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A Seattle Post-Intelligencer special report on how police here and around the nation fumble missing-person reports, originally published in 10 parts.
Monday, February 24, 2003 Part 7: Key to dead man's identity in a file all along For five years, the mystery of William Edward Brown III's identity was hidden in a file in the King County Medical Examiner's Office.
In it were descriptions of his tattoos, estimates of his height and weight and an account of the clothes he was wearing when he died of a drug overdose in a public restroom in 1997. There was nothing to suggest a name, however. It was only after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer prompted a statewide review of old John Doe cases that forensic anthropologist Kathy Taylor was able to reunite Brown's remains with his family Wednesday. The identification came after Taylor took a call about another body recently found in Newcastle. The caller, Brown's sister-in-law, wanted to know if that body could be Brown, a 35-year-old transient who had vanished five years ago, leaving his family with no idea where to look for him. The woman said Seattle police had rebuffed family members who tried to report Brown missing. With no report on file, there was nothing about Brown in a statewide system designed to track missing persons and to help match them up with dead bodies. But the caller's description of Brown as missing his front teeth reminded Taylor of an old case she had reviewed late last year at the request of the P-I. Taylor then spoke with Brown's brother, who accurately described three unusual tattoos on his body. Homeless people are often difficult to identify because families do not know exactly when they disappeared or where they were last seen, Taylor said. "These are the people who are falling through the cracks," Taylor said. "What it took in this case was the family calling in." Seattle police had no immediate comment on the case Friday. Brown's family, through Taylor, declined interview requests. The state had Brown's fingerprints, taken after an arrest, on file when he died in 1997, but print-matching technology has gotten much better since then. In 1997, the state relied on a system that generally compared only thumbprints and relied on images of inferior quality. In 2000 the state adopted a system that compares much better images of all 10 fingerprints, if available, said Cindy Stewart, a King County sheriff's identification technician. That new system was used to quickly confirm Brown's identity. INSIDE SEATTLEPI.COM
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