CINCINNATI (WXIX) – Investigators and analysts at the Hamilton County Coroner’s office say they are hopeful improving technology will help them one day identify Jane and John Does.
Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco and her team members handle autopsies, even from other counties, to help police with murder investigations and unidentified remains.
It can be challenging work and Dr. Sammarco says despite what people may see on TV, it can take months if not years to determine someone’s name.
“We still have eight cases in our database of people that we have not yet identified,” she said.
Advances in technology are giving the coroner’s office access to new tools.
Fingerprinting in the morgue has been a huge help. In years’ past they had to put ink to paper but now it is all digital.
Chief Coroner Investigator Maria Stewart says they use an electronic device that allows them to quickly get the prints into national databases.
“It goes from local to federal in order to figure out who and what is in different systems, and it’s not anymore just criminals in the fingerprinting databases. It’s also everyone who goes into a civil servant position,” Stewart said.
Fingerprints helped identify the “Pearl Lady” as Barbara Hess Precht in 2014. Her body had been found floating in the Ohio River in November 2006.
In other cases dental records, when available, can be critical. Dr. Sammarco says they have a forensic odontologist on staff.
“He will make those comparisons between the cavities and things in the teeth, roots, different implants, things that are in the mouth that he’s able to make comparison on,” Stewart said.
Social media has also become part of the coroner’s office investigative work. After a woman’s torso and later her head were found in wooded areas in 2023, it was a post online that led to them learning the Jane Doe was Makaila Luckey.
“Believe it or not, somebody forwarded that to her sister in Atlanta, and she called on a weekend, and we went over the details, and with all the information that we got, we were able to match her,” Dr. Sammarco said.
DNA confirmed the connection and when coroners have DNA, they are able to work with state and federal investigators to try to build family trees.
It’s something they are currently doing to try to identify a woman known only as the “Avondale Jane Doe.”
[RELATED: Potential DNA breakthrough could lead to identifying Avondale Jane Doe]
“BCI has been helping us with genealogy, trying to find some matches, and maybe close enough relatives, and being able to get their DNA and try to identify somebody,” Dr. Sammarco said.
X-rays are also an option as the images allow investigators to see if someone has any medically implanted devices such as knee replacements or plates.
“We will have the pacemakers and things removed at autopsy, bring them up, be able to get the serial numbers off of those, call that manufacturer, and be able to identify that individual based on what serial number was assigned to that individual,” Stewart said.
Dr. Sammarco says her office is also now one of only a handful in Ohio that has a CT scanner for postmortem imaging.
CT scanners have been used for forensic purposes in other countries for years but only recently relied on in the United States.
“We’re able to reconstruct those images in all three planes and actually have 3D capability of taking those images and making a 3D image that we can actually spin around,” she said. “There are changes in the body that are related to postmortem changes. It could be related to temperature, humidity, the time since death, so there’s so many more variables.”
One issue they are facing though, Dr. Sammarco says, is that postmortem CT scans can be difficult to understand and many people in the field are not trained to read them.
Even as a board certified radiologist with more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Sammarco says she has taught herself new things about the images nearly every day.
She says she would like to see a forensic radiology fellowship developed in the future, maybe even at a local university.
In the meantime, Dr. Sammarco and her staff members are dedicated to solving as many cases as possible using the tools available to them. So far, it has paid off.
“We had a case of an unidentified woman, who we knew she had been a homeless woman, who was found on the side of the highway on 75 near Princeton, and it was only recently that we were able to match her with a family from New York,” Dr. Sammarco said. “She had a half sister, and a mother who had been looking for her daughter for so many years, even in a nursing home. Her sister said they never stopped, that they continued to look for her.”
Although it is impossible to predict when the coroner’s office could close their eight unsolved Jane and John Doe cases, Dr. Sammarco says they have no plans of giving up.
“They had somebody that loved them, that brought them into this world and would want to know what happened to them,” she said.
To learn more about the open cases, visit the Ohio Attorney General’s website.
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