Coroner exhumes body to ID woman buried 28 years ago

By Jackie Valley

Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2010 | 11:20 a.m.

Officials from the Clark County Coroner's Office gathered around a Palm Mortuary gravesite this morning as workers unearthed a casket buried since 1982.

This wasn't part of some sinister cemetery operation. It was a sanctioned exhumation with good intentions — identifying the Jane Doe buried inside a grave at the edge of the cemetery.

Since receiving a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, the coroner's office has been exhuming bodies in the hope of placing a real name to the John and Jane Does buried throughout Clark County by using modern forensic science to identify them. Today marked the 28th exhumation of the DNA Project.

Coroner Mike Murphy said he is pleased with the project's progress, especially after getting positive DNA samples from the first 10 exhumations. The others are still in the collection stage.

"So far, the progress is exceeding my expectations," he said. "You don't know if you're going to get that DNA."

Even so, no one has been identified yet, but that's largely because it is a months-long process. After lab workers extract DNA samples from the person's remains, it takes months before that information is uploaded to a national missing persons database, Murphy said, which is why he remains optimistic about identifying those individuals.

"There's a lot more to be done," he said. "We won't know our success for months."

Clark County was the first in the nation to receive this type of grant from the Department of Justice, but a similar project is under way in an undisclosed location in the country to compare the effectiveness of the initiative.

The 18-month grant was set to end in December, but Murphy said the project might be extended another six months because the funding was slow to arrive.

The coroner's office selected 52 unidentified people for the project out of its more than 160 cases based on criteria it established: burial site location, probability of success upon removal and the facts of each case. Homicides were given first priority, Murphy said.

Today's exhumation dated back to July 10, 1982, when an unidentified woman was found dead in a bus depot on South Main Street. Authorities determined the woman — probably between 55 to 60 years old — died of natural causes, but no identification items were found in her purse.

At the time, the 138-pound woman with brown/gray hair and hazel eyes was wearing blue pants, a white undershirt and a multi-colored floral print shirt.

Cemetery workers finished unearthing several feet of dirt above the casket this morning before coroner employees removed the woman's remains and placed them in a body bag for transport back to the coroner's office.

The body will remain at the coroner's office for several months as employees conduct examinations, X-rays and dental analyses, and obtain DNA samples.

Murphy said he hopes this project can eventually solve decades-old mysteries and finally answer families' questions about missing loved ones.

"Somebody speaks for all these people," he said, motioning to the flowers, flags and decorations dotting the cemetery before turning back to the unadorned grave of the Jane Doe. "Who speaks for that person?"