe a receipt. Maybe a photo with a street sign in the background.”

Each piece could be the key.

Jones surrounded herself with the faces of the dead. “Even if the photos were gruesome, to her they were people. Not evidence.”

The Impact And Obstacles

But not every case has a Hollywood ending.

Many suspects are long dead. Some families don’t want old wounds reopened. Others don’t know they’re missing someone until a knock at the door reveals the past.

“Some of these cases are babies,” Schweit said. “Abandoned. Frozen. Even if we identify them, the person responsible might be protected by time or silence.”

That complexity hasn’t slowed them.

Other departments are now calling. Forest graves in Pennsylvania. Unmarked plots across the Midwest.

Forensic Genetic Genealogy

The secret weapon? A branch of science that sounds like science fiction: forensic genetic genealogy.

Using DNA, databases, and painstaking family tree mapping, forensic genealogists can connect the dots where standard DNA databases fall short.

Still, it requires consent. And that’s not always easy.

“People will give DNA to Ancestry.com,” Schweit said, “but they won’t give it to a cop trying to find a murder victim.”

NamUs and the Road Ahead

To bridge that gap, the Department of Justice launched NamUs, a national registry for missing and unidentified persons. It allows the public to upload DNA and info to help solve these cases.

Operation UNITED confirms that “Justice begins with a name and closure begins with knowing.”

Tenacious Team of Women

As for the title of Schweit’s book, she heard the question more than once: “Why focus on women?”

Her answer is simple. Because they were women. Every leader of Operation UNITED. Every forensic anthropologist. Every champion of the forgotten dead.

“Maybe women don’t give up as easily,” Schweit offered. “Maybe we see the missing and think of our own families. But the facts are the facts. No one else did it. These women did.”

Anita’s Story

The book concludes with one final reunion. One woman. One grave. One family that found peace.

“Anita was found,” Schweit said. “And she mattered.”

For all their scientific tools and bureaucratic battles, that’s the truth that anchors these investigators. The simple, stubborn belief that everyone matters.

Even if they were buried in a ditch.

Even if their file was shoved in a box.

Even if no one else remembered.

They mattered.

Epilogue

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, 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 services—at no cost.

Justice begins with a name. And closure begins with knowing.