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104 15. Cold-Case Database T hough much of our time is spent on active forensic cases that we receive on a regular basis (between forty and fortyfive a year), the resolution of some of our cold cases which have been in our laboratory for many years provides us with the incentive to continue our search for the identities of others. This chapter highlights some of those cases. On September 14, 1992, Mr. John Gagliano, chief coroner’s investigator for Orleans Parish, called and told me that someone who was walking through a swampy area near the 11000 block of Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans had found some bones that looked human. John asked if I could help him with them, and, of course, I agreed. When the bones arrived in my office, they became case 92-23, the twenty-third case brought to our lab in 1992. I could tell immediately that they had been exposed to the elements for a minimum of a year or so. With only a skull, a scapula, and a few other small pieces, I knew it would be difficult to come up with a full profile to try to get the person identified. I asked John if I could travel to the area where the bones were found to try to find at least one innominate, the hip bone, which is the best bone for determining both sex and age of the person. He said that it had rained so much in the region in the previous weeks that the entire area would be underwater and we would not be able to see anything. He also noted that he thought everything that was associated with the person had been picked up by the coroner’s office. I was concerned that the sex might be hard to assess because the skull was quite small, what we call “gracile,” or feminine-like. I knew that it would be somewhat of a challenge to determine for certain if the person was male or female. Back in the early 1990s, DNA profiling that could reveal the X or Y chromosomes was in the Cold-Case Database 105 future, and no database was available at the time that was accurate enough to determine sex with confidence when based on just the skull. Fordisc software, a powerful tool we use today, was in its infancy at the time and only a promise of the future. I measured every bone that was measurable, over and over again. Was it a small male, or was it simply a moderately sized female? In the end, my report said “gracile male,” which is what my measurements and my visual assessment of the morphology of the skull convinced me was the case. The forehead sloped somewhat (a male characteristic); the root of the zygoma (a raised ridge of bone that in males courses along the temporal bone above the ear hole and often extends just beyond the external auditory meatus) appeared male-like; a few muscle-attachment sites seemed quite prominent for a female (females usually show very little evidence of muscles along certain areas of the cranium, for example, the temporal line—whereas males often do). These features along with the measurements suggested that we were dealing with a male, though there was some concern in the back of my mind. What about ancestry? That seemed a little more obvious. The sloping eye orbits, the narrow nasal opening, the orthonathic (or straight) appearance of the mid-facial region of the cranium when viewed from a lateral perspective, the towering nasal bones, the prominent anterior nasal spine, all suggested white ancestry. When I presented the profile to the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office back in 1992 (young, white male), Gagliano informed me they did not have anyone missing who fit the profile of a young white male under the age of thirty. For years, the case languished on the shelf in our laboratory. When we finally began to make progress on the DNA database in 2004, we started with the most recent cases, feeling as though they would be the ones that would have the best chance of getting solved. As circumstances would have it, in 2010 we were just about to send out the DNA sample for the Menteur swamp case when Susan Burg emailed me and asked if we could determine if our case 92-23 was her brother, John Erickson, who had been missing since August [3.131.110.169...

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