You may remember our recent reporting on Lorena Gayle Mosley's body being identified after her remains were found back in 1997. We reached out to the Washoe County Medical Examiner's Office to learn more about the process of identifying a body.
They can have someone come in and identify the body visually, but in other scenarios when the body is decomposed, burned, or left as skeletal remains it becomes more challenging. That's when they resort to other methods.
Dr. Laura Knight, Chief Medical Examiner and Coroner of Washoe County, told us, "We use other methods including dental examination by a forensic dentist, DNA methods, x-ray comparison from x-rays before they died to x-rays after death, and even a fingerprint comparison in people who still have fingerprints."
If none of these are an option, Doctor Knight said they would move to more advanced resources such as genealogical data bases. This was used to solve Mosley's case.
"In those cases, that's a case where we might want to do something like sequence the genome from those bones and try to compare that to genealogical data bases and that is the discipline of forensic genetic genealogy," Dr. Knight said. "That allowed us to solve a recent case."
Once they had a lead on her genealogy, they sent in Mosely's remaining fingerprints and potential name to the FBI and managed to identify her. While these are quite successful methods, Doctor knight told us that one of their biggest challenges is the funding.
"It's very expensive again to do DNA testing, so we have to do our best to find the funding if that's crowd sourcing, if that's projects like the Justice Project, that's how we can do it."
She told us that they actually have a lead on another cold case due to genealogical data bases and are hoping to get it solved soon.
