Naming the Bones

Ann Ross’ ponytail dangles over the back of her white lab coat. She’s wearing a brown T-shirt that reads “Women in Science” and black Vans with big, bright red roses and a colorful skull. 

Ross, a forensic anthropologist at North Carolina State University, works in a sun-bathed lab featuring a collection of saws, claw hammers, crowbars, and machetes, as well as a device that creates 3D images of skulls. 

The North Carolina Human Identification and Forensic Analysis Lab is working to identify human remains from cases that have gone cold, using cutting-edge DNA analysis and genealogy. So far, they’ve helped a woman in Baltimore answer the 46-year-old mystery of a missing uncle, a pair of elderly sisters in North Carolina learn what happened to their brother in 1976, and other people looking for lost loved ones. 

There’s no shortage of cases for them to take on. North Carolina has a backlog of about 280 unidentified bodies, according to Nate Thompson, head of the cold case unit with the State Bureau of Investigation. In 2023, Thompson and Ross received a three-year, $700,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Missing and Unidentified Human Remains Program to pay for advanced testing, such as isotopic analysis that helps with geographic origins. It also helps fund a doctoral student to work with Ross. 

When the grant ends, Thompson and Ross can apply for a one-year extension, Thompson said. And they can keep applying for grants when they become available. Meanwhile, Thompson, who’s been with the SBI 27 years, is trying to build his own cold case team, which would include forensic genealogy. So far, he hasn’t been able to train anyone to make a dent in the hundreds of cases waiting to be solved. 

While there are a litany of new tools available–such as improved DNA analysis, new forensic genealogy techniques, and the ever-expanding databases of DNA–using those tools is expensive. Each identification can cost as much as $10,000 to $14,000. 

Unless an unidentified person dies as the result of a crime, law enforcement doesn’t routinely pay to have remains identified. If a medical examiner labels the cause of death “undetermined,” “suicide,” or “accidental,” the remains are usually left sitting in a box at the local law enforcement agency. These are the people Ross cares about most. 

They “are usually the individuals who are marginalized in life, the people that our society thinks are societal deviants,” she said. Maybe they suffered from drug addiction or did sex work. 

“It’s almost like our society won’t even talk about it,” she said. “They’re the forgotten, and it’s like, ‘Who cares about them?’” 

On this particular day, Ross had laid out on a lab table the remains of someone who was killed and then burned. Bones and fragments are arranged by size and anatomical location, most of them charred, splintered, and ashen or warped from the heat. The skull is coal black and misshapen, like a partially melted bowling ball. 

“She burned for a while,” Ross remarked.

Bones arrive in Ross’ lab in cardboard boxes sent by medical examiners and law enforcement agencies from across the state. She puts them in her storage room until she can get to them; about 35 are in there at a time, neatly stacked on shelves, labeled with case numbers and descriptions: “African American Male 60+ years,” “European-American Male 28 yrs [gunshot wound] to head,” “Hispanic Male 41 yrs No Skull.” One very small box is simply labeled “infant.” 

From these, Ross will work to create biological profiles–sex, approximate height and stature, identifying scars or features. In homicide cases, she’ll include her best guess at the cause of death. And then the real challenge begins, one requiring the doggedness of a genetic genealogist who’s willing to spend months or years tracking down a name.

Connecting the Strands

Ross’ work has brought her a modest amount of fame. In 2011, she helped solve the murder of Laura Ackerson, a 27-year-old woman who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Grant Hayes. Hayes and his wife, Amanda, killed Ackerson in North Carolina, cut up her body, and drove it to a suburb of Houston, Texas, where they dumped it in a creek hoping alligators would dispose of it. 

Ross used different types of saws on pig bone to identify the tool Ackerman’s ex-boyfriend used to dismember her. Grant Hayes got a life sentence; his wife received two consecutive sentences of more than 36 years.

Ross, who is in her 50s, grew up in Panama with an English father and Chilean mother. The family lived under ruthless military rulers, Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, at a time when violence seared the region. When Ross visited her grandmother in Santiago, Chile, she would learn other chilling lessons around their kitchen table, about citizens being tortured and killed under the reign of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, babies stolen from mothers at birth and secretly sold into adoptions. These were the desaparecidos –“the disappeared.” 

She went to college in Florida to become a banker. It’s what her father wanted, but she was bored and failed her first accounting class. 

She took an introductory class in physical anthropology in her final semester, and something clicked. She found it interesting that bones can indicate how much one exercised, whether they ate a healthy diet, if they’d had certain diseases. “Your life history is written in your bones,” said Ross. 

She got a second degree in anthropology, and then a doctorate. She was still studying at the University of Tennessee in 1996 when her adviser recommended her to Physicians for Human Rights, which was working in Bosnia to document war crimes. At 26, it was her first time experiencing mass death, identifying bodies, and working with grieving families.  

“It was a little bit scary,” she said. “It was also very exciting.” 

The group was trying to identify bodies from a mass grave that held concentration camp detainees. Most of them were of similar height and build, and roughly the same age. There were no medical records or dental records.

She went on to work with truth commissions in both Panama and Chile that investigated human rights violations committed during the countries’ respective dictatorships and dispensed justice. After Hurricane Katrina, she was deployed twice to Louisiana as part of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, which was sent in to identify bodies. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, she deployed to Port-au-Prince to do the same. 

To Ross, ensuring that the names and identities of the dead are known is a basic human right. “The minute you’re born, you have a name,” she said. “It’s just really sad that you die or disappear or something happens and then you’re erased of that identity.”

But Ross only works with the bones, and DNA labs can only return a string of letters. Attaching names requires a forensic genealogist–someone with the skills, time, and tenacity to comb through genealogical databases to connect that DNA to long-lost families. 

In 2020, Ross connected with Leslie Kaufman at a meeting of the Carolinas Cold Case Coalition, a group of detectives from law enforcement agencies across North Carolina that shares information. The two found a common passion. 

Kaufman, 72, is a self-trained software expert based in Butner who was drawn into the work through her own family history with violence. In November 1973, her father shot and killed her mother in the parking lot of a nursing home before shooting himself.

In the ’80s, Kaufman was a divorced single mother who took a job answering phones and checking in patients for a dentist in Chapel Hill. As the office transitioned to computers, she taught herself to install, operate, and manage software systems.

Her brother, Larry, had become a national leader in computer forensics, and brought Kaufman on to run his office and produce Talk Forensics, his hit show on BlogTalkRadio that featured prominent criminologists. 

Kaufman felt a kinship with victims of violent crimes. She also developed a friendship with Tim Horne, a detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, after helping search for a woman who had gone missing near Kaufman’s house. 

In another case, a road crew had found the remains of a young boy hanging in brush beneath a billboard in Mebane in September 1998. Horne couldn’t find a missing-person description that matched the boy; the case file sat in a box under his desk for nearly two decades.

Over those years, forensic genealogy made a number of advancements–perhaps the most famous being Barbara Rae-Venter’s identification of the Golden State Killer in 2018. Rae-Venter, a retired lawyer who uses investigative genetic genealogy techniques, took on the case of the Mebane boy that same year, and within months was able to give him a name: Bobby Whitt.

The boy was 10 when his father, John Russell Whitt, strangled him and stuffed his body behind the billboard. He then suffocated his wife, Myoung Hwa Whitt, and left her body off Interstate 85 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. When the bodies were found, John Russell Whitt confessed to murdering his son and wife from a Kentucky prison, where he was doing time for armed robbery. 

Horne called Kaufman with the news. Kaufman hung up the phone and told her husband: “I’m going to be a forensic genealogist. I will learn how to do this.” 

Finding the Name

Forensic genealogy is a slog, but it’s getting easier, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, a California-based forensic genealogist who solved the first two cold cases using the technique in 2017. 

As more cases are solved, forensic genealogists are learning new techniques from each other, said Fitzpatrick, who has a doctorate in nuclear physics from Duke. Technology can now extract meaningful information from smaller DNA samples, including samples that might be degraded from age or freeze-thaw cycles, or from being left at room temperature for too long. Meanwhile, the pool of DNA samples available for comparison is exploding, with over 43 million people in databases. 

When Kaufman met Ross, she offered to do the forensic genealogy work pro bono because she was new to the field. She tackled it like she’d done with every job she’s ever had: She taught herself. She read books, practiced on adoption cases, watched every YouTube video she could find on the subject, and helped people trace their family history, no matter how crooked their tree. 

Ross handed Kaufman 13 cases. DNA analysis was obtained for seven; DNA from the other samples had degraded, by time and wear, beyond analysis. Kaufman found the names of the seven, including the uncle of the Baltimore woman and the brother of the elderly sisters. She also named a man whose remains were found in Charlotte. One woman’s results were startling: They indicated her ex-husband was her father, and a man she’d thought to be an uncle was her brother. Two were suicides, three were homicides, and two were accidental deaths or overdoses, Kaufman said. 

“I do it because I just believe that these people, everybody, deserves to have their story told, and their name. Without your name, you’re nothing, and these people aren’t nothing,” Kaufman said.

After Ross does an initial examination in her lab, she’ll send a small bone or a piece of the skull to a genetics lab for analysis. Those results are emailed to Ross–files full of seemingly random letters, repeated thousands of times–which she forwards to Kaufman.

Kaufman works from the tan sofa in the living room of her modest home in Butner, her laptop and printouts of family trees spread across an oversized ottoman. Sometimes the work overflows to a whiteboard in the spare bedroom, which is covered in scribbles that look like an NCAA bracket.

Kaufman gives each new case a nickname until she uncovers the person’s real identity. She uploads the file to GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA, the only two ancestry databases that allow users to upload someone else’s DNA and grant access to law enforcement. 

The databases compare clusters of genes called centimorgans to the millions of others stored in the system. Within a day or two, they will usually fetch a result–maybe a distant cousin. Kaufman often follows hundreds or thousands of leads in each case, working around nicknames and fake names over 10-hour days, every day, for weeks or even months. 

When she finally finds a first-degree family member–a sibling, parent, or child–she contacts the law enforcement agency that was managing the cold case. 

Kaufman made such a call to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Homicide Detective Matt Hefner in May 2021. She told him she might be able to help identify a body they’d found in October 2010 on a side street near Charlotte’s main homeless shelter. But she needed $700 to upload the case to FamilyTreeDNA. 

Hefner’s lieutenant attended N.C. State and had taken a class with Ross. “He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’”  

Ten months later, Kaufman called Hefner with a name: Napoleon.

“What makes you think it’s him?” Hefner said.

“He fits in the tree,” Kaufman explained. 

“I called his brother,” said Hefner, still seemingly amazed by a breakthrough nearly 2 years later. “We had never done this before.” 

The brother had no idea; the last he knew of him, Napoleon had been living on the street in Raleigh for years. 

Connecting a name is both elating and emotional for Kaufman and Ross. As long as the body of a loved one hasn’t been identified, there’s still hope they’re out there. 

“I don’t think any parent will feel like they got closure to finally know that their child is dead,” said Ross. “But at least they’ll have the answer, and they won’t keep wondering.” 

For Kaufman, naming the bones helps put families back together. “To me, that’s restoring them,” she says. 

Both women believe that’s what all these bones in a box deserve: a name. 

Correction: This story initially misstated the year of the earthquake in Haiti. It was in 2010.

Clinton Colmenares has been a writer and reporter for 30 years. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, and has an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.