LITTLE ROCK — When a decomposing body was pulled from between two barges on the Mississippi River in Mississippi County on April 19, 2003, investigators were left with few clues to determine its identity.

The barges had traveled from New Orleans, with a planned drop-off in Greenville, Miss., but no missing persons cases immediately matched with the body, which investigators could only determine was that of a white man between 30-60 years old.

One promising clue was dental work inscribed with a name: Thompson.

Several years later, after Chris Edwards began handling unidentified-remains cases for the state Crime Laboratory, attention turned back to the man between the barges and his dental work.

“We got lucky to have that name in there,” Edwards said.

Edwards contacted dentists in New Orleans and Greenville to see if they had put the work in place, but he said many dentists no longer write names or numbers on dental work.

He also sent the body’s mandible to the University of North Texas Health Science Center’s Center for Human Identification in September 2009.

After the center obtained DNA from the bone, came “a waiting period,” Edwards said.

On April 1, 2011, Edwards received notice that the remains had been identified by a family’s DNA sample as that of an Illinois man named Roy Thompson.

But Edwards’ goal is to put a name to all of the skeletons in his closet.

As the unidentified human remains and missing persons coordinator at the state Crime Laboratory, Edwards works to identify the bodies using personal objects, dental work and DNA.

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a registry for such cases, Arkansas has recorded 119 unidentified persons since 1970.

Of those cases, only 12 have been closed.

In a small room in the basement of the state crime lab, about 80 of the unidentified bodies are stored in various sized cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Some are complete skeletons, others just a handful of bone fragments.

On a 10-foot-tall metal shelving unit, dozens of these boxes and bags are stacked, each marked with a case number and the year the remains were found.

Inside the containers, every body displays its own history: a jaw wired shut, a broken bone, capped teeth and other dental work.

And as the “straight John or Jane Doe” cases come in, about 10 a year, Edwards chips away at the total.

“The unidentified bodies, I’m not letting those go anywhere,” Edwards said. “Those are going to stay until they get identified.”

Edwards now has DNA samples on file for nearly all of the unidentified remains in the agency’s bone room.

The remaining samples area waiting testing, part of a normal backlog at the UNT Center for Human Identification, said George W. Adams, the national director of operations for NamUs, at the center’s Forensic Science Unit.

He said when working with robotics, which run batches of up to 90 samples at a time, a small backlog is needed so the batches are always full.

“We need to make everything as efficient as we can,” Adams said. “The more efficient that we can become, the faster we can get the samples out and the more associations we can make.”

He said the unit, which operates on grant funding and does not charge law enforcement for testing or expert testimony, is geared toward turning over samples as quickly as possible to move investigations forward.

“In law enforcement, every hour, every day that there’s a delay in making an association or identification or getting a result means there’s more investigative work going on and that’s driving up the cost of operations,” Adams said.

Edwards said the DNA work provided by the Center for Human Identification has breathed new life in some cases. He said while reviewing an unidentified body’s file, he found scalp hair that he was able to send off to the lab.

In another case, where a hunter found a partial skull in a wooded area in Ozark in1985, DNA testing helped identify the man in 2010 by samples provided by his daughters.

“A single bone makes it very hard, even though I can send that bone off for DNA and get those results back,” Edwards said. “If I don’t get a hit, it’ll stay in the unidentified database indefinitely until there is a hit.”

With a lack of clues, he said, getting a family member’s DNA into the NamUs system could provide the link to closing an unidentified person’s case file.

Edwards has been working directly with law enforcement agencies since February 2011 to pursue the families of missing persons and obtain DNA samples for those cases.

He said he plans to hold several missing-persons events next year after the success of a similar event in August 2011.

Of the roughly 165 missing persons cases in the state at the time, Edwards said he had family contact information for 30. But family members of 23 missing persons came out and provided about 45 samples, which could provide a future match to an unidentified body.

“That’s the main thing, is finding families who have missing loved ones and get their information, get them in, get their DNA and send it in to the database,” Edwards said.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 10/29/2012