HopeRains
My name is Lisa Coburn Kesler.
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- Updated: Sep. 08, 2022, 2:03 p.m.|
- Published: Sep. 07, 2022, 8:02 a.m.
The decapitated head of a Jane Doe found in the backyard of a Detroit home on Nov. 27, 2008. A mummified, naked woman discovered in a Detroit alleyway on March 26, 2009. A stripped prostitute slain by a serial killer left in an abandoned home in Detroit on June 5, 2006.
Their bodies are buried in unmarked graves, or cremated.
Once, they had names, lives, stories, but it will be difficult, if not impossible, to ever identify them now.
Their autopsy reports are gone.
Related: Breanna Sharp, 13, died in a stairwell. No one reported her missing.
About 80% of 326 Michigan’s unidentified remains examined by MLive were found in Wayne County, and in 224 cases, they are without autopsies, an MLive analysis found. Contrary to what experts say is customary or ethical, records 12 years old or older are no longer available at all.
“How is that possible?” Oakland County Medical Examiner Dr. Ljubisa J. Dragovic said. “These are death records. Death records are permanent records. To hear that they got rid of unidentified bodies without records. This is crazy and those people should be criminally charged. This is serious business.”
Michigan’s most populous county, as of March, had 261 total Jane or John Does, several times more than all the other counties combined. The Wayne County total had increased to 271, as of Sept. 1.
On a per capita basis, Wayne County ranks second among the nation’s 30 most-populous counties in the FBI-run National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), behind only New York County, New York.
Attempts to garner an explanation regarding the missing autopsies from the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, an institution with a documented history of deficiencies, have been unsuccessful.
In addition to calling and emailing the medical examiner’s office multiple times, an MLive reporter visited Dr. Carl Schmidt, medical examiner for 28 years, at his home in Lambertville on Aug. 9. He declined to speak.
“I would like those (medical examiners) to sit down with a family of a long-term missing person and explain to them why they didn’t feel the need to keep records,” said Nina Innstead, social media director for Missing in Michigan, a nonprofit that helps find missing persons. “I think it should be a face-to-face meeting and they should have to look at the people that they are not serving by refusing to maintain these records long term.”
“If the department is not maintaining their unidentified records, it could potentially be depriving a waiting family of answers.”
Listen and subscribe to the full “Michigan Crime Stories: What Happened to Breanna?” series on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Using the Freedom of Information Act, MLive in March requested autopsy reports related to the 326 John and Jane Does reported in Michigan since 1959 in the publicly accessible NamUs. That request yielded 67 autopsy reports or other death investigation records.
There is no law requiring autopsies on unidentified remains, but based on the circumstances, pathologists told MLive they usually occur.
Related: There are 326 John and Jane Does in Michigan. Here’s how experts ID them
Of the 261 Wayne County cases for which MLive requested autopsies, including 205 from Detroit, 37 were provided. There are 14 unidentified remains discovered up to five years ago for which the county said autopsies remain incomplete.
“All records requested before 2010 ... (are) denied,” said a FOIA response letter sent to MLive. “After a diligent search for the requested records, we have determined and certify the records do not exist.”
The rest of the state fared a little better. Of 61 non-Wayne County cases, medical examiners provided autopsy records for 30.
Michigan law requires county medical examiners to investigate the cause and manner in any death that is sudden, violent or which a medical physician is not in attendance.
It is also their duty, by law, to identify bodies.
“All medical examiners offices want to treat the decedents with the dignity they deserve and part of that is identifying them and being able to return them to their loves ones,” said Carolyn Isaac, director of the Michigan State University Forensic Anthropology Lab. She was speaking generally about the duty of medical examiners. “So, I think it’s a high priority but we’ve all had it where we get crazy busy and certain things fall off our radar just because we don’t have the bandwidth to tackle everything.
“That’s why I think the relationship between law enforcement and medical examiners and other forensic practitioners is really important because then you have a safety net to make sure that those cases don’t get lost.”
Records play a critical role in making an ID
Wayne County, with nearly 1.7 million residents has, by far, the busiest medical examiner in the state. According to a recent audit of the office’s activity, it conducted 2,720 full or partial autopsies in 2021, in addition to 890 death examinations that don’t require surgical procedures.
Oakland County, with about 400,000 fewer people, reported 999 autopsies in 2020.
The National Association of Medical Examiners, which accredits medical examiners across the nation, limits the number of autopsies a pathologist may conduct in a year to 325. Based on the seven pathologists Wayne County employed at the time of their recent audit, each would have to perform 357 autopsies per year to keep up with the county’s workload.
Often it’s completed and detailed reports that make the difference.
The national unidentified remains database contains information related to bodies – or parts of bodies – that arrive in morgues across the nation without names, as well missing persons. In many cases, the missing are those Jane and John Does. But it’s not always easy to match the two.
Reports might lack important identifiable traits, like age, race and even sometimes sex, due to decomposition, disfigurement or because the data entry wasn’t thorough.
A decomposed body of a man was discovered in basement of a vacant Detroit house in 1999. A government ID was nearby but the database doesn’t list the name that appeared on the ID. Another record mentions a class ring found on a dismembered finger in 1977 but doesn’t identify the high school. And rarely in records are the addresses where the remains were found listed. Instead, they list “vacant building” or “abandoned house.”
The federal list includes houseless people who froze to death in abandoned buildings and weren’t found for years; dismembered, torched or hidden and decomposed homicide victims; water-logged drowning victims; pieces of bone or skeletons discovered in basements, beaches or garbage piles; and newborn babies discarded by their mothers.
As of Aug. 26, there were 14,141 unidentified remains and 21,012 missing persons listed nationally.
Wayne County officials haven’t said if the records were intentionally destroyed as part of a records retention policy, or somehow lost.
Michigan Medicine, part of the University of Michigan, has been contracted to operate the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office since 2011, but also wouldn’t comment on the missing autopsies. The university is letting the contract lapse next month.
In multiple instances, medical examiners across the state, or their staff, didn’t know where the paperwork was – or if it still existed. Often, the forensic pathologists who reviewed deaths years ago are gone or dead themselves.
“I have no information regarding a case involving unidentified charred remains discovered on June 24, 2011,” said Dr. Lois R. Goslinoski, the medical examiner for Manistee and Benzie counties in response to one request. “My case list for that year does include a notation that ‘unidentified bones’ were reportedly found, but there is nothing in the file.”
Dr. Stephen Cohle, chief medical examiner for Kent County, said his office retains biologic and other material associated with any unidentified cases, including blood, hair, photographs, and a bloodspot card, for as long as it takes, “basically in perpetuity.”
“I haven’t researched any standards to be honest because I don’t think I need to,” Cohle said. “I know that’s the right thing to do.”
Dragovic said all Oakland County death records and autopsies are permanently stored. It’s been that way since he was hired as the medical examiner 31 years ago. It began with microfiche and has transferred to digital storage.
The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office recently created a database, posted on its website, of unclaimed or unidentified remains. As of Aug. 26, the office listed 32 remains dating back to 2014. Ten of those cases didn’t appear in the national database, raising questions over the thoroughness of data in the national database and what the total number of unidentified remains in Wayne County really is.
‘They just ignore you’
For those looking for a missing friend or relative, no paper trail often means a dead end. With older cases that lack DNA and death investigation records, they must rely on police and medical examiners to connect the dots.
Kimberly Alice King vanished from her Warren neighborhood in September 1979. Her then-16-year-old sister, Kathie Lucas, now 60, has been searching ever since.
Lucas said she’s been told by police and others to have faith in authorities that her sister’s body has never been found and listed as a Jane Doe.
“But when you demonstrate incompetence, I can’t build confidence,” said Lucas, of Armada.
MLive has reviewed multiple cases in which families reported a missing person and spent years searching for their loved one, only to find the bodies had already been found, stored in morgue coolers for an extended period of time prior to burial. Some were already listed in the national database as missing persons.
Related: Search database of Michigan’s Jane and John Does
A Detroit-area family collectively sued the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office and Dr. Schmidt in March 2020 over the office’s failure to ID relative Timothy William Majchrzak for nearly a year and a half, despite Majchrzak arriving at the morgue with his ID.
His disappearance was reported to four police agencies and entered into several databases, including NamUS. Detroit police responded to the death scene. Relatives called the medical examiner’s office and were told he wasn’t there.
It turned out Majchrzak’s name was misspelled, leading to the extreme delay in notifying the next of kin.
The lawsuit was dismissed, citing the lack of clearly established constitutional right to timely death notification and qualified immunity for Schmidt, but illustrates the disconnect that sometimes exists.
Dr. Dragovic of Oakland County said his investigators constantly work with law enforcement to quickly identify Jane or John Does and notify next of kin. A lack of communication or due diligence are usually to blame when someone remains unidentified, he said.
“That’s the human factor,” Dragovic said. “It’s either: who cares, why should I care, that kind of thing. The general attitude of any person working in this environment should be to be constantly on alert ... If we are not on the same page, we have loose ends, there are errors, mishaps and mistakes.”
Majchrzak’s family are among the lucky ones. Numerous other families will likely never know how or if their loved ones perished, since they were buried or cremated before DNA was regularly collected from unidentified remains.
The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office is amid transition. The county paid Michigan Medicine nearly $6.5 million in fiscal year 2021, and that contract expires Sept. 30. The county is seeking a new operational contract with Wayne State University and appears to be cutting ties with Schmidt, who’s currently employed by Michigan Medicine, according to county spokeswoman Tiffani Jackson.
“I am supportive of the county’s pending agreement with (Wayne State University) because it is a new beginning,” Wayne County Board of Commissioners Chair Alisha Bell said. “We thank Dr. Carl Schmidt for his nearly 30 years of heading the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office. However, recent findings did uncover critical management mistakes and, therefore, a change was imminent.
“A search for a new chief medical examiner will result in fresh ideas and an office sure to meet the needs and provide comfort to family members at a time of grief and sorrow.”
An Aug. 1-published, 38-page audit of the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office conducted by the county Auditor General, found at least 15 deficiencies, including: The loss of power for two days in June 2021 that escalated the decomposition of bodies; too few pathologists and some without necessary certifications needed to meet accreditation standards; a failure to log public complaints; and inaccurate data related to the location of remains in the records system.
“When you are talking 10, 15, 30, 40 years ... they are still looking for answers. They are still calling police departments, and saying, ‘hey, maybe they were an unidentified in 1980, and we just missed it,’” said Innstead of Missing in Michigan. “So to hear there are no records is crushing.”
Lucas, whose sister disappeared in the 1970s, knows she is probably dead, though she clings to some hope of a miraculous return. She believes there’s a good chance a medical examiner’s office, somewhere in Michigan or beyond, long ago buried her sister anonymously.
But her investigative efforts have led to an impasse.
She sent her own Freedom of Information Act requests to medical examiners in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland Counties, and Ontario, Canada, for records related to unidentified females found near the time her sister disappeared.
They all said there were none, but she’s skeptical. Lucas said she appealed the denial of records in Wayne County.
“They don’t even reply to you on the appeal,” she said of her experience. “They don’t even send you back a notice saying we affirm what the morgue found and here’s our reasoning for that. They just ignore you.”
Lucas feels the pressure of time.
“I turned 60 this year and it was the realization that we are not too many years away from not having anyone on this planet who actually knew Kimberly,” she said. “We’re running out of time for someone to care.”
Lucas and her sister lived with their grandmother, Anna Laura King, when Kimberly disappeared. Before she died, King bought an extra cemetery plot next to her own, so Kimberly’s remains would one day had a resting place.
“Wherever it is (Kimberly) is, it’s not where she’s supposed to be.”
