LIVINGSTON, Tenn. — Four days a week, Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. After work he drives home, where he spends the next seven hours immersed in a very different world.
The faces seem to float from his computer — morgue photographs, artist sketches, forensic reconstructions — thousands of dead eyes staring from websites. John and Jane and Baby “Does” whose bodies have never been identified.
His wife, Lori, complains that Matthews, 37, spends more time with the dead than he does with the living. You need a hobby, she says, or a goal.
I have a goal, he replies, though he describes it as a “calling.” He wants to give the “Does” back their names.
The Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state. Bank managers and waitresses, factory workers and farmers, all believing that with enough time and effort, modern technology can solve the mysteries of the missing dead. Increasingly, they are succeeding.
There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S., according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.
The premise of the Doe Network is simple. If the correct information — dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs — is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law enforcement agencies and medical examiner’s offices simply don’t have the time or manpower.
Using the Internet and other tools, volunteers do the job.
And so in Penn Hills, Pa., Nancy Monahan, 54, who creates floor displays for a discount chain, says her “real job” begins in the evening when she returns to her house, turns on her computer and starts sleuthing.
Monahan’s cases include that of “Beth Doe,” a young, pregnant woman strangled, shot and dismembered, her remains stuffed into three suitcases and flung off a bridge along Interstate 80 near White Haven in December 1976. And “Homestead Doe,” whose mummified body was found in an abandoned railroad tunnel in Pittsburgh in 2000.
“It’s like they become family,” Monahan says. “You feel a responsibility to bring them home.”
Matches can be triggered by a single detail — a tattoo, a piece of clothing, a broken bone. It is just a question of the right person spotting the right piece of information. The process can be tedious and frustrating; months or even years of clicking on a dizzying array of sites can often lead nowhere.
Still, the rewards of cracking a case make the time worthwhile. The Doe Network claims to have assisted in solving more than 40 cases and ruling out hundreds more.
Successes are not entirely joyous, says Doe volunteer Kylen Johnson, a computer technician from Clarksburg, Md.
“On the one hand, you are giving families the information they have been searching for. On the other, you are extinguishing all hope that their missing loved one will be found alive.”
“Nothing you find can be any worse than something that has already gone through your mind,” says Mary Weir of Palmer, Alaska, describing the sickening moment when she spotted an artist’s rendition of her 18-year-old daughter’s face on the Doe Network.
Samantha Bonnell had been missing for 19 months. She was killed while running across a California highway in 2005 and buried in an unmarked grave — Jane Doe #17-05.
“Her name wasn’t Jane Doe,” Weir said, her words punctuated by sobs. “She was Samantha, my Samantha, and she had curly red hair and green eyes and freckles on her face. And she was a real person, and she was loved. She wasn’t just a number.”
