Morgue Mystery, Identifying corpses can be elusive
By BOB WARNER
Philedelphia News
December 5, 2005
ON AUG. 12, 2004, a police marine unit pulled a woman's body from the Schuylkill, near 61st and Passyunk, not far from the South Philadelphia refinery complex.
She apparently had drowned. Investigators at the city Medical Examiner's Office found no evidence of foul play or unusual injuries.
She was about 5-feet-5, 133 pounds, maybe 30 years old, authorities estimated, but that was mostly a guess.
Her body was partially decomposed from its time in the river, which is especially damaging to tissue in the warm summer weather. Her race was uncertain - maybe mixed. No one could say for sure how long she'd been in the water.
But there were other clues to her identity.
Beneath the men's thermal underwear she was wearing, there were tattoos: the letters HAL on her abdomen, and a Chinese character of some sort on her right calf.
She wore white high-top sneakers, Converse, with pink laces, and around her neck was a red and blue lanyard with a keychain, initialed "PCOM," and four keys.
Close to 3,000 bodies a year come into the Medical Examiner's Office on University Avenue in West Philadelphia. The office sits on the edge of the huge health-care complex that includes the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital.
For each body, the M.E.'s office is supposed to identify the deceased and establish the cause of death.
More than 90 percent of the time, it's routine. The bodies come in during the day, are examined first thing the next morning by doctors, and identified by relatives. The bodies are sent to funeral homes within 48 hours, for burial or cremation.
But perhaps 300 times a year, a body arrives and nobody steps forward immediately to identify it.
Those cases go to David Quain, chief investigator for the Medical Examiner's Office, and his eight-member staff.
Quain, 42, was the official who was reading the Daily News three weeks ago and noticed a brief reference to a North Philadelphia woman, Unisha "Niecey" Jefferson, who had disappeared in April 2003, at age 38, last seen near 22nd and Lehigh.
Something clicked. In September 2003, the police had found a woman's decomposed body in an abandoned factory building on Marjie Street, about four blocks away. Quain had never been able to identify the corpse.
Over the following weekend, the M.E.'s office contacted Jefferson's family and obtained an old X-ray of her head and lower jaw.
It was a positive match - ending a 2 ½-year ordeal for Jefferson's family and closing one of Quain's oldest open cases.
Prompted by the Jefferson case, City Council voted last week to hold hearings on how the city tries to match unidentified bodies with missing-person reports.
The numbers fluctuate, but on any given day, Quain's unit may be struggling with 10 to 20 corpses for which it has no names.
Currently, the number is 12 - unidentified remains from 12 bodies discovered in Philadelphia over the past four years.
The list includes eight men and four women. They're equally divided, roughly, between whites and minorities, though it's sometimes difficult to tell.
Four of the 12 have already been cremated, after a dentist removed their lower jaws for future reference, in case dental records or DNA samples become available to attempt a match.
The bodies of the eight others are in cold storage at the M.E.'s office, some frozen in body bags, the others maintained at 38 degrees Fahrenheit and laid out on gurneys while their identities remain unknown.
The woman with the "PCOM" lanyard is frozen.
Quain thought his unit was on the verge of identifying her last year.
Officials at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine thought the keys might belong to one of the residents at Overmont House, a 12-story apartment building for senior citizens on the PCOM campus near City Avenue.
One of the keys appeared to be the same make used in Overmont's mailbox system. Investigators tried the key in one box after another until they found one it fit.
They went straight to the corresponding apartment unit.
But the wheelchair-bound man who lived there said he did not recognize the woman whose body had been pulled out of the Schuylkill. He did not know anyone named "Hal," or anyone who was missing. Investigators have found no reason to question his veracity.
Quain, who grew up in Olney, graduated from Saul High School in 1981 and has worked for the city ever since - first as a grounds- maintenance worker with the Fairmount Park Commission, then a scheduler in the Water Department and a security officer at the Youth Study Center.
He took a pay cut in 1989 to work with decomposing bodies as a trainee at the Medical Examiner's Office.
"I needed something more interesting," Quain said. "I have never had a boring day at this office. There is always something going on. Whatever is in the newspaper today, we've lived it the night before."
His investigators follow several routines trying to identify corpses, but all of them are hit-and-miss.
There's constant interplay with the missing-persons unit at the Police Department, which may have 400 active case files at any given moment.
"If a call about a missing person comes in several months before a body is found, sometimes it can be difficult to make that link," Quain said.
Whenever possible, the Medical Examiner's Office takes fingerprints from its corpses, leading to more than 100 positive IDs each year, Quain estimated.
But the fingerprints normally help only for people with criminal records, whose prints are maintained in databases by local or state police, or the FBI. Sometimes the M.E.'s office reaches out for additional print sets maintained by the military and immigration officials.
As months go by and bodies remain unidentified, the office may contract for DNA analysis by an outside lab, but the problem is, there's no universe of DNA results with which to compare it.
Similarly, dental records can lead to positive IDs, but only when investigators come up with a potential match through other means.
The bottom line: Just about every year, three or four people die anonymous deaths in Philadelphia without being identified.
Other big cities have the same problem. An official with the medical examiner's office in Cook County, Ill. - about three times the size of Philadelphia - said the agency runs into eight or 10 situations a year in which it's unable to identify dead bodies.
Given the nation's problems with crime and homelessness, the numbers are surprising mostly because they're so low.
One of the 12 unidentified corpses on Quain's list, for instance, is a man who lived in an abandoned car in a wooded area near 5400 Ogontz Avenue. Sometime during the winter of 2003-04, he died, and his body was found, partly skeletonized, in March 2004.
People in the neighborhood knew the man as "Pops," but the M.E.'s office has been unable to find anyone who knew his real name.
Pops was cremated. His ashes are stored in a carefully marked plastic container, on a shelf inside the city morgue on University Avenue.
That's the temporary resting place for the ashes of 2,000 other Philadelphians who have died over the last 20 years.
Some, like Pops, were never fully identified, but the vast majority were those whose families could not be found, could not afford or otherwise chose not to make funeral arrangements themselves.
"We like to hold onto them for a time," Quain said. "Sometimes a son or daughter grows up, comes in and asks for someone's remains."
Until the mid-1980s, the city buried these Philadelphians in a potter's field in the Far Northeast, near Dunks Ferry and Mechanicsville roads.
But that burial ground ran out of space in the 1980s, and the city began cremating its unclaimed bodies instead. Officials have been developing plans to bury the ashes, but as they say in the funeral trade, the arrangements are incomplete.