The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free PDF

once-broken collarbone. Digging through evidence boxes, the police artist pulled out jewelry and a sweater found with the remains. He fingered strands of her long hair, traced and measured the skull, and started to sketch, conferring with the anthropologist on the shape and placement of her eyes, ears, and mouth.
    Within days of the finished sketch’s appearing in a local newspaper, police had identified Roseanne Michele Sturtz, who had not been seen since the previous year. People who knew her said that the twenty-year-old nightclub dancer favored one leg and had broken her collarbone when she was six.
    A few years later, a father devastated by his son’s brutal murder funneled his considerable energy and intensity into shaking up what he perceived as a deeply flawed system. After the disappearance and horrific 1981 murder of six-year-old Adam, Florida hotel developer John Walsh became an impassioned advocate for the missing. He joined forces in 1984 with the then-new nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (its acronym, NCMEC, is pronounced “nick-mick”) in Alexandria, Virginia, which Congress would later sanction as the official national resource center and information clearinghouse for missing and exploited children. Walsh went on to host America’s Most Wanted , among the first TV shows to enlist the public’s help in solving crimes, paving the way for a growing movement: ordinary citizens working on cold cases. A decade later, the web sleuth phenomenon would force law enforcement’s hand in ways Walsh likely never anticipated.
    Fierro continued to forge her own connections within forensics and with the unidentified. When she had treated living patients, asking probing questions always gave her insight into what might be ailing them. So when confronted with UIDs—whom she saw as patients who happened to be dead—she talked to them as well. She asked them to tell her their stories, and she found that when she examined them the right way, they respondedas eloquently as if they could speak, telling her whether they were right- or left-handed, if they had ever been seriously injured or undergone surgery, their age and race, whether they took care of their teeth, if they had ever borne a child. No detail was insignificant. “You have a genius for minutiae,” Watson once chided Sherlock Holmes, who routinely made mental notes of esoteric facts. Holmes countered that recognizing distinctive calluses and scars on the hands of cork cutters, weavers, diamond polishers, and other tradesmen might help him identify an unclaimed body.
    In the late 1980s, Fierro wrote a handbook for pathologists on tricks of the trade for conducting postmortem examinations of unidentified remains. She approached FBI officials, who, years after the American Academy of Forensic Sciences speaker had called for a registry of the unidentified, were still not the least bit interested in setting up such a thing. Considering that the FBI wouldn’t have a working computer system that allowed its thirteen thousand agents to track case files electronically for almost another three decades, she shouldn’t have been surprised.
    Around the time Fierro was learning the silent language of the unidentified, Todd Matthews was a twenty-year-old factory worker in Livingston, Tennessee, who possessed an odd sense of kinship with the deceased. The fact that there were many like Tent Girl, nameless and forgotten, wouldn’t reach the public consciousness for more than another decade. The way one longtime forensic anthropologist saw it, when Todd managed to identify Tent Girl, he triggered a gold rush. The case details of long-forgotten UIDs started to find their way out of dusty filing cabinets and onto websites, becoming an untapped mother lode of potentially useful crowdsourcing data.
    CSI , with its gee-whiz forensics, premiered in 2000. The following year, 9/11 struck, and the desperate need to