It was August two thousand and five.

Tanett Jackson and her husband Hardy lived with their four children in a small house in Biloxi, Mississippi.

The Jacksons and their neighbors had seen their fair share of hurricanes and prepared like they would for any other storm, but no one was prepared for Katrina.

In a matter of hours, Tonet's name would be added to the list of twelve thousand missing people.

This is America's crime lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Coroner's offices around the country are filled with boxes of unidentified human remains.

We've talked about this many times on the show.

These boxes represent dead ends, times when traditional DNA testing didn't work.

Meanwhile, there are families who never stopped looking for their lost loved one who might have ended up in one of those boxes without a name.

Today, we talk with someone who's been trying to solve this problem to learn about her experience as someone with a very unusual job and a special role when it comes to iding mysterious remains.

Bones, they're not really viewed as people because they don't have soft tissue.

They're not visually recognizable as a human, and then sometimes the investigation is not prioritized.

Anastasia Holobinko is a forensic anthropologist, which means she steps in when law enforcement runs out of leads.

Think Temperance Brennan from the TV show Bones, studying skeletal remains to find clues about things like gender and biogeographical ancestry.

For nine years, Anastasia worked for the Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office.

This year she joined AUTHRAM as the Special Projects coordinator for Anthropology.

In college, Anastasia thought she might study marine mammals until she took an elective course in forensic anthropology that changed her life.

I actually got my first look at human bones, and I was just fascinated, fascinated and particularly viewing the skull.

That's a person.

I mean, I don't know what that person looked like in real life, but that skull represents a human.

One of Anastasia's first cases using forensic anthropology involved a lost boter on Lake Erie.

The body was discovered one spring as the ice on the lake thought out.

So that was really my first autopsy, seeing what that body look like.

And I have to say I used vis under my nose because the odor is something and I think you either get used to it completely or you don't.

And it's something that I still am struck by the fact that I haven't completely gotten used to it.

By twenty sixteen, Anastasia was working in Mississippi's Medical Examiner's office, where she faced the state's long backlog of unidentified remains cases.

When she first learned about OUTHRAM, she was intrigued.

Maybe the problem wasn't that these cases were impossible to solve, Maybe they just needed new technology.

At AUTHRAM, Kristin Middelman shared an interest in clearing Mississippi's backlog.

She knew the science was there, but she was facing a different obstacle money.

There were no funds to work the cases.

Then a Mississippi native, Carla Davis, offered to fund the project.

Carla had spent years researching DNA and family trees for adoptees, and she later joined AUTHRAM to lead their genetic genealogy, but before that, she was compelled to help identify remains in her own state with her own money.

Now with Carla involved, they could begin to tackle the backlog of unidentified human remains at the Medical Examiner's office.

At the time, there were forty three unidentified remains cases on the back burner.

People had assumed that technology was the limiting factor and that many cases were just unsolvable.

See anthropologists would measure features of the skull or skeleton to try and figure out clues about where someone was from.

That was helpful, but it was also inexact, and in tough cases, it didn't give investigators enough information.

Now Authroom's technology offered a way to look at tens of thousands of DNA markers and compare them to other people with well documented family histories think big family trees.

Kristen was confident that this would reveal a much clearer picture of an unknown person's origins, but looking at the Mississippi remains, there was a problem.

In many cases, all that was left were bones, some completely stripped of DNA before they were shelved years ago.

The Mississippi bones are difficult to work with for a couple reasons.

A lot of them have been cleaned off with detergents that make it more difficult to do DNA testing because back then, advanced DNA testing wasn't a thing.

Even DNA testing might not have been a thing, And so what they did is they washed these bones boil them, use detergents so that they can clean them to be able to better look at them, not knowing that you know, decades later DNA testing would be able to give them the answer.

But the worst thing you can do to DNA is boil it or wash it with a detergent.

On top of that, Unlike most states, Mississippi's backlog included a lot of Hurricane Katrina victims.

Katrina victims, as you can imagine, there would be a lot of contamination there that make the DNA testing a little bit more difficult.

There's a lot of degradation because a lot of them were left in water or out in field for decades and decades and decades.

This is where Authurm's tech may be able to help.

Kristen and Anastasia started working together to start.

They had a particular Jane Doe in mind, and they had a hunch that their name might be Toannette Jackson.

There are several that really I will remember for a very long time.

That would be one of those cases.

Tonette Jackson and her husband were trying to seek refuge in their house on their property and she was swept away during the storm.

Tenette and Hardy Jackson were climbing up to their attic to escape the rising water when a twenty foot wave crashed into their home and split the house in two.

Hardy clung to a tree with one hand and held on to Toennette with the other.

When Tinette realized Hardy wouldn't be able to hold her for much longer, she made him promise to take care of their children and grandchildren.

Then they let go.

When the storm cleared and people were coming out onto the streets, a reporter came across mister Jackson, who was visibly distraught, and she was able to talk to him about his story.

Reporter Jennifer Merley from w k RG, a local CBS affiliate, saw mister Jackson walking with his two young sons.

After he told her about his wife's disappearance, the reporter asked him to describe her so people could keep an eye out.

What's your wife's name in case we can put this out there.

Tell that Jackson?

Okay?

And what's your name?

Part of Jackson?

Where are you guys going?

We gotta nowhere to.

Go, no web go.

I'm love.

That's all I hed.

That's all I had.

In the video, the reporter does something you don't see on TV.

As she holds the microphone to Hardy Jackson, listening to him, she starts to cry at the end.

When she turns the story back to the news anchors, they seem speechless behind their desk.

I think we need to go to a break, one of them says, and then bursts into tears.

I think we need to go to our break.

We'll return with more in just a moment.

Weeks later, in the neighboring community of Saint Martin's, a search crew located a body.

It was in between the slabs where two houses once stood.

They believed them to be those of miss Jackson, but there were technical difficulties in achieving an identification.

Was this Tenette.

No one could tell for sure, and her remains were buried as a Jane Doe, but Tannette's husband, Hardy Jackson, never stopped looking.

Nineteen years after Hurricane Katrina swept to net Jackson away, Anastasia took up the case.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation decided to exhumem two bodies that were buried as unidentified individuals in the wake of Katrina, one man and one woman.

A Jane Doe.

I took samples from both sets of remains to send to AUTHRM.

I do know that there was a lot of bacterial non human DNA there in her sample specifically, and if you don't have purpose built methods to filter that stuff out genome sequencing sequences, everything plant DNA, bacterial DNA, anyone else's DNA that may have touched those remains, it's super powerful.

But if you have markers from all of these genomes, you actually aren't going to get any relatives because they're all mixed together.

By selectively analyzing the human genetic material hidden among DNA from non human sources, Authorne was able to reveal the truth about Jane Doe's remains.

These remains did belong to Tenette Jackson, the woman who hadn't been seen since a twenty foot wave tore her away from her husband.

And so it came full circle.

Unfortunately, Hardy, her husband had passed away a few years earlier.

He never got to hear the news, but Tinett's.

Family did, and he did spend the rest of his days keeping his promise to her and looking for her.

This was just one of dozens of cases that were so through Anastasia's partnership with authram for the Mississippi backlog, But it wasn't long before Anastasia discovered another hurdle.

Before she arrived at the Mississippi Medical Examiner's office, Mississippi had relied on universities or forensic anthropologists who were out of state for help with investigations, and when she tried to get a full picture of how many unidentified remains were actually in state custody, she realized something.

Mississippi's remains were sitting in university labs and storage rooms all across the South.

So she started making calls to nearby universities slowly and sometimes with a lot of pushback.

They agreed to send them back.

One box of remains they got back posed a new problem.

The remains were recovered in twenty twenty two, but when Anastasia looked at them, it was clear they were much older.

She dated them to the nineteen eighties, and she didn't have much else.

It was an incomplete case that I received, meaning not all of the skill.

Little elements were present, and there were some personal effects, but there was no documentation with the remains.

But the big problem was they weren't sure when this person went missing.

This made it harder to know which generation this person might belong to on a family tree.

Anastasia sent the evidence to Athram.

Their scientists were able to build a genealogical profile that was used to conduct genealogical research.

This helped them identify Luther Ezelle.

They realized that he was born in nineteen thirteen.

I believe he was a father to six children.

He was married, He loved fishing, and went missing in nineteen eighty.

And he lived in California and traveled cross country in his vehicle to assist a family member with a move and somewhere around Mississippi.

He checked in with his family, but then was not heard from again, and they hired private investigators.

Then they searched for their father for decades.

And I know that he was a family man that his family honestly thought, really loved being a family man, and then one day he was gone.

Thirty two years after he disappeared, Anastasia contacted Luther Eazell's family.

She returned to the few personal belongings found with his body.

I know his daughters were really really happy to hear from us and figure out what happened.

To their father.

I think this is one of those cases where they weren't sure if he just left and decided not to come back to the family, and now they have answers and they know that that's not what happened.

We still don't know exactly what happened to Luther during that cross country trip, why he died, or how his body ended up where it did, but at least his family has some closure.

They know he didn't stay away on purpose, they know where he is now.

Now, the story of Luther Usel unveils another surprising part of how unidentified bodies are treated, because if Anastasia hadn't gotten his remains back from that university lab, what would have happened to him?

Probably the long term use of unidentified human remains as teaching specimens.

This kind of blew my mind because I had no idea that a body found without any idea might end up as a classroom tool.

And we're not talking about legitimate or official anatomical donations where the individual has signed off on donation of his or her body to a teaching institution or maybe the next of kin authorizing this donation.

Teaching specimens now, typically when people donate their bodies to science.

They're donating a cadaver, a complete body with skin and tissue and organs.

When the cadaver is no longer needed as a teaching tool, most medical schools return the bodies to families for burial or cremation.

This means that medical schools do have cadavers, but they don't have a lot of access to skeletal remains.

In the past, since unidentified human remains were more difficult to ident identify, and since universities needed skeletal remains for teaching purposes and law enforcement wasn't clamoring for the remains to be returned, universities and historical institutions may have been using unidentified remains to teach students, remains that really should be returned to the state and ultimately families.

I can't speculate as to what would goes through people's minds.

The explanation that, well, we don't have advanced technology, so we can't identify this person, so why even try with the technology we have nowadays, many practitioners or professors, they have changed their outlook over the years and as well as the development of standards.

But really, until the death investigation systems became more structured.

I'm not.

Surprised that this sort of thing happened.

There's been a reckoning of sorts.

Many universe, city systems and cultural institutions are taking a closer look at their skeletal remains collections.

State police are also asking universities to check their storage rooms for unidentified remains, and then you have medical examiner's offices calling universities to see if unidentified remains are sitting on their shelves, like what Anastasia has been doing, because there is no need to wait.

The technology exists to solve the puzzle.

Kristin, Anastasia and Carla started with forty three unidentified remains cases in Mississippi, and since then they've helped identify most of them.

But in the meantime, the backlog has continued to grow.

As of September twenty twenty five, there are sixty nine new unidentified remains cases waiting to be solved in Mississippi.

But this growth doesn't reflect neglect, it reflects renewed hope.

Kristin says more people in the state are submitting cases for review because of the success the teams had.

Anastasia has appeared before many state legislatures.

She wants them to know that there's a solution and that solving cases is a choice.

Some states are beginning to get on board.

There are thousands, tens of thousands of unidentified human remains cases.

It can become so overwhelming, but I think most of us who do this type of work are very good at compartmentalizing.

And of course if you're not good at compartmentalizing, then you become much more proficient at it through this work.

But it really is just it's moving forward, one name at a time.

Anastasia Julobinko is a former forensic anthropologist for the State of Mississippi, now now a special Projects coordinator in Anthropology at Authrum.

America's Crime Lab.

Is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is by David Woji.

Our producing team is Catherine Fenalosa, Emily Foreman, and Jessica Albert.

Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell.

Byrne Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at AUTHRM.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Thanks for listening.

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