We’re a people that seriously enjoys investigative crime drama. Shows, movies and books spanning the decades—Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, Agatha Christy, Dateline, CSI—provide fodder for our morbid curiosity of criminals and their victims. But even as these media portray highly-trained experts and brilliant lone detectives whose careers center on unraveling mysteries, online volunteers are tackling real-life cases of unidentified persons.
Deborah Halber’s recently-released book, The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases, dives into the peculiar world of web investigators. She provides an extensive look at the limitations of law enforcement and forensic teams’ abilities to parse out the thousands of missing person cases and unaccounted for bodies that exist in the U.S. Against this background, Halber reveals some of the key players among web sleuths who help connect the dots in cold cases, as well as officials who break from law enforcement skepticism to work with these ordinary puzzle-solvers.
In the course of her extensive research for the book, Halber encountered some of the macabre physical realities involved in this type of investigative work. She saw gruesome photographs, visited morgues and encountered disturbing details of how killers disposed of their victims. She also found great respect for those who choose to dedicate themselves to this rather unsavory work. As one forensic anthropologist she interviewed said, web sleuths are essential “because when it comes to identifying people, there will never be a computer as good as the one right between our ears.”
We caught up with Halber to ask her more about her background as a journalist and some of her unexpected findings in the course of writing the book.
You started off as a local reporter, and later made the jump into science writing for MIT. What about science writing appeals to you?
Science writing seemed like the ultimate challenge. How do you take the arcane language of research and turn it into a human story of serendipity, frustrations and triumphs? How do you write about, say, neuroscience or astrophysics when you don’t have a background in those fields, or in any scientific field? I was lucky that at MIT some of the world’s most talented researchers were willing to work with me to make their passions more accessible to the public.
How did you come across the world of online sleuthing? What made you decide the topic had solid book potential?
I came across online sleuthing by accident. A local Massachusetts case, one of the oldest unsolved murders in the state, was reopened in 2010 when a new police chief convinced the Smithsonian to do a state of the art digital facial reconstruction. I’d heard about the case known as the Lady of the Dunes for years, and I just couldn’t understand how she’d never been identified. But it was when I came across the National Institute of Justice figure that there are 40,000 unidentified human remains across the US that I knew I had to write about this little-known issue and the individuals taking matters into their own hands to get IDs.
One of your observations is that apart from the intrinsic human desire to solve puzzles, the sleuths often seem to get involved in this work to distract from aspects of their own lives that may be difficult. Why do you think this (grisly) online detective work is cathartic in this way?
It’s a distracting pursuit simply because it is so very challenging. It makes finding a needle in a haystack look easy. It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of hours, but the payoff is significant: you’ve done something powerful. You’ve changed an unknown victim back into a human being, and you’ve provided answers for family and friends who may have been living in doubt for years, or even decades.
Which part of research did you find most interesting—finding out about the backstories of the formerly unidentified persons, or about the online sleuths and law enforcement officials who worked on their cases?
I loved meeting the web sleuths, even the ones that I’d been warned were difficult or prickly or even a little nuts. They’re not so very different from the scientists I’ve interviewed: they’re passionate about a cause that consumes much of their time, and they’re convinced they’re providing a valuable public service. And it was always sad to think about the unidentified being isolated and sidetracked from their expected destinies for so long.
You point out that while online sleuths often support and aid each other, there is also plenty of infighting and dysfunction among these online communities. Were you surprised to see that networks ostensibly committed to selfless unpaid work could also be so openly hostile?
That did take me by surprise, but then again I had never been deeply involved in any online community, and I hear that the web sleuth community is not unique in that respect. I got the sense that the really nasty sniping was tied to the anonymity and the screen names personality clashes would get elevated in ways that I’d like to think would never happen in person. But maybe I’m just naive in thinking everyone would rather get along than not.
Regarding a more technical topic, though you have decades of experience in news and science writing, this is your fist book. How difficult did you find it to navigate the world of book publishing?
Book publishing is completely unlike newswriting, where your work can be online and accessible to your audience within a matter of hours or days. For a variety of reasons, the editing process alone took much longer than I ever imagined—almost a year! But I’m very grateful that my editor, Sarah Knight, had the patience and vision to make it a much better book.
The book details how amateur sleuths have helped spur government systems to improve the way they go about the massive problem of unidentified persons. What do you think has been the most important development in this realm?
Without doubt, the launch of the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) in 2009 was a huge step forward as the first fully searchable database accessible to the public, medical examiners, coroners and law enforcement. There’s still a long way to go, however, before the database is fully populated with information and widely used by law enforcement.
In the book, you discuss your initial attempts to get your feet wet in online sleuthing, and how you discovered it requires vast reserves of patience, persistence and attention to detail. Is this an activity you think you’ll pursue in the future?
I found out that I’d make a terrible web sleuth. All those details to compare, uncertainty about the accuracy of the information, page after page of photos and reconstructions make my eyes glaze over.