Databases offer limited help to ID remains

BY MICHAEL AMON

AND ANDREW STRICKLER

michael.amon@newsday.com

andrew.strickler@newsday.com

Detectives working the case of four bodies found wrapped in burlap on Gilgo Beach face a dauntingly complex landscape of missing persons databases to use as they seek clues to the women's identities, experts said.

The FBI program considered the "grandfather" of crime databases - the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, launched in 1967 - may contain too much information to be immediately useful to police, at least at this stage of the investigation.

A new federal program just became fully functional last year and is designed to match missing persons with unidentified remains. But it - the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs - doesn't yet have enough information to pinpoint possible matches because too few law enforcement agencies are participating

"You can't put a puzzle together if the puzzle has missing pieces," said Todd Matthews, spokesman for the Doe Network, a national group of volunteers that works with law enforcement to identify human remains.

And with so many overlapping investigative avenues among various public and private agencies, detectives face significant hurdles of time and effort to make use of all of them, Matthews said.

NCIC, in Clarksburg, W.Va., the central repository for information on disappearances, contains more than 87,000 cases of missing people, said Stephen Fischer, spokesman for the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

Only law enforcement and some other agencies can access NCIC, meaning that family members or volunteers must go through police to update a case.

Experts say the system has helped solve countless cases but that the sea of data can make specific clues - for instance, a suspect with an unusual tattoo - difficult to sift out. NCIC includes tens of thousands of cases too recent to be useful in the Gilgo probe, where the remains are up to 2 years old.

False positives

With NCIC, "we're flooded with information and you get a lot of false positives," said Daniel Warren, a special agent supervisor at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

In New York, all police agencies are required by law to tell state officials and NCIC of disappearances. A separate state law requires another notification when a college student and anyone under the age of 21 goes missing.

The new NamUs program, which is largely open to members of the public who might have vital information that could help solve a case, suffers the opposite problem: too few cases. Nationwide, less than 14 percent of the 35,000 to 40,000 long-term missing person cases have been entered into NamUs.

In New York, of about 3,800 open missing persons cases, only 206 now have information published on the NamUs website, including nine women from Long Island. Police are not required to enter missing person cases into the system.

"We don't have everybody who needs to be in there [NamUs] at this point, so it's limiting," said Warren, an advocate for NamUs reporting.

Nassau police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith said the department, which has about 700 open missing person cases, does not regularly update the NamUs system.

"It wouldn't be practical for us or every police agency, of which there are hundreds in the state . . . to call up every site or agency with every case," he said.

Suffolk police Deputy Chief of Detectives Frank Stallone said in a statement that the department notifies NCIC and state officials of all missing person reports.

He did not respond to questions about NamUs or about how many open cases of missing persons the department has.

Complicating the detective work is the existence of other databanks requiring the time and attention of detectives for whom missing persons are just one of many responsibilities.

Among them is the FBI's Violent Crime Analysis Program, a confidential database that compares homicides with other violent crimes and was designed to help catch serial offenders. It has details about 142 unidentified homicide victims from New York, including the four Gilgo Beach women, investigator Kim Law of the New York State Police said.

The program has searchable information on 182 missing persons in the state "in which we believe there is foul play involved . . . and we think someone has probably caused a homicide," she said.

Files being transferred

Law said the Violent Crime Analysis Program is actively encouraging law enforcement agencies to update their cases into NamUs and is in the midst of transferring all the state's missing persons information to the system.

"It's a really good tool because it involves the public," Law said. "It's very unfortunate, but at times it's not been easy to get your missing persons entered by law enforcement."

Stallone of the Suffolk detectives also declined to answer questions about the VCAP program.

Law said her agency also has a working relationship with the volunteer Doe Network, which maintains its own database of 6,400 disappearances worldwide.

NamUs officials say it has helped close 44 missing person cases in the past two years, including that of a girl killed in 1986 by a pickup truck as she ran across an interstate near Orlando, Fla. The teen had no identification, just a purse bearing the name "Serena Balint." The girl had been reported missing in Green River, Colo., but the file was under her maiden name, Serena Harmon.

More than two decades later, with the teen still unidentified, a friend doing basic Internet searches found NamUs as well as a Florida state database of unidentified bodies. After viewing sketches from Balint's autopsy, the friend alerted authorities. The case was closed through a DNA match with Balint's family.

"We were excited about closing that one," Warren said. "It all worked perfectly."