Walking the Line is a new true crime podcast dedicated to exploring the unsolved cases of the missing and murdered.

My name is Lexi Cacus and I'm your host.

I'm a victim advocate with a passion for justice.

Every week, I'll be walking the line of investigative journalism and empathy.

Sharing these stories is a balancing act, but with over two hundred thousand unsolved cases, these stories must be told.

If you're passionate about true crime stories that respect the human element, Walking the Line is for you.

Available on all platforms.

In October of twenty twenty three, podcaster Laura Norton is releasing a new book on investigative genetic genealogy, bringing the listener on the journey of solving a case.

Today, she's here to talk to us about the case and her work.

I'm Charlie Worrel and I'm Mark Carter Londine and this is Crime Lines and Consequences.

Hello and welcome Charlie here with my co host Eric, and we are joined by a special guest, a friend of ours, Laura.

So thank you very much for coming on our show.

Would you like to tell us we're going to talk about your book?

So this is the time to get the podcast part of the conversation out of the way.

Absolutely, it's funny to talk to y'all because of course I know you both very well, but I'll pretend that I don't and I will say that I have two podcasts.

One is The fall Line, which is a true crime podcast It's been on for over six years now, which is a little wild that covers cold cases that have gotten little to no media attention, and especially cold cases that really need some help in terms of maybe digging up archival research, families and law enforcement that are specifically looking for deep dive coverage, working with experts, cases that have a forensic angle that perhaps seeds a little more coverage.

So that's what we do there.

And then I have a podcast called One Strange Thing, which looks at archival news and the strange, little unexplained events that are buried there that perhaps people have forgotten about.

We will occasionally pull in you know, Jersey Devil or something fun, but usually something smaller, like a really contained mass hysteria that maybe happened in Seattle, or you know, blobs that appeared in Texas in the nineteen sixties.

So that's what I do.

So you spend a lot of time in the newspaper archives, that's what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah, in person and online.

I have not gone into the newspaper archives in person yet.

I am pretty restricted to what's been digitized because I don't cover anything that's necessarily local to me, so it would be hard to travel to like multiple, you know, state archives.

I've been to once in Connecticut while I was doing genealogy research, but never anything for the podcast.

It's really fascinating because of course the librarian there is going to be an expert, right, so they always get involved and we'll find the most fascinating stuff for you.

I once got the single piece of paper I was looking for and she was like, I'm so sorry, but someone has vandalized it.

And when I got it, it was about a UFO case.

And when I got it, it was vandalized in the absolute best way, and that someone had come in and put a giant UFO stamp across it about eight to ten inches.

Had just come in and put a giant stamp across that one page.

I could read through it, so that became kind of a piece of personal memorabilia as well.

So I guess.

The long short story there is go to the archives if you can.

I think I'm definitely missing out on that opportunity.

I rely almost exclusively on police reports and family and the interviews, So I think that there's definitely some opportunity for me to explore covering those local cases for your paranormal show, Eric, for sure, yeah, oh for oh yeah, for those Buchanios.

Absolutely would be a great opportunity there.

But I don't want to be rude, but enough with a small talk.

We've got some business to talk about here, so let's get into what we're here for.

And that's your new book, Lay Them to Rest, as you can see behind me here, and that's a good place to start.

The title is compelling.

Why did you choose that title?

The title came to me immediately as soon as it began to work on the book.

It just was right there.

And I think it's because the idea of laying someone to rest.

I mean, that's the goal, right, and it's the goal to me on a couple of different layers and levels, because the idea of laying someone to rest, we talk about that a lot, right, like we laid them to rest.

It's the idea of resolving a story for someone, for their family.

You know, in true crime we talk a lot about avoiding the word closure.

One thing we don't talk about a lot is allowing people to ren and to rest easy.

So finding someone's identity is a kind of rest, you know, Solving a crime is a kind of rest.

Connecting someone back with their family is a kind of rest because it's not just the unidentified person who's resting.

It's the family who's resting.

It's the law enforcement who's been trying to solve a case for twenty years who's resting.

It's the mystery that's resting.

So there's all these different layers of resting.

I think that we're trying to achieve.

So one of the things I learned through your book is that there are a lot of cases out there of John and Jane does a lot of cases.

Some are as small as a bone fragment, some are full remains where we have pictures of them.

The El Dorado Jane Doe was one where we had pictures from her life to use.

So, as you're looking at all of the Doe cases out there, why did you choose this one to pursue?

So Amy and I don't have just one case that we're looking at.

I know we talk about in the book.

We have a Google doc of thirty forty fifty cases that we're looking at and she and I and that's doctor Amy Michael for people who haven't read the book.

She's my close collaborator, good friend of mine.

She's a forensic anthropologist.

I met her working on the Fall Line and that's when I really got involved working on unidentified persons cases outside of the show.

So she and I have worked together privately for a long time.

And what I bring to the table is my ability to do archival research, field research, and also I do a lot of interviews, which is not something that scientists do a lot of, So I bring that to the table.

She and I had a large working document of cases we were interested in, and we had a couple of criteria for those cases, cases that we thought needed reanalysis because they hadn't been looked at since the nineties, cases where departments might not have the funding to do testing.

And this is not just DNA testing.

There's a world of testing out there.

You know, radiocarbon blasting, you know isotopic testing, and even just skeletal reanalysis because anthropology is not a static field, so so much has been learned since the nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties that simply coming in and re examining a victim can teach us so much more a case where new forensic art might help.

So we had a list of a lot of cases that we were actively working on at the time and want to say actively working, researching, communicating with law enforcement, et cetera.

And the case that we end up pursuing in the book was one where everything just aligned at that perfect time for us to cover it at the time I was writing and for Amy, she is actually from rural Illinois.

She grew up in that area.

She has a lot of family connections there, and her family had worked in that area, you know, her whole life.

So it just kind of naturally worked out for us that that was the case.

But it was a case that stood out to us as well because there had been forensic art out for a long time, and it was forensic art that had been shared widely, and we felt that if that art was precise, someone would have recognized the victim by this point.

So we said, this is a case that hasn't been re examined since the nineties.

Let's see if there's something that we can contribute.

I think you do a really amazing job of telling the story of how you're going through this whole process and really illustrating what's going on in the moment.

As you're describing what happened, what was the most surprising or what is the most surprising part of that process of solving a Doe case.

That's a big question.

Eric.

You know, my job, I think in terms of the book, is to be in the reader's seat, you know, because I'm lucky enough to learn from scientists.

You know, my background.

My background is in English, you know, I'm a writer and researcher, and I decided I have to had to learn science and not become a scientist, but learn to understand what they were doing in order to be a better writer and reporter and steward of this information.

So I'm surprised, like on the daily by various things that are happening.

I'm surprised when an odentologist tells me that he identifies someone based on a single tooth.

I'm surprised when a skeletal reanalysis tells us that, oh, actually, perhaps an ancestry estimate was wrong.

I'm surprised when we find out that someone's age estimate was off.

I'm surprised all of the time.

But one thing that I think surprised me the most was that we don't have a really truly good number of how many unidentified deccedents there are in this country.

We toss around the number of forty thousand a lot, but as I said in the book, that number was counted somewhere in the early two thousands, and boy did I try to find a better estimate, but I still haven't found one, and I think it's just difficult to say how many people there truly are.

So I mean, that was a really surprising thing for me.

How many cases are not solved by DNA, though, I think is the number one surprising thing for me that I learned.

That was surprising for me when I was reading through and just thinking about that process.

Like, DNA is important, and we do put a lot of stock in it, especially in true crime and as we're talking through cases and things like that, but it's interesting that they're to see all the different ways that scientists and other investigators use to identify these people.

It's incredible and really inspiring as well.

Most of them don't make the news.

That's a big thing too.

That was something I learned as well when I talked to Amy or some of my other friends who do identification.

They'll identify several people a year, and you just don't hear about it.

And I think that's a good thing that those identifications are happening, you know, based on a medical implant or a skull id or a dental id, and simply we just don't hear about that.

It doesn't hit the news.

And that's because, you know, investigative genetic genealogy is so exciting and new, which again I'm glad about because I do want dough cases to get in the news, so that more dough cases get in the news.

But for sure, that has been the most surprising.

While we're talking kind of about the role of DNA, I have to say that I have never in my life thought about the shape of my teeth as much as I have while reading your book, I'm like running my tongue over the ridges, and I'm like, do I have shovel teeth?

Like?

What do I have?

I had a whole conversation over dinner with my friends, and we decided which one of us would be the easiest to identify based on extensive dental work and unique dental characteristics.

Like this invaded my brain for like a month.

And I know that dental records have always played a large role in identifying remains, But I'm curious how has DNA testing changed either the use of dental rid records or the importance of dental records and identifying remains.

I don't know that it's changed it.

I think it's made the lack of dental records not such a horrific dead end, if that makes sense, because we always go to dental records first and hope and pray there are dental records, right because if there aren't dental records for a missing person available, and for those listening out there, there are so many assumptions I think we make about what's available for a missing person that just aren't true.

Dentists do not have to keep your records.

They don't have to keep your children's records.

The rough estimate, you know, good rule of thumb is hold on to stuff for seven years.

But that's not any kind of federal or state law.

And Tennessee Todd Matthews from the Dough Network has done a lot of work to get some laws in place about you know, there should be regulations for police must come get dental records on a missing person by this amount of time, they must be uploaded to nam US, right, that's but generally they just don't have those rules.

So we assume we have these great dental records.

I mean, my mouth's a mess, you know, so I have you know, I think I have like six crowns.

You know, they'd be like, there's that lady with a disintegrating teeth.

So I have these great dental records, but it only works if someone goes and gets them and gets them uploaded.

Otherwise they're gone.

So I think that having those dental records is amazing and important because the comparison of dental records is basically free, you know, and that's what we're looking for because DNA testing is expensive now.

Certainly the str testing, which is that classic testing, the testing when people say let's get it and codeius and run a check.

Not the expense it used to be very you know, pretty basic.

Law enforcement does that out of hand.

But IgG, which is that investigative genetic genealogy.

That testing is pricey, so having those dental records there, we never want to skip that.

So having an awareness of who is your dentist, who are your loved ones dentists, who are your children's dentists, that's so important keeping track of like where your dental records are, especially college kids they move so much, you know, keeping track of those things.

I don't think that's lessened in importance any I think simply we now say if we don't have dentals on a decedent from the nineteen eighties, we're not at a dead end.

I think that's the big difference.

One of the things I love that kept kind of going through the book was this Isn't Bones, which is one of my favorite shows of all times.

So I just really every time I read that, I imagined you saying that, and I just loved it.

So that's off topic, it's not a question.

I just had to say that because it made my day.

I think it was funny reading a book that a friend of mine wrote, because I read the entire thing in your voice and I could hear like the inflection like I don't need your audio book, which I know you have your setup behind you.

Other people can have your audiobook, but like, I know exactly how you said every sentence, like in my head, Well, I was talking to you while I was writing it, So you remember me going on.

You remember me going on some of these trips and stuff.

That was a funny part when I got to you, going to Saint Louis and seeing tornado shelters at the airport.

I remember when that happened, and I was like, oh, this is giving me a time context for when this book was written because I remember when that happened.

I remember asking you is this normal, and you were like yes, unfortunately yes, And be glad you didn't have to use them.

Be glad they're there.

Yeah, to what Eric said about it not being bones, and of course the TV show Bones, Doctor Temperance Brennan, you know that show is what drives people into forensic anthropology courses.

And you might assume that forensic anthropologists are like, oh god no, but I mean they're happy because it gets people interested in wanting to learn more about bones.

Right.

And so what Amy has told me is she spends the next couple of weeks really teaching people that they're dealing with humans, right, not a piece of bone that's separated from a person and has become an object.

And then once you do that and you get them to really care about their remains that they're entrusted with, then they start to really make the connection, I think, between the kind of exciting world of mystery and what they're actually doing, which is caring for the remains of someone who's been separated from their identity.

Whether that's a historic remain, you know, that's been stolen in some way from its proper ancestral place, or whether we're looking at a discedent who may have died of natural causes or been murdered, or a grave that's been disturbed in some way.

I mean that happens all the time from you know, you might look at what they called poor farms, you know, and this is especially sort of endemic in New England, where people were buried in the grave, markers removed.

All of these people that need to be cared for in different ways.

So she's able to connect that excitement of you know, learning about forensic anthropology and that let's solve the crime with the truth of let's serve this person that's really awesome and so noble, such a noble thing.

And I love that even beyond the glitz and glam of the television show, like there's this greater purpose to it.

It's really beautiful.

Was there ever a point when you considered what would happen if you couldn't solve this case?

No?

Well, okay, tiny bit, but no.

I knew that if we could get a decent sample, we would solve the case.

And I thought that there was a possibility that we could solve it even before DNA.

There's a couple of different times, and I'll explain why, because I knew that we needed new forensic art, because I already had my sissions that the forensic art did not match even perhaps the first anthropologists' notes, right, And that's not to the fault of an artist.

I do want to stress that because forensic art is an approximation, someone has to approximate.

You do an approximation, and if it doesn't work, then you need to do another approximation.

My friends, who were some of the best forensic artists in the world, update their approximations because if no one comes in, that means you need to make adjustments.

Right.

But it became really clear that the decedent.

In this case, the homicide victim did not have the skeletal asymmetry that was suggested in the first forensic art.

They suggested pretty extreme skeletal asymmetry, so extreme that someone would have one hundred percent recognized her.

So one that I had immediately was if we get new art out, someone may immediately recognize her.

And when we didn't get an immediate hit on that, I was like, Okay, there's some else.

Maybe it's age right, maybe it's something else.

When we discussed her unique dentition and I spoke more extensively with the odentologist, I knew that her family probably didn't know about the extensive issue she had with her teeth, because if they had, that would have qued them in because when the press release came out about her new art, they released new information about her teeth.

And for listeners who don't know about this, not only did this victim have a really unique crown that was worth noting with a root canal, but she also had really extensive cavities.

But she also had pretty extensive decay that would have been painful, and it seemed pretty recent.

So our thought was that her if her family knew about that they would recognize that immediately as well, So we knew that that was also something that people would have recognized.

And was there the possibility that she did not have family that could recognize it, certainly, but we knew that as long as there was going to be a decent sample.

I knew Australia Forensic Labs was going to be able to get a good sample, and I knew the genealogist in question were going to be able to solve the case.

And there's an underlying message there also that I think we need to touch on, which is that a white European in America is going to have their case solved by genetic genealogy as long as their family did not recently come over from Eastern Europe, with the exception of someone who's Jewish, because they are going to have more likely submitted their DNA to the database.

And this has mostly to do with health testing, and that's because more white people in America have submitted their DNA, so it's easier to solve their cases.

And if you're white, you're more likely to be identified.

And that's just kind of a fact of life, right, And that gets into a lot of inequities that I think are interesting to talk about.

And also if we look at cases and how they get funded, that's a whole different kettle of fish too, But I knew that she would probably be identified.

One of the things I thought was interesting when we're talking kind of about what gets funded and not, is that the book mentions that they found that people who have DOE cases that have forensic art where people can see what the person may have looked like in life and maybe connect with that, do get funded more often than you know when the dough network doesn't have some forensic art.

But the process of becoming a forensic artist isn't really a straight line for any of these people.

It's like, you talked about one person who could draw pretty good, so they got kind of moving into forensic art with law enforcement.

But then Carl Koppelman, who I feel is very well known just because I think his pictures hold a lot of humanity in them, he was an accountant like that surprised me.

So when it comes to the forensic art, how is this done?

Do the police have to reach out to people?

Are their forensic artists just floating around America drawing pictures for people?

I don't understand entirely that process of getting a forensic artist involved.

Well, it widely depends.

So most state bureaus have an artist.

So we're just lucky here in Georgia to have, in my opinion, the best forensic artist in the United States, right, and that's Kelly Lawson.

If you've ever seen any of her art and said, oh my god, that's beautiful forensic art, it's Kelly Lawson.

We share it a lot on the fall line.

It's beautiful, and that's because she's a classically chained artist who became a forensic artist.

But most state bureaus, so you know, the TBI in Tennessee is going to have an artist.

Of course, the FBA has artists.

Nick Meck has artists, you know, Parabond has artists.

So there are artists.

But a smaller area may not have easy access even to their own state artist.

So in that case, what they can do is they can reach out to a volunteer, right, someone like Carl or they can request, for instance, so Kelly might get a request from a state where there's not perhaps a state artist in residence for that bureau.

So I worked on an Oklahoma case for instance, where they needed age progression and there was not an age progression artist available.

So Kelly Lawson worked for them in that case to do that.

And so there's a lot of those kinds of connections.

You know, artists want to be careful not to step on each other feet.

There's amateur artists out there who are training who will offer to do art for cases that are kind of piled up because you know, all the artists in the United States who do work for a federal agency a state agency could work all year long and not cover all the cases.

So there are folks who offer to do this reach out.

They might go to a smaller police station and say, hey, can I help out, and they'll say yes.

And of course, you know, there's the photo composite art.

You know, there's people who are doing line drawing.

But even at the end of the day, a lot of these cases don't have anything to work with because if you don't have a mandible and a cranium, or at least a cranium to work with, you're not going to be able to come up with a piece of art.

And that's running into a major problem we have with dollcases, which is lack of narrative, because narrative story is what people connect with.

That's why I started writing about DOE cases, is to get people to try and connect with the narrative.

With a missing person or murdered person, there's a narrative of someone's life there for people to connect with, them to care about.

But for a dough that string has been forcibly cut in some way, So how do you get people to emotionally connect with that story and get them to share it?

Carl talked about that, Kelly talked about that in my book, which is you get them to connect with the art.

But if you've ever looked at DNA dough projects work, sometimes they have to just put up a basically like a relief shadow to take the place of the person because there are not remains available in that case.

So then you have to figure out how do I get someone to connect with a fragment of bone because that is still representative of the human being that was lost, right, and that becomes kind of the tough part.

I know it's Parabon Labs is does these composite sketches through DNA?

Are they the only DNA lab doing that work?

To my knowledge, yes, I think it's based on their specific technology.

And I was actually us looking today because my mom had just finished reading the book and she wanted to see pictures.

So they have a big page of them where you can see both their perpetrator cases and their unidentified person's cases and kind of get a sense of and you can actually see matched ones as well, so you can see people who've been matched and see how closely they came up.

And some of them are very just amazingly close matches.

Some are less close, kind of in the same way that forensic approximations are.

They'll use DNA to figure out, you know, this person is very likely to have blue eyes, this person is very likely to have blonde hair, this person is very likely to be this or that.

But they are still faced with some of the same problems that every artist is, which is do we show this person as midweight?

Do we show this person as you know?

And if they don't have height information, etc.

They're even going to have some DNA information about, like, you know, things we don't think about, like freckles, you know, which can really add a lot to the approximation.

And maybe just maybe you know, ring a bell for someone and make them make that call, which is pretty amazing.

It's incredible.

It's amazing work that's being done out there.

And again I keep saying this, but it's just so inspiring because you think about some of these families that are sitting there wondering with no answers, or you know, people who cared about these individuals, not knowing who they are.

It's just it's amazing the amount of work that gets done.

And you know, I know that it's a huge part of all of these labs missions to try to identify these doughs.

And it's just super incredible.

But that's just me commenting that doesn't really mean anything.

Well, I do have another question though, So knowing that you are an archival researcher and it's something that you're very skilled at, you do get access to things that not everybody has access to.

What's it like for you watching the internet speculation that goes wild with cases and how people react to things.

How does that feel from your perspective?

Well, first, it's totally natural, right because I started out just being an English professor, you know, just good at looking stuff up, and somehow I've ended up today I sit here with you know, literally twenty two full doughcases on my desk.

They were on the computer, but I had to print some stuff out.

You know, they didn't send me all that paper.

That would have been a waste.

But I'm sitting here with these files, going through things, and I just realize everything that I would have missed if I didn't have the contextual detail that I have, And that's just because I would be working off what was available and what's available.

Often.

We both know this, and we both we all three know this because of being researchers, and you know, we do the best digging that we can.

And there are people working on Reddit and working on other sites that are just as skilled as we are at using all of the Internet sources digging things up, saying oh, you know there was a river, you know one mile away, there was this, there was this, we can find the temperature.

People are very good at these things, but ultimately there are details that are not available to the public that change the entire context.

I've been in labs and seeing their lab boards and seeing what was up for testing and gone, oh.

I have been on the inside of a case where people were discussing it on the outside, and I saw they had four or five or six facts wrong.

And Charlie and I have talked about this before and you kind of go, you know, but of course that is never something you should share.

And you understand how people are building that house wrong and all those bricks are in the wrong place.

And the house looks good, but the bricks are in the wrong place.

And I know that because I have that house wrong myself many times before.

And so what I do is I understand, you know.

But the biggest thing that working directly with experts in law enforcement and having the access that I'm granted has done has taught me when to stop.

And where I stop is where my access to direct facts that I know for sure ends.

I can present here's a road, here's a road, here's a road.

But I don't even go down the theory anymore.

I just say, here are the things that we know.

Here are the things we don't know.

And I can't do anything beyond that because there are too many unknowns.

And my book, the victim who is ultimately identified goes on a walk at night.

Maybe you know, as far as we know, we can't say for sure where she walked.

People think she walked one place she could have walked somewhere else, and there's all of these other things.

Some people say that, you know, she did one thing, some people say she did another thing.

And there is no way for me to prove precisely what happened because you know, my main witnesses too were on a phone out of state.

The other one was four years old.

So how am I supposed to, you know, precisely say what happened.

I can't, so it would be irresponsible for me to try and build any kind of real theory based on that, because what I don't have access to are the files from a different state where her case was closed.

So I think that I see it, I recognize it.

I appreciate the need to want to understand and close it because I have that same need.

But I say, yeah, that's where I stop.

That's what I say.

So I find that interesting because the reason I don't have special access to law enforcement details is i'd like make a fake Reddit account and just start correcting people, so I will never get access to literally anything.

I'm probably i'd be banned, like on site, from every police department.

But I know Eric knows your side of things a little bit because with his brother's case.

You know, when he's working with not necessarily law enforcement, but with you know, a private investigator or someone else helping out, they might find something that he can't talk about.

And I just yeah, I mean, fake Reddit account is my solution.

But I feel like you two have a little bit more self restraint than I do.

You have to protect the case.

I mean, there's a lot I left out of my book because it was necessary, and I think I mean Eric, of course, I mean that's his brother, so you know that case is paramount.

Yeah, protecting the case is the most important thing.

And I think that's something that people don't understand when they are websle thing because they do want the answers, And there are answers that I have that people don't have.

And it's it's that way for a reason, not not because I'm worried about getting sued by you know, the purpose trait or anything, but it is the most important thing.

And so I definitely, I definitely relate with that, Laura.

And even when you think you do have the answers, let me tell you, Like I was wandering through a state park on several different roads trying to figure out which was the exact right road with like formats, do you know what I mean?

So even when you think you're right, you might be wrong.

That's so true.

So kind of speaking a little bit to the case, after you identify the person, you still don't know necessarily what happened to her.

And when the identity was established, you did contact her surviving family and you met with them, with her sisters.

And first, can I say, I cannot picture you in a cracker barrel, And so that part of the book didn't really ring true to me.

However, I'll trust that you were in fact at a cracker barrel.

But like, on a more serious note, what was you knew their sister in a very different context and they did, So what was that meeting?

Like, Well, first, Charlie, I didn't even know y'all had those in the Midwest, So I was just surprised.

I'd like, it opened up a whole new world for me.

Like I thought cracker barrel was southern, so but apparently they're up up in the Midwest too.

Who could say we have them in New Mexico?

Really?

Wow, I thought this was a whole southern thing.

I mean, I hadn't been to one since I was my accent comes out as soon as I start on this.

Let me let me, let me go back to American standard.

Yes, so I had not been to one since I was five.

So I had spoken to her sisters several times on the phone, like you know, as we've gone through the process of you know, the investigative genetic genealogy team working with them on confirmation of identification, I'd spoken to them as well.

We're still in contact today, like I literally spoke to her daughter this morning, so we're in regular contact.

But it was really interesting because on the Fall line, we have worked with families for years and years and years and years.

Right Brooke, who is my co creator, as our main family contact, as she does the family interviews, but I work with families a lot on the back end, making sure scripts are approved, doing some pickup interviews, making sure everyone is comfortable and feels good about the situation they're in.

So I do a fair amount of family contact myself, but it's a very different kind of family contact because we're working with families who are in that period of limbo, who are waiting, and this is a family who has been absolutely shell shocked by answers and this was the night before the press conference to announce that she had been identified, and I asked if I could take them to dinner, and we happened to be at the same hotel, on the same floor, two doors down, and I was by myself because the student assistant who worked with me and Amy was coming to stay with me.

She was lost at the airport.

It was the whole thing, but I was really glad to have that time alone with them.

Like I didn't take a voice recorder, I didn't take any notes.

We just sat and talked, and they had all of these pictures of their sister that they had rescued from a fire and a flood.

It was such a surreal experience because I had been waiting to know this woman for years, and they had been waiting to know what had happened to her for years.

So my job in that situation, and I didn't think of it in any kind of formal terms.

I was just there to be with them.

But I think that my role in that situation was to listen and to answer the questions that I could, and to make sure that later on I got them the answers to the questions that I couldn't answer.

And you know, just just to be there and spend time with them, and that has sort of been my role since then.

We didn't do formal interviews until much later, you know, after there was time to process and to get answers and to speak.

But it was one of the most affecting experiences of my life.

And I've spoken to dozens and dozens and dozens of families who have survived crime at this point, but I think that is a fairly unusual experience, I think, even for those of us who work in this field, to meet with a family who's loved one has been identified after almost thirty years, especially their loved one whose case was closed because her case was closed for nearly thirty years, so they were unable to look for her in a formal way all that time.

She wasn't ennameous, she wasn't listed anywhere.

So a what an awesome thing, What an awesome gift for that family to be able to hopefully rest and find some peace in all of this and some information that they were relacking.

It's a really really beautiful, touching moment, and I hope that that they do find that rest in that piece.

Aside from the Aina County dough case.

Other cases overlapped in this book, including mummified remains that were found at a school.

I would have thought the times that human remains were found in the school would be like nonexistent, but it turns out that it's not that uncommon.

How do modern human remains end up in a school, attict?

How did that happen?

Well, you know, we have a lot of old schools here, nothing like you know, say Europe, but these will be human remains.

I mean there were two mummified human remains, separate sets of human remains that were mentioned in the book that were found in older schools.

And right now I have a friend who's dealing with a museum, a private museum, you know, owned by singular individual, that had a bunch of human remains that were sort of ill gotten, you know, because until that nineteen sixty eight act about you know, the ethical donation of human remains, people could pretty much do what they wanted.

So when we talk about a mummy, I think a lot of people think about Egypt, right although certainly there are other cultures that practice mummification as well.

But just for listeners to understand this mummy that we talk about in the book.

This was an amateur mummy, so someone who was likely my best guess, would have been an amateur scientist, so probably somewhat wealthy, sort of the you know gentlemen, you know diletant type had practiced mummification.

Someone may have done that because they were some sort of you know, educator, or they had learned about ancient Egypt and they wanted to give it a try.

And how they got those human remains to practice on we have no idea, but my assumption would be it would not be good.

It could have been someone who was impoverished.

It could have been someone who was an indentured servant.

It could have been someone who was enslaved.

We just don't know.

It could have been the remains of an indigenous person, which of course means that those remains would be under nagpra legally right required to be returned to the proper peoples.

And what was so upsetting about this was this school really wants to do the right thing.

You know.

This is a private school.

At one point was a seminary, you know, so it has a very long background.

It's a little confusing for them to even figure out precisely where these remains came from, and in the very far back of their attic, And if I could explain to you how big and old the school is, it was like entering Narnia to go up into this attic, this huge attic that is bigger than my house.

And in the far back corner they'd found this wicker basket that contained a mummified person.

But it was a that at first I think they didn't even quite recognize as a mummy, because this decesion had been coded in Lacker.

So I think that even perhaps they thought at first this was some kind of artificial sort of representation of a human being.

And you can kind of imagine the horror they felt when they realized this was a person in their remains.

And then they have to figure out what is the kindest and most ethical and the most right thing to do.

How do you possibly get someone back to their people when the scientists who us experimented on them has destroyed the best ways we know how now to get that person back.

And so that was what we were left with when Amy came in to work on that project for them.

I imagine the care that the school has in making that right, even if they don't know how it ended up on their school property.

They're taking ownership, accountability of making or it's right.

It makes me wonder because, like Eric, I would have thought zero is the number of mummified remains in random schools, but how many are there?

And the schools are not making those efforts.

And so I'm glad you included that because it does speak a lot to the importance and I felt like you you spend a lot of care going into the details of that situation, which really humanized the Again, like we said, it's not bones, it's a person.

Humanized that situation where it's like, this is somebody, and this is somebody who is separated not just from their identity, but possibly from their people and their ancestors and their descendants, and it's time to return that.

I hope other schools are people reading this book who know about situations like these in schools will will get them to do the right thing.

I think they will, because this school acted with a swiftness and has really made this an ethical and complex learning project for their students as well to research everything they can in the archives, to learn about, you know, ethical treatment of people and bodies, to research you know, who could this woman have been?

She also may have been a teenager or you know, a very small woman.

You know, how could this have happened?

Why did people mishandle human remains?

And the students and staff still check in to see if testing has you know, come any farther because they really do care, you know, And so I think it was not only kind of I wouldn't even say a wake up call because I think gen Z are so involved morally and ethically in the proper treatment of humans.

I think it was more of a call to action for them than a wake up call.

They don't need a wake up call exactly.

So before we let you go, I just to leave us with some of your wisdom.

I know that, like you said, a lot of times, we have all the bricks to the house and we put it together and we think there it is, everything fits.

And maybe we don't think that we could fit all those bricks together into different solutions to a case, and we get kind of some tunnel vision as armchair sleuths, you know, as I'm sitting there on Reddit, not on a fake account, FYI, I am on my regular account reading about cases and reading people's theories and seeing what people can dig up, especially what people can find out about the areas and things.

It's amazing.

But if I want to contribute positively to a case, what would your advice be.

I mean, the number one thing you can do is sharecases first, right, sharing a case, learning everything you can about a case, going and clipping old news articles for people that don't have access to them, and sharing them, especially with family members who have made pages Facebook, who have set things up.

A lot of family members don't necessarily have like archival news account access, like not just newspapers dot com, Like I have a Lexus account that costs me like two hundred bucks a month, Like it's horrific.

Whenever I build a file of archival news articles, I share them with the people whose family member they are about.

So that's one thing, you know, building repositories of information.

And when I say that, I don't mean theories, right, you know, like maps of people's houses, intrusive information, but background archival media information that you can share, things that you can make publicly available, but most especially publicly available to the people who are involved.

Right.

If you want to go to pages where people are sharing information about does if there is already let's say, a page about that dough or a post about that dough.

Perhaps you want to say, hey, I found this article and you want to post it, right, So any of that kind of information there if someone is searching, because I know in the case in my book, the family was constantly searching for dough pages, and if someone had seen a few of the articles because they missed them because of the way they were titled, By the way Eric and I talked about this when we spoke like a year ago, titling something in a more human way could have changed this case.

You know, decapitated head found is not going to tell you anything.

Eric and I sat and talked about this, but if you'd said, you know, remains of redheaded woman found, things might have looked a little different thirty years ago.

So, you know, finding an article, writing a summary, even article, you know, providing that.

I know on Unresolved Mysteries on Reddit they do a really good job of writing up really detailed objective case descriptions, you know, and sharing those, and I think those are really valuable.

People do that as well, So there's a lot of ways to do that.

Offering if you have graphic design skills, and you are you know, friendly with a family who would invite this.

Making missing persons posters.

I do that like all the time.

Make missing persons posters for people to share if they would like to.

If you want to volunteer at your local Missing Person's Day in missing person's events, you can do that.

If you don't have one, why don't you send a message over to local law enforcement or the DA and ask why you don't have one, because you should, right, every area should have one.

So these are all the things I think people can do, because the thing about solving a mystery, this is something I've really realized.

Nothing is a puzzle with one missing piece, which is really what I used to think before I really started working on this stuff, that if I could just obsessively in the dark find that one piece and stick it and everything would be fine.

That's not going to happen.

That's not how it works.

Because a year plus after this case was solved quote unquote, or at least part of it was solved, her family is still processing the trauma.

You know.

There we're dealing with a woman whose body parts were separated.

Her family is still haunted by that.

They wish they had all of her to later rest.

They still don't know for sure what happened to her, and they're still wondering when they're going to be fully at peace.

So is that puzzle solved?

No, I think if her killer was identified, the puzzle would still not feel complete to them because there's going to be lost there, right, So I think we have to look for different goals there, and I think those goals have to be about serving not only the case and the people involved in the case, but looking at building better support systems, better ways of communicating, better ways of adding detail to how we share cases with other people.

So not just throwing up, you know, missing woman, but the details we add there.

Eric and I have talked about this before, that can actually maybe get them to the right people.

If you have archival research skills, why don't you think about saying, hey, I can cover this case that's hard to cover.

Maybe you're not a podcaster, Can you write a blog?

Can you make a TikTok?

Maybe you can do that too.

I'm not the only person on earth that can do that.

You know.

I wasn't more and special, you know, I am just stubborn.

So you know, so those of us who like to do that, and you are two people like that too.

Other folks can do that too.

Let's get the cases out there that are less popular and maybe they will have a chance of getting some leads in.

This may not be the question you asked me, but it's what I felt like talking about.

It was the answer we needed.

It was the exact exact question I asked.

Yeah, at some point, at some point, you know, my eyes glazed over and then my my heart just began to talk.

So, you know, I wanted to know how armchair sleuths could contribute positively to a case, and your answer is to actually contribute.

Well.

I want to thank you for joining us and remind everyone that the podcasts are the fall line and one strange thing.

But the book is called Lay Them to Rest.

As people are listening and or viewing this on YouTube, the book will be out so you can get it wherever you get your books.

I mean, I don't know where people get books, but I'll leave some links there.

Eric has been representing with the Green screen back there for you, and we really appreciate you taking time out of your very very busy schedule to give us so much time to talk about this case and the process behind it.

I am so thankful that you had me on.

I really appreciate it all my wonderful friends letting me talk about my book.

We loved your book.

It was incredible and put it down, so thank you for allowing us to read it and to talk with you about it.

And anytime we get to spend time with you is a good time for us.

So if our audience wants to join the conversation, find us on social media.

All links are in the description below.

We'd love to hear what you think about the solvability of doe cases as well as your thoughts on Laura's book, and with that, we'll see you in a few weeks.