Some human remains in Tarrant County have gone unidentified for years. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office is making a new push to discover who these people were, with the help of a $500,000 federal grant.
The money from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance will allow the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office to hire an investigator whose main focus is cold cases, county documents show. The office also plans to do a full review of all cold cases dating back to 1969, when the office first opened, according to human identification lab chief Dr. Christian Crowder.
Investigators will exhume and evaluate remains that were buried before the advent of DNA technology, update federal databases with new information, and take advantage of new technology to generate leads, Crowder said.
“I would love to, of course, identify everyone, but if just one identification comes out of this, that is a huge success,” Crowder said. “This is a person who had no name family that's probably been wondering what happened to them."
It’s rare for medical examiner’s offices to hire someone whose sole focus is cold cases, Crowder said. He points to New York City’s forensic cold case team as a success story. Crowder hopes to prove how effective this approach is so the county can keep the specialist after the grant expires in 2026, he said.
People’s bodies end up at the medical examiner’s office when their death requires an investigation, whether they died from suicide, homicide or other unknown circumstances.
A relatively small number of people remain unidentified for long periods. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office sees 4,000 cases a year, and only about 900 need identification, Crowder said. In the majority of those cases, fingerprints are enough to figure out who someone was.
But sometimes, none of the regular methods work. Fingerprinting, dental records, comparison to national databases - all turn up nothing. The person's identity remains a mystery.
In Tarrant County, that happens to one or two people a year, said Dr. Chris Rainwater, senior forensic anthropologist for the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office. Since 2000, the office has ended up with 31 cold cases, he said, and there are some cases that go back even further in the county.
As a forensic anthropologist, Rainwater is an expert on anything to do with bones and skeletons. With the grant, the Medical Examiner’s Office will buy a scanner that can create 3D images of skulls, which state law enforcement can use to reconstruct a person’s face – creating an image someone out in the world might recognize.
“That’s something that hopefully will get some more public interest, and ultimately, hopefully, lead to an identification of our unknown,” Rainwater said.
The grant will also pay for some unidentified remains to undergo genealogical analysis. That's when investigators take someone’s genetic information and compare it to publicly available databases, matching them with possible relatives.
If investigators can find a distant cousin who has given their genetic information to a public database, they can use that to work backwards and identify a Jane or John Doe.
That’s how law enforcement found Glen McCurley, who was convicted in 2021 for the murder of a teenager named Carla Walker in Fort Worth almost 50 years earlier.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center (HSC) in Fort Worth recently became the first public lab in the country to offer this type of genealogical analysis, according to an HSC press release.
Through HSC, the analysis – which is usually expensive, and done through private labs – will be free for law enforcement, said Dr. Michael Coble, executive director of HSC’s Human Identification Lab.
Forensic genealogical analysis is helpful, but it has some limitations, Coble said. Most of the people in the genealogical databases are white. Other racial and ethnic groups are not as well-represented, “but there are successes that do happen,” he said.
On Friday, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, will hold a press conference at HSC alongside Coble to present his latest legislative proposal: the Carla Walker Act, which would create federal funding for forensic genealogical analysis to “aid in resolving previously unsolvable cold cases," according to a press release.
