Tulsa World: SUNDAY: Tulsa's missing: gone but not forgotten

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SUNDAY: Tulsa's missing: gone but not forgotten

Tulsa Police Department Detective Margaret Loveall emerges from dense woods where human remains were found at 13100 E. Admiral. STEPHEN HOLMAN/Tulsa World

By NICOLE MARSHALL World Staff Writer
Published: 5/23/2009 2:22 PM
Last Modified: 5/23/2009 2:52 PM

For More: Read about Tulsa's cold-case-missing-persons and watch a video about a woman who sells pies to raise reward money for information about her missing daughter at tulsaworld.com/missingpersons.

Chances are, the skeletal remains of at least one of Tulsa’s missing persons sit unidentified somewhere in a medical examiner’s office or buried in an unmarked grave.

For decades, the lack of a uniform state and nationwide system to match unidentified remains with missing people has prevented some families from learning that their missing loved one has died.

“There have been so many advances in technology, but most agencies don’t have the systems in place to take advantage of it to close cases,” said Sgt. Mike Huff, who supervises the Tulsa Police Department’s Homicide Unit and missing-persons investigations.

“What is sitting in every evidence room and medical examiner’s office across the country is golden,” Huff said.

DNA testing that potentially could match the missing with unidentified remains is free to law enforcement officers and medical examiners at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth, which specializes in forensic DNA analysis for human identification. But many agencies still haven’t taken advantage of the resource.

Read the complete story in Sunday's Tulsa World.

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By NICOLE MARSHALL World Staff Writer

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Reader comments for this story have been moved to the most updated version of the story, now under the headline "Missing a chance: Many agencies aren't using valuable database," which was published on 5/24/2009. So far, 14 comments have been made.