Law and Disorder: NamUs system helping find the missing
When Laurel Nowell went looking for her teenage friend, Tammy Jo Alexander, she found herself deep in the online NamUs system — the federal government's attempt to help thousands of unidentified bodies finally reclaim an identity.
There, individuals, hoping to find a missing person, can get detailed information on unidentified corpses. The world of the dead was new for Nowell.
"I thought, 'Oh dear, this is not what I signed up for,' " Nowell said.
But, without Nowell's insistence that information about her friend get placed on the NamUs system, then the 2015 identification of Tammy Jo Alexander may have never happened.
The story about how a girl found fatally shot in a Caledonia, Livingston County, cornfield in 1979 was ultimately discovered to be Tammy Jo Alexander is a testament to not only Nowell's indefatigability, but also the power of the NamUs system, so called because it is an acronym for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. (Also, of course, the acronym is a telling description of its goal: "Name us.")
Nowell had been close friends with Tammy Jo when they were teenagers, but had lost touch. Around 2013 she and a former boyfriend of Tammy Jo decided to try to locate her, but could find no sign of her. Nowell found Tammy Jo's sister, Pamela Dyson, who long believed her sister had run away and started life somewhere else.
Nowell wasn't satisfied, but did not want to appear to be a nosy voice from the past. "I just didn't want to step on anybody's toes," she said.
Still, she continued to push to see whether a missing person report was ever filed on Alexander. She hoped to place information on NamUs, but learned that, understandably, a formal police report was needed. She then spent months working to get a Florida sheriff's office to do a missing persons report. Finally, she said, she found a sympathetic investigator.
The report eventually made its way to NamUs, and Carl Koppelman, a Calfornia resident who had followed the mystery of the unknown girl in Caledonia, believed that Tammy Jo was in fact the same girl. He and others helped move the case to its 2015 identification.
(A break here: The latest installment of the podcast findingtammyjo.com goes online Sunday morning and will include the recollections of some of the folks discussed here. If you've yet to sample the podcast, the previous four episodes are at the site also.)
The Justice Department launched NamUs in the late 2000s, and it has become an increasingly successful tool to match the unknown dead with the missing. The NamUs spokesman, Todd Matthews, does not come from a traditional communications background. Matthews himself was active in citizen networks that tried to match the missing and the unidentified. That gives him a tremendous insight into the work of NamUs, and helps him serve as a liaison with citizen networks like the ones he was once part of.
"I'm probably one of the only people in this program that doesn't have a college degree," he said.
That fact once bothered him, Matthews said, but no longer does. Instead, his hiring shows the commitment of NamUs to its mission.
The NamUs numbers can be staggering: At any time there are as many as 85,000 missing people in the country, and, as of April 1, 26,057 missing persons cases have been reported to NamUs as have another 13,292 unidentified person cases. NamUs has helped resolve nearly 1,300 cases.
As more people realize the power of NamUs, the more it will be used and the more mysteries will be answered, Matthews said.
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A couple of upcoming podcast-related events (in reverse chronological order):
* On June 13, my reporting partner, Veronica Volk of WXXI News, and I will record live at the Little Theatre at 7 p.m. Sponsored by WXXI, we will take questions from the audience, play some clips that did not make the podcasts, and, we hope, have available some of those involved in the Tammy Jo Alexander story. The event is free but you need to register. You can do so by visiting the Facebook pages of either WXXI News or the Democrat and Chronicle. If you have trouble, email me at gcraig@gannett.com.
* On Wednesday, June 1, Veronica and I will do a live Facebook chat at 7 p.m. from WXXI studios. You can reach out to us via the WXXI News or Democrat and Chronicle Facebook pages.
* And Sunday, May 29, Veronica and I will do our weekly Twitter chat at 7 p.m. at hashtag #TammyJo. Please join.