Seattle Unknowns: An Examination of Seattle’s Unidentified
I want to try something different. For the past several years now, I have been engaged in web sleuthing. If you’re reading this, you most likely already know what this is. I have enjoyed scouring through databases like the NamUs database and the Doe Network, searching for any John or Jane Doe case that might have some small sliver of information that might lead to a positive identification.
I’ve done this since around 2014, maybe. The success I have found has been in matching a name or some other small bit of information associated with an unidentified person, to the identity of a real person and/or to their next-of-kin.
Along the way of engaging in this activity, I have learned a lot of interesting lessons. If one spends a lot of time examining websites dedicated to missing person cases and unidentified people, you can’t help but run into the same problems or ponder the same limitations over and over again.
One of the benefits of web-sleuthing is that it engages the mind. One of the drawbacks is that by my nature I am extraordinarily scatter-brained. I tend to think of everything in terms of abstract narratives, and I rarely, if ever, catalog anything in any way that resembles the way that I have seen other people catalog data. I am not, by nature, an Excel spreadsheet kind of guy.
One of the things that has interested me along the way is location. Often the location of where a person is located might provide some sort of indication of exactly who a person might be. During the pandemic I actually sat down and took a look at John and Jane Doe cases in New York City from the late 1980's and into the early 1990's.
Going against every one of my internal tendencies, I decided to create my own spreadsheet of cases from the late 80's and early 90's, when the collection of DNA and the digitization of fingerprints was not as common. I also made sure to pay extra attention to location. This collection of data started to get me thinking about some of the larger structural problems of cataloging the unidentified dead.
One New York City case that I have been following for about the past year and a half had very much to do with location. Not just the location of where a body was recovered, but also the location of the jurisdiction where one particular missing person was reported missing.
The NamUs system, while very beneficial, does not place location at the center of each unidentified person case. GPS coordinates or addresses are often not entered — or if they are populated, it might simply lead to the headquarters of a sheriff’s department or the offices of a medical examiner’s office. The mapping of precisely where a person was found– in proximity to a road or waterway, for example — does not seem to be a priority in a large number of NamUs listings, especially in urban areas. This is unfortunate, as a focus on location data could provide additional avenues for data that could lead to identification.
An example of this: a great many of New York City’s NamUs entries would give some indication of the location of where someone was found (“floating in the Hudson River near the Riverdale Yacht Club in the Bronx”) but the profile page itself wouldn’t map the precise location. It wasn’t until I started doing a top-down view of a single municipality in a certain time-frame that I started to see how additional information could be derived.
With a significant portion of these cases, I believe that there very well could be a factor of cracks in the system hindering identification: fingerprints that could be digitized but aren’t, a missing person case assigned to a long-dead detective, a jurisdiction balking at paying 1800 dollars for a DNA comparison. It’s the small issues like these that illuminate the cracks in the system that prevent people from being identified. I’d like to illuminate these sorts of issues (if they are to exist) with the Seattle John and Jane Doe cases.
Illuminating these cracks is what’s beneficial. And if web-sleuths, citizen journalists, true-crime aficionados, dweebs like me on their keyboards — if we can play a constructive role in the identification of long-unidentified decedents, then I say the more the merrier.
I would like, and I would hope, that something like this would exist for data-centered and tech-savvy Seattle. I spent a great deal of my life in the city, and until I̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶r̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶i̶t̶c̶h̶f̶o̶r̶k̶s̶ I moved away, it was, of all the cities in the United States, the one I know the best.
Seattle has its fair share of unidentified decedents and missing people. I’m old enough to remember the stories from the 1990's about the gloom of Seattle and the preponderance of serial killers and their victims. One would think that with Seattle being such a hotbed of innovation, the local government and law enforcement would find innovative ways to publicize missing person cases….
Well, I’ve looked, and I couldn’t find it. Washington State is in the top 5 states nationwide in terms of missing persons. Law enforcement agencies in tech-savvy Puget Sound aren’t (in my opinion) as successful in social media outreach as other law enforcement agencies across the county. Washington State used to have a bare-bones website that cataloged all missing person cases going back to the 1970’s and 80’s. These were cases that were, presumably, still active but not listed in NamUs.
Today this website looks like this:
To paraphrase Kennedy, it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I’ve spent years looking at these types of cases, and I know that the aggregation of data into a single narrative so that this information can be discovered online can be extraordinarily useful. Plus, these cases are all fascinating. I can’t help but wonder how someone could end up as an unknown person in one of the most “technologically advanced” cities in the United States. By profiling these cases I hope to light a figurative candle. It’s better than doing nothing.
This blog will spotlight some of these Seattle-specific cases with an emphasis on the possibility that these people can be identified using contributions gained from some combination of the following methods:
- OSINT research — is there anything (and I mean anything) that might avail itself to the use of OSINT methods to aid in the identification of an unidentified decedent in Seattle? Does the physical location of where a decedent have any larger meaning?
- Public Records Requests — is it possible to file a public records request with either the Seattle Police Department or the King County Medical Examiner’s Office? If so, do any of the returned records provide insight into the cases that were previously available?
- Direct outreach — if one has a theory about the identity of a John or Jane Doe, will either the authorities in Seattle or in some other jurisdiction, be communicative if they are contacted?
- Social Media exposure — would it be possible to generate new leads by publicizing individual unidentified decedents on websites such as Twitter, Reddit or Websleuths?
- Media outreach — would it be possible to use a blog post about an old unidentified decedent case to encourage podcast episodes or blog posts in the media?
The first case that I will profile will actually be a case that found resolution. In this case I had engaged in some of the tactics above in an effort to contribute to solving cases. While I don’t think that anything I did helped in the finding of resolution of the case, I do think it is an a fascinating example of how the system can work.
It’s also been profiled in articles and podcast episodes — so it’s very much in the public domain.
Cases after that will profile individual unidentified decedent cases. I am looking forward to profiling some of these cases. If you’d like to be in contact, you can reach out to me at seattleunknowns@gmail.com.
