No resting in peace
Hundreds of Texas bodies remain unidentified despite new technology
The last time anyone saw Patricia Elaine Thomas-Wardell was back in the summer of 1970. The 18year-old new mother had hopped on a bus headed to downtown Houston, where she was studying to become a court reporter.
Patty didn’t come home that night of July 17.
Her family walked their northeast Houston neighborhood. Her mother filed a police report. She called the FBI. The family contacted reporters, spoke to radio stations, hired a private investigator, even contacted true-crime TV shows, urging them to investigate the case. Patty’s sister, Maxine Hines McNeely, went to the local office of the Social Security Administration, asking to see if anyone was using Patty’s Social Security number.
No tips or leads panned out. The family didn’t know it then, but Harris County deputies recovered skeletal remains of a young woman six months later, just a few miles from where Patty lived. They weren’t able to identify the corpse, however, and the remains went unnamed, listed as “ML71-0299.”
The corpse sat in the morgue for five years before it was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Tens of thousands of families across America suffer similar anguish,
part of a silent mass disaster. Some 600,000 people go missing every year, authorities estimate. At least 1,800 unidentified bodies lie in morgues and pauper’s graves across Texas, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), a voluntary federal database created to track missing persons, unidentified remains and unclaimed bodies.
In recent years, genetic testing and other investigative resources have brought light to cases that had gone unsolved for decades: Dean and Tina Clouse, a young couple from Florida, whose corpses were discovered east of Houston; John Almendarez, a beloved Houston father who disappeared in 2002 but wasn’t identified until 2014; and Peggy Anne Dodd, a Fort Bend woman who disappeared in late 1984 but wasn’t identified until earlier this year.
A Houston Chronicle investigation found that while advances in forensic science now offer hope for answers in once unsolvable cases like these, a host of obstacles leaves families across Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. suffering, while the dead are laid to rest nameless.
• Texas (government) forensic labs aren’t equipped to perform more advanced tests necessary to conduct genetic genealogy.
• Police departments focus on fresher cases, meaning old cases often languish.
• While experts estimate Texas has at least 20,000 unsolved homicides, most of the state’s police departments don’t have cold case units or detectives.
• The state’s largest departments have backlogs of 500 to 1,000 cases — but only one or two detectives tasked with investigating them.
• Relatives of missing persons report not being taken seriously or being told that “it’s not illegal” to leave one’s situation, family or community.
• Record-keeping is often incomplete or outdated.
• Lack of communication between departments hampers investigations, leading to cases where remains of missing persons are discovered just miles from where they disappeared.
• Texas’ fragmented death reporting system (with hundreds of elected justices of the peace) leads to further communication breakdowns.
• While government officials have passed laws to address the problem by entering missing persons cases or unidentified remains into NamUs, the Chronicle found a number of instances of cases where counties apparently are not following those laws.
• NamUs is not well known, even among law enforcement.
• Many departments have yet to establish policies or funding to embrace new forensic testing techniques, leaving individual detectives to search for grants or other resources to solve old cases.
• The federal government has spent hundreds of millions clearing out untested sex-assault kits — but allocated only $4 million for genetic genealogy to dig into nameless dead cases.
The result: Cases go unsolved unless civilian investigators pick up the slack, identifying possible matches and teaming up with true crime podcasts or other commercial entities to reopen old cases or perform DNA testing and analysis on remains that have languished for decades.
The Houston Chronicle requested information on unidentified remains from the state’s 800 justices of the peace and medical examiner’s offices from more than a dozen of the largest counties in Texas. Reporters interviewed families of missing persons, investigators, forensic anthropologists, lawmakers and medical examiners and reviewed hundreds of pages of related documents. The families’ stories made clear the scope and cost of the failures in the system.
Many, many walks
The youngest of 10 siblings, Thomas-Wardell had married just a year before and was raising her infant daughter, Cynthia Denise. Her father worked as a barber, grocer and landscaper. A small army, the kids came with him to work, bagging groceries at his store, or raking leaves and pushing lawnmowers.
They weren’t rich, but most of Thomas’ children made their ways into middle-class careers at local chemical companies or in public service jobs, as educators and firefighters.
Thomas-Wardell was determined to improve herself, Hines McNeely said. Every day, she’d head to Durham’s Business College for her stenography class, returning hours later to her daughter.
But not that day.
Her brother, Leroy Thomas, heard the news when he stopped at his mother’s house after his shift at Houston Fire Station 42 for a morning cup of coffee.
“How can she be missing,” he recalled thinking, “It confused me.”
Over the years, Thomas walked the Texas Killing Fields in League City, wondering if his sister’s body was among the remains that had been found there over the years.
“I went on many, many walks,” he said. “I walked them Killing Fields until my feet were sore.”
When they went to the police, they were met with skepticism, he said. She’d probably run away, they told him. She could be “doing anything and everything,” he said. She was probably on drugs.
“It really made me mad,” he recalled. “This is my sister — they didn’t want to do anything.”
Patty’s parents adopted and raised her baby daughter, Cynthia Denise Wardell.
She didn’t learn about her mother’s disappearance until she was 7, when her grandparents sat her down and told her that her absent father wanted to visit her.
“It bothered me all my life,” she said. She looked through newspapers, wrote letters to God, prayed, always wondering what happened to her mother.
Creating NamUs
In 2007, decades after ML710299’s body had been buried in a pauper’s grave, the Department of Justice created NamUs — housing it at the University of North Texas in 2011 — to track missing persons, nameless dead and unclaimed bodies. The voluntary database allows law enforcement, medical examiners and the public to enter details about missing persons and unidentified bodies and cross-reference them to try to match the puzzle pieces together. Law enforcement and others credit the database with helping resolve thousands of cases across the U.S..
But many law enforcement agencies don’t make use of NamUs, and other issues continue to make identifying Jane and John Does difficult, including lack of communication among agencies. A 2015 investigation from the public radio investigative program and podcast “Reveal” found a host of problems hinders the identification of Jane and John Does.
“We just don’t communicate well,” Rodriguez acknowledged.
Until 2021, just 12 states required law enforcement and medical examiners to enter their nameless dead into NamUs. Texas passed a law last year, but its legislation did not require departments to add old cases, meaning that if someone died and was unidentified in Texas before the John Doe law went into effect, they don’t need to be retroactively added to the NamUs system. Further, lawmakers didn’t create any accountability mechanisms to ensure that departments comply.
While Congress recently passed The Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act, lawmakers didn’t actually set aside any money for that task or require the sharing of information among federal databases.
One more try
In 2016, Hines McNeely decided to call the Houston Police Department again.
“I never got any peace,” Hines McNeely recalled. “I wanted to find out what happened to my sister.”
Two patrol officers arrived at her home on Seeker Street and took a report. They couldn’t find any past records on Wardell-Thomas.
Hines McNeely kept calling. Eventually, she and her family met with HPD Missing Persons Detective Darrin Buse, who took over the case on Oct. 16, 2016.
He met with the family and took DNA from Hines McNeely, one of Thomas-Wardell’s brothers, and her daughter. After he left that meeting, he logged on to NamUs and found two cases that looked promising.
He sent the family DNA samples to the University of North Texas, which, at the time, housed NamUs. In March 2017, he learned that the first lead had not panned out. He waited for the lab results on the other set of remains: a body found in January 1971 in a vacant lot in northeast Harris County.
There hadn’t been much there: a decayed purse, some sandals with chunky heels, and the skeletal remains of a young woman. The skull had a missing tooth and was damaged, perhaps by a blow to the head.
Years went by with no update. Every February, he filed a report noting that he was still assigned to the case. Then, early this April, he received another email from a forensic analyst at the North Texas lab.
“A Missing Persons DNA Association has been issued for this Missing Person case,” he wrote in a report detailing the developments.
He was finally able to speak with Hines McNeely on April 15 — it was Good Friday — and gave her the news: They’d found her.
“It spanned six years, waiting on DNA,” he said. “I really don’t know why it took so long to get a hit on it.”
Chronicle findings
Several factors lead to such delays in identification, the Chronicle found, among them lack of funding, lack of urgency in investigating such cases, lack of knowledge about resources available, lack of investigative expertise.
But a year after Texas required counties to enter information about unidentified persons into NamUs, many are not complying.
In response to its requests, the Chronicle received 274 records from justices of the peace, medical examiners and district attorneys’ offices across the state. At least 13 unidentified bodies found after John and Joseph’s Law took effect still were not entered into NamUs.
For example, Maverick County’s Precinct 3 Place 1 justice of the peace sent records of seven nameless dead found after September 2021. Yet the county’s most recent case regis
tered in NamUs is from 2017.
Lubbock County District Attorney’s Office sent the Chronicle 25 unidentified cases, but two-thirds did not reference the date the body had been found, making it impossible to tell whether the county is in compliance with the new law. Only two cases for the entire county are listed in NamUs.
Many of the 800 justices of the peace contacted by the Chronicle either did not respond to the Chronicle’s requests or noted that they did not have to comply with them because the judiciary is not subject to the Texas Public Information Act. (Medical examiners, on the other hand, are required to make such information public).
In other cases, many JPs in smaller counties said they did not know of any cases, even though they’d been listed in NamUs.
In Austin County, for example, Precinct 4 Place 1 Justice of the Peace Bernice Burger said she had not handled any nameless dead case in her precinct. But her records are not computerized, she said. The documents aren’t even in her office.
“If you want something from before 2015, it will take quite some time and research, which will incur a $25 fee,” she wrote in response to the Chronicle’s questions. “Let me know if you wish to proceed.”
NamUs shows two active cases listed in Bee County, but officials in July told the Chronicle there were none there.
The lack of communication between jurisdictions is a common problem.
The discovery in 1971 of Patty Thomas-Wardell’s body was handled by the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office, but her family had reported her disappearance to the Houston Police Department. The agencies either hadn’t communicated or hadn’t taken the missing persons reports seriously, leaving Hines McNeely and her siblings in limbo for more than half a century.
Houston Police Homicide Sgt. Richard Rodriguez said he couldn’t speak to how the case was handled when ThomasWardell first went missing, but “looking back on these old reports, and these old cases, it was a lot different than what it is now.”
“We’re required to get a lot more data now,” he said.
Harris County Sheriff ’s Homicide Lt. Robert Minchew said the outcome — at the time — reflected the reality of trying to investigate those cases in an age when technology was much more limited.
“This was pre-internet, precomputer, pre-fax machine, missing persons posters were put up at police stations and on telephone poles in neighborhoods. The sheriff ’s office had very little chance of knowing about this with the limited information they had,” he said.
To make matters worse, the sheriff ’s office had only skeletal remains — which a medical examiner had said, back then, belonged to a white female.
The lack of reliable, accessible records is widespread. When the Chronicle requested information from the Galveston County Medical Examiners’ Office, officials said their records from 1993 to 2010 were available only in old handwritten journals/log books that are searchable only by flipping page by page, line by line to find unidentified cases.
In several of the cases the Chronicle reviewed, investigators weren’t able to find initial missing persons reports.
At the Houston Police Department, the state’s largest municipal police department, homicide detectives have only just started seeking forensic genetic genealogy testing in some of its Doe cases, said Rodriguez, the cold case sergeant. The department does not have any dedicated funding for such testing — leading him and his peers to seek outside grants from nonprofits, the Department of Public Safety or elsewhere.
“Before I got here, it was not discussed,” he said. “It wasn’t being used here.”
The toll
For relatives of the missing, a sudden disappearance can lead to unending agony, a trauma that freezes them in time, said Vaile Wright of the American Psychological Association.
“In these kinds of experiences, what you end up sometimes having happen is this sense of not being able to really live one’s life,” she said. “There’s this constant sense of, ‘what else is bad is going to happen?’ ”
That’s a feeling that Alice Almendarez remembers all too well.
She last saw her father, John Almendarez, in June 2002, when she was 16. After he disappeared, her family filed a missing persons report. Like Thomas-Wardell’s family, they spent days scouring their neighborhood, talking to anyone who would listen.
At the Houston Police Department, investigators told her they couldn’t do anything.
“They told me that maybe my father didn’t want to be found or that maybe he turned away from the life he had been living,” she told the podcast documentary series “Reveal” in 2015.
Almendarez never stopped searching.
“There’s no normal day for you,” she recalled recently. “Everyone else keeps living. I felt stuck at 16.”
In 2014, she learned about NamUs, pored through its records, and found the remains of someone who she thought might be her father. She donated a sample of her DNA to UNT for entry into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System, a program that operates local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons), facilitated by NamUs, hoping they could compare it to the remains.
More than a decade after her search began, she got an answer: the John Doe was her father.
First responders had pulled John Almendarez’s corpse from Buffalo Bayou just a few weeks after his disappearance. His remains had decomposed, leaving him unrecognizable, and he’d been listed as a John Doe.
For Hines McNeely, the relief at finally getting an answer was tempered by other feelings: frustration, rage.
Her sister’s body had been discovered just a year after she went missing. It had sat in cold storage for five years, then been buried in a pauper’s grave a few years later. It had been right there, waiting to be identified.
She thought of her mother, who had wondered about her youngest daughter’s fate until she died in 1984.
Not knowing “was really hard on her,” she said. “She would have had some peace.”