As serial killers bury victims, this Fort Worth lab helps dig out their lost identities

Identifying victims of serial killers can be a tedious job — that’s if you actually have remains to work with.

For years, the Center for Human Identification lab at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth has been the go-to place for law enforcement shops across the U.S. to get help in sorting out evidence from crime scenes.

The lab recently confirmed the identification of one of Washington state’s notorious serial killer, Gary Ridgway, who is also known as the Green River Killer. In 2011, the lab lent the Cook County Sheriff’s Office a hand by helping to confirm the identities of 8 of John Wayne Gacy’s as then unknown victims.

“This again demonstrates it is never too late for hope,” CHI Executive Director Michael Coble told the Star-Telegram in an email. “These families can have answers, even decades later.”

Often decades slip away without resolution to a crime, adding frustration to the families’ grief.

“Forensic Genetic Genealogy has been a real paradigm shift for its ability to find relatives for human identification. Even cases that were once believed to be unsolvable can be resolved,” Coble said. “A case like this represents thousands of hours of dedicated work by law enforcement, forensic scientists, medicolegal professionals, prosecutors and volunteers before it reaches this point.”

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How Fort Worth lab helped unearth indentity of Bones #20

The King County Sheriff’s Office earlier this week announced it had identified the remains of the Green River Killer’s last victim as that of Tammie Liles.

Back in 2003, Ridgway led authorities to a site on the Kent-Des Moines Road near Seattle where he claimed that he had left a victim’s body. A search uncovered several bones and some teeth, but no skull or most of the major bones.

Investigators sent samples of what they found to the CHI lab in Fort Worth to extract a DNA profile. That data was then uploaded to the FBI’s National DNA Index System, a national database that contains the DNA profiles of missing people and unidentified remains.

“With no identification made on these remains, investigators labeled her as Bones #20,” according to a sheriff’s press release..

Washington investigators partnered with Othram Forensic Sequencing Laboratory to tentatively identify Bones #20 as Liles two decades later. Using DNA from Liles’ mother, the Fort Worth lab last year was able to conclusively confirm the remains are of Liles using traditional STR and mitochondrial DNA testing.

“While Liles had originally been identified as a victim in 1988, the discovery of Bones 20 in King County and subsequent forensic testing last year has concluded that the remains are those of Liles,” according to a press release..

Liles was one of dozens of women identified as victims of the Green River Killer.

Ridgway was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to the murders of 49 vulnerable girls and women in the Seattle area. He preyed on sex workers and runaways in the 1980s and 1990s — earning the moniker of Green River Killer because his first victims were found by the waterway meandering through suburbs south of Seattle.

“The King County Sheriff’s Office is immensely grateful for the work of Othram Forensic Sequencing Laboratory, The University of North Texas, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, and all others who worked on helping to identify Tammie Liles,” King County Sheriff Patricia Cole-Tindall said in a press release.

Closing the loop on John Wayne Gacy’s killing spree

Gacy is remembered as one of history’s most bizarre killers, largely because of his work as an amateur clown. The Chicago-area building contractor lured young men to his home by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work. There, he stabbed one and strangled the others. Most of the victims were buried under his home, but others were dumped in a river.

Gacy killed 33 young men, but only 25 of the victims were ever identified using personal belongings, medical records and Gacy’s admissions, confessions and know relationships with some of the men. That left 8 victims still to be identified.

The Cook County Sheriff’s Office decided to reopen the Gacy file in 2011 as a cold case, exhuming bone fragments and sending eight sets of mandibles and maxilla to the CHI lab in Fort Worth for DNA processing.

“Well, the 8 cases that we processed, we were able to get full mitochondrial DNA profiles off of all 8 of those, and then partial STR profiles off of 6 of 8 of those,” Dixie Peters, current technical leader of the Forensic Genetic Genealogy at CHI, said in 2017.

Peters explained that the condition of most of the bones were exceptionally poor. Years of moisture and bacteria contamination had ate into the integrity of the skeletal remains. Extracting DNA was going to be a challenged. To help, the sheriff’s office asked family members of the missing men to send in their DNA.

The Fort Worth lab confirmed in 2017 that 16-year-old Jimmy Haakenson of Minnesota was among the dozens of bodies found in a crawl space of Gacy’s Chicago-area home in 1978 — nearly 40 years since he disappeared.

What is the Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth?

The Center for Human Identification sorts through hundreds of unidentified remains each year — 390 in a recent year according to its 2021 annual report.

Forensic anthropologists at the Fort worth lab sort through bones to help identify the person and possibly the cause of death. Local law enforcement agencies, medical examiners, coroners, and Justices of the Peace often look to the CHI for assistance in complex and unsolved cases.

“As the first accredited public lab to offer this technology, the Center for Human Identification at The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth is committed to assisting Texas law enforcement at no cost to help bring resolutions to families who have had to wait far too long for answers about their loved ones,” Coble said.

Evidence from criminal or missing person cases are often submitted directly to the lab. The lab’s assessments have also been used to help exonerate people who have been wrongly accused of a crime.

“The integrity of the evidence is maintained in every case by strict security and quality assurance standards at every step of the evidentiary chain of custody,” according to a CHI report.

The lab analyzes the remains they receive then create biological profiles to tease out the lost identity of the victims through medical and dental records. How the unidentified people died, the extent of the trauma they endured, are all part of the lab’s purpose.

“CHI’s primary operational mission is to assist investigations seeking to provide answers for victims, their families, and the community; to develop investigative leads to assist in resolving criminal cases; and to provide information that may exculpate individuals who have been wrongly associated with crime scene evidence,” the lab states in its annual report.

By request of law enforcement agencies, lab personnel will go out on the field to help with the search, excavation and documentation of remains.

The lab is located on the campus of the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. It is accredited by the American National Standards Institute’s accreditation panel and the FBI’s Quality Assurance Standards for Forensic DNA Testing Laboratories.r documentation and integrity of the remains.