What Remains

As a teenager, Todd Matthews had an unusual obsession. He was fascinated by the human remains found along the side of a highway in a small community in rural Kentucky. The woman had been wrapped in a tent bag, and the tale of Tent Girl became a sort of urban legend. He never let go of his obsession with the case. Later in life, while working the assembly line at an auto factory, Todd created an early web page about Tent Girl, asking for the public’s help solving the case. That site helped Matthews do what police could not – solve an unsolved murder. And in doing so, it changed the way investigators across the country handle missing person cases today.

Todd Matthews went on to create The Doe Network, a nonprofit database of missing persons, unsolved murders and cold cases. His search methods helped shape NamUs, The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

In this episode, Todd describes his first and most famous case, and how the work he started as a teenager sparked a revolution in unsolved murder investigations.

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Each investigator has that one case that haunts them, the one that just won’t budge. For Detective Tim Horne, the Billboard Boy was that case. He was just a young crime scene tech when the skeletal remains of a little boy were found beneath a billboard in his jurisdiction. With no leads, the unsolved murder turned into a cold case. But Horne kept the case in a box beneath his desk where he would literally bump into it for the next 25 years. It was a daily reminder that he needed to solve it. The unidentified remains couldn’t stay unidentified forever.

When the clock starts ticking down to his retirement, he knows it’s now or never. Horne is determined to make something happen.

That’s when he turns to forensic genealogy, and the research of Barbara Rae-Venter. Famous for her work on the Golden State Killer and Bear Brook cases, Rae-Venter uses DNA profiling to provide a single piece of information that could help Horne solve the case. But can he do it before time runs out?

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Dr. Ann Ross is surrounded by bones, literally. Everywhere you look in her osteology lab at North Carolina State University there are skeletal remains on metal tables laid out like jigsaw puzzles – a mosaic of hundreds of pieces that only she knows how to put together. Ross is a forensic anthropologist, often called on to help solve murder cases using forensic science.

In this episode, we walk you through the definition of forensic anthropology with the disappearance of Laura Ackerman, a young mother of two boys. The frantic search for her leads across state lines from North Carolina to the gruesome discovery of her dismembered remains in a Texas creek filled with alligators. The clues point to her ex, Grant Hayes, and his current wife.

When the skeletal remains arrive in Dr. Ross’ lab, the work of solving the case with forensic science begins. But solving this takes creativity. That’s where a pig carcass and a reciprocating saw from a hardware store come in handy.

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Sitting in each state is a collection of skeletal remains, unnamed and gathering dust. These are cold cases that have proven to be uncrackable, unwilling to give up the secrets of who they are or what happened to them. Unsolved murders that refuse to be solved.

The newest crime-solving tool, forensic genealogy, came onto the scene when it helped solve two of the most highly publicized cases in the U.S.: The Golden State Killer and the Bear Brook murders. We introduce you to the rockstar behind the forensic genealogy in those cases, Barbara Rae-Venter, and how her success breathed a new kind of life into unsolved murder cases around the country. In North Carolina, one scientist is now on a mission to put a name to each of the state’s 124 unnamed boxes of bones. She and a dream team of forensic experts are starting this mission with 13 cases.

In this episode we go step-by-step through the process, explaining how DNA profiling, web research and forensic genealogy work together to help identify victims and suspects.

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There’s this beautiful place in the mountains of North Carolina where death lives to tell a story. For people who have chosen to donate their body to science, their remains are laid out on the ground and left to decompose. Forensic anthropologists call them “human decomposition facilities,” but most people just call them “body farms.”

In this episode we’ll take you to a place few people ever get to visit while they’re alive. Guided by the director of the facility and her husband, both anthropology professors, we walk through each step of how bodies decay, and how the variables of weather, location, and even vultures can impact the state of skeletal remains. Learn how the research that comes out of observing this process can help police investigate unsolved murders and cold cases.

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