Honolulu hopes to unravel mysteries of long-unclaimed bodies using advanced DNA testing
Some may have been lost hikers, runaway children, or wanderers.
One thing connects the 58 or so remains at the Honolulu Medical Examiner's Office found with no identification card and no next of kin to claim them: They remain nameless.
Forensic pathologists hope advanced DNA testing technology will enable them to attach names to all of the agency's unidentified people. But for now, five cases - all children and teens - have been sent for additional testing thanks to a $50,000 grant from Texas-based cold case resolution company Othram.
They include the partial skeleton of a teenager found in Keehi Lagoon near the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in 2002; parts of the body of a 7- to 10-year-old boy discovered in Waianae in 2000; six fingers of a girl under the age of 4 who was found in Honolulu in 2012; and the skeletal remains of an adolescent found mixed with animal bones inside of a vase purchased in Honolulu in 2015.
The medical examiner's office wouldn't provide additional details about the cases, but medicolegal investigator Charlotte Carter said each represents a person whose family deserves closure.
The five cases sent to Othram for testing were chosen in part because they are juveniles who DNA experts felt had a good chance of being identified through advanced technology.
One case is connected to a 2014 homicide, so the medical examiners office declined to provide information while the investigation continues.
For the case involving the severed fingers, it's unclear whether they belong to a child who died or only suffered trauma to their hands. The other cases could be missing children, a possibility that can't be ruled out until DNA testing is complete.
Carter said she's committed to resolving the other unidentified cases in Honolulu's morgue, especially if DNA testing becomes more accessible and affordable.
"Anybody who's unidentified deserves to have a chance at being found and identified," she said, "and given their name back."
The Honolulu City Council in June accepted the grant from Houston-based Othram, which performs forensic genetic genealogy testing, which combines DNA analysis with genealogy research.
So far, Carter said, none of the samples have been identified.
Sparse information about each case is available publicly through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, an organization funded by the National Institute of Justice, which runs a national database of unidentified, missing and unclaimed persons. Representatives with NamUs didn't respond to interview requests.
For some cases, very little is known.
For the skeletal remains found inside the vase in Honolulu, for example, forensic pathologists could not identify an age range, gender, height, weight or year of death - only that the person was still an adolescent.
Other cases include more clues. The young boy found in Waianae in 2000 was suspected to have died that same year. He was recovered without a torso and was missing one or more of his limbs and one or both of his hands.
A forensic artist reconstructed his face, which is included on his NamUs profile, showing what he may have looked like in life. He's listed in the missing children's database as "John Waianae Doe 2000."
Carter said it can take a year or more for DNA testing results to come back.
Thus far, her agency has worked on one successful identification with Othram.
Skeletal remains unearthed by a construction crew in Manoa in 2010 were tested and later identified as belonging to William Hans Holling Jr., a Washington man last seen by friends and family in January 1985. Othram identified Holling's remains and the Honolulu Police Department confirmed his identity in July. No arrests have been made, and the investigation remains open.
Serial killer-rapist identified with the technology
Forensic genetic genealogy testing enables investigators to search for an unidentified person's relatives as a starting point and, with the help of public records, to build a family tree they hope will get them closer to an identification.
The method became popular in criminal investigations in the 2010s after companies like 23andMe and Ancestry came onto the market. Those companies block law enforcement agencies like the FBI from their databases, but investigators can use others, like GEDMatch, which is public-facing, and FamilyTreeDNA, which allows limited access by law enforcement, according to Stephen Kramer, a former FBI in-house counsel and founder of Indago Solutions, a DNA identification company.
While still working with the FBI in 2018, Kramer helped identify the Golden State Killer using forensic genetic genealogy testing. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., pleaded guilty to 13 murder and rape charges for crimes committed in the 1970s and '80s and has admitted overall to 161 crimes involving 48 victims, including dozens of rapes.
Kramer's company recently identified Albert Lauro as the murder suspect in the 1991 killing of Dana Ireland on the Big Island.
During a presentation to University of Hawaii law students this month, Kramer said genetic analysis of the DNA found on Ireland's body connected him to ancestry information about the suspect. He discovered the man was 83% Filipino, meaning he had three Filipino grandparents. He was also 5% European and Scandinavian, with the rest a mix of Hawaiian, Maori and South Pacific Islander.
That told Kramer the suspect's fourth grandparent was about 30% European and 25% Pacific Islander, he said. Kramer focused on that grandparent because it's generally easier to find public records for people of European descent.
He used records to identify people with this ancestry who had moved to Hawaii and married into Filipino families, leaving very few potential matches. He traced a family tree with three Filipino grandparents and one grandparent descending from Europeans, Scandinavians and Pacific Islanders.
There, he found his suspect.
Investigators followed Lauro by picking up a fork he discarded, which was tested against a DNA sample from Ireland's body.
Detectives later reconfirmed Lauro's identity with a swab when they brought him in for questioning on July 19. Hawaii County Police Chief Ben Moszkowicz later said police didn't have enough probable cause to arrest Lauro for Ireland's murder, and they let him go.
He killed himself four days later.
Factors hindering use of the technology
Lack of funds is the main obstacle to more intensive screening and forensic genetic genealogy on cold cases, Carter said. Each case costs about $10,000, and NamUs pays for Honolulu to send around five cases per year for testing.
The 58 unidentified cases at the Honolulu Medical Examiner's Office date back to about 1966 and include people found under a variety of circumstances.
Many are skeletal remains uncovered at construction sites, Carter said. Others are remains discovered by hikers that likely belonged to people who were homeless and living in encampments in remote parts of the island.
If remains are found on tribal lands, are more than 50 years old or otherwise suspected to be Native Hawaiian, medical examiners contact the Department of Land and Natural Resources' State Historic Preservation Division for confirmation. If the remains are confirmed to be Native Hawaiian, the agency takes custody of them for repatriation.
But some unidentified cases involve people who died fairly recently and, although they were physically recognizable when they were found, still haven't been claimed by family members or matched through any national database.
Forensic pathologists haven't been able to identify a woman fatally struck by a car while trying to cross a road on May 21, 2016, Carter said. She was between 50 and 75 years old, of Asian or mixed Asian ancestry and appeared to be homeless, according to her NamUs profile. Her DNA was run through the national database and Honolulu police collected her fingerprints and sent them to the FBI but received no matches.
A few people have come forward thinking they knew her, but her identity wasn't able to be confirmed, Carter said.
"That is a person who was a victim of a crime," she said. "But, unfortunately, we're not able to figure out who she is."
The most recent case was discovered on Oct. 9 when military personnel doing a training exercise found two femurs inside a camping tent off a hiking trail in Haleiwa.
Carter said her office doesn't track statistics on identifications but said usually one or two unidentified remains are ID'd each year through DNA testing. If a person is identified but their next of kin can't be found, their case is moved to NamUs's unclaimed persons database.
If family members are found, they are able to collect their relative's remains for burial or cremation, Carter said.
She hopes that as technology improves, testing will become more accessible so every case can be resolved.
"I just think everybody deserves a name and their family deserves an answer," she said. "We have a lot of families who are out there wondering what happened to somebody they love. And now that there's new technologies, we're maybe going to get a little step closer to having more closure or more processing to that new normal for those families."
