The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Long before the popularity of forensic crime shows like CSI, amateur sleuths were using the Internet to gather clues and connect with one another to identify the remains of unidentified corpses—tens of thousands of them—across the U.S. Science writer Halber uncovers a gritty world of web sleuths taking up cold cases of murder, suicide, and accidents, of remains unmatched to missing-persons reports. Often competing with each other, sometimes appreciated or disdained by the police, many of these sleuths develop obsessions with particular victims. Using crowd-sourcing and databases, determined sleuths have managed to identify unidentified bodies. Halber takes the reader on visits to the morgues to witness autopsies of cadavers, some deteriorated by exposure to the outdoors and harsh conditions. She explores changes in investigative techniques and the growing use of DNA to identify remains. She draws on interviews with medical examiners, police investigators, coroners, and the web sleuths themselves for an intriguing look at an underground society of quirky people easily dismissable as wackos, except that some of them occasionally solve cases the police had long abandoned. --Vanessa Bush