NamUs – National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

Published: 09:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 13, 2010

One step closer (maybe) to finding Billy Smolinski
Billy Smolinski quarrelled with his much-older girlfriend on their Florida vacation about calls she was getting on her cell phone. It turns out they were from the woman's other lover -- a married guy she had no intention of dumping.

By the time they flew back to Connecticut, Smolinski and Madeleine Gleason were history. Smolinski returned home. He unpacked the suitcases he had borrowed from his folks. Forty-eight hours later, on Aug. 24, 2004, at 2:59 p.m., he bought lunch at Burger King. Then a neighbor claims the 31-year-old tow-truck operator and bus driver asked him to take care of his dog for a couple of days.

That's the last time anybody saw Smolinski. The next morning the neighbor couldn't find a key that was supposed to be hidden outside Smolinski's home, so he was unable to feed the dog. Meanwhile, Smolinski's truck was still at the house, only it was parked in a spot he never used.

Right away, Smolinski's parents wanted to file a missing person's report, but the Waterbury Police Department refused, saying they would have to wait three days because that's how long the neighbor claimed Smolinski would be away.

To its credit, the department has since changed its protocol. If someone wants to report an adult missing, its officers will launch an investigation on the spot. Law enforcement agencies always say that the first minutes and hours are critical in locating a missing person. Leads have a way of going cold. So it was three days later before any investigation into Smolinski's whereabouts even started. No one ever took fingerprints from inside his truck, let alone impound it.

The one thing everyone who's looked at Smolinski's disappearance agrees on is this: He's dead.

And it's no accident his body hasn't surfaced. Someone doesn't want him found.

Investigators from Shelton, Seymour and Waterbury have brought in cadaver dogs to scour construction sites when leads suggested that Smolinski's body was dumped and encased in concrete.

Every year, more than 100,000 people vanish in the United States, never to be heard from again. Close to 4,500 of these missing souls wind up on a cold metal slab in a medical examiner's office somewhere. They have no name. Instead, they are identified by a toe tag that bears their case number. And that's how they remain until the day comes -- if ever it does -- where some law enforcement agency figures out who they are.
How's that as a way to go into your eternal rest?

Compounding the problem is that federal law does not require medical examiners and coroners to notify their brethren that they have unidentified remains. A Justice Department study shows that 80 percent of medical examiners and coroners "rarely" or "never" enter the information into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database that all law enforcement agencies access.

"It's hard to believe that there are such gaping holes in our missing persons systems," U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-5, says. "So it's no wonder that there are thousands of unsolved cases across the country."

A bill Murphy introduced has won bipartisan support in the House and is now wending its way through the Senate. Billy's Law would link the national crime database with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, also known as NamUs, established three years ago from a Justice Department task force striving to solve missing persons cases. Unlike the FBI's database, NamUs allows families of missing people to enter information, anything from dental records to DNA, to assist law enforcement agencies. The information is posted after investigators verify it.

So far, NamUs contains details on 6,200 sets of remains and another 2,800 missing people. Closer to home, in Connecticut, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has unclaimed and unidentified partial remains of 15 people that go back as far as Feb. 28, 1986.

Janice Smolinski, Billy's mom, is sure someone knows something more about her son's disappearance. Thousands of fliers have gone up all over Connecticut and Grand Central Station about him.

"Every day I miss my brother. He used to stop by a bagel place near where I live and come over in the mornings," Paula Bell, his younger sister, says. "He was always tinkering, and was into these really old cars.

He had a Camaro, a Monte Carlo that he was always fixing. And whenever I see one I want to call him and say `Bill, guess what I just saw?' But I can't," she says. "He needs to be found, and he needs to be laid to rest where he belongs. The ending of this is not going to be a happy one, but it will be a relief."

Connecticut Post columnist MariAn Gail Brown can be reached at 203-330-6288 or mgbrown@ctpost.com.

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Justice for Billy Smolinski

Janice Smolinski's son Billy disappeared over 5 years ago. She has never given up hope and is a woman of amazing strength and courage. I came to know Janice through Facebook and what I have read about her son Billy and her fight to champion a new law. Janice is championing a new law in Congress known as "Billy's Law."

Please check out the following links for more information.

Justice4Billy - Billy's Guiding Light of Hope

http://www.justice4billy.com/

Database can crack missing person cases - if used.

3/7/2010, 2:40 p.m. CST STEVE KARNOWSKI The Associated Press

(AP) — MINNEAPOLIS - A new online database promises to crack some of the nation's 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it.

The clearinghouse, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), offers a quick way to check whether a missing loved one might be among the 40,000 sets of unidentified remains that languish at any given time with medical examiners across the country. NamUs is free, yet many law enforcement agencies still aren't aware of it, and others aren't convinced they should use their limited staff resources to participate.

Janice Smolinski hopes that changes-and soon. Her son, Billy, was 31 when he vanished five years ago. The Cheshire, Conn., woman fears he was murdered, his body hidden away.

She's now championing a bill in Congress, named "Billy's Law" after her son, that would set aside more funding and make other changes to encourage wider use of NamUs. Only about 1,100 of the nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide are registered to use the system, even though it already has been hailed for solving 16 cases since it became fully operational last year.

"As these cases become more well known, as people learn about the successes of NamUs, more and more agencies are going to want to be part of it," said Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department.

Before NamUs, families and investigators had to go through the slow process of checking with medical examiner's offices one by one. As the Smolinski family searched for clues to Billy's fate, they met a maze of federal, state and nonprofit missing person databases that weren't completely public and didn't share information well with each other.

NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, allows one-stop sleuthing for amateurs, families and police. Anyone can enter all the data they have on a missing person, including descriptions, photos, fingerprints, dental records and DNA. Medical examiners can enter the same data on unidentified bodies, and anyone can search the database for potential matches that warrant further investigation.

So far, about 6,200 sets of remains and nearly 2,800 missing people have been entered, said Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the National Forensic Science Technology Center in Largo, Fla., which runs NamUs for the Justice Department.

Detective Jim Shields of the Omaha, Neb., Police Department hadn't heard about NamUs until he saw a presentation at a conference in 2008. He then had a local volunteer associated with NamUs input his data on several missing people.

Among them was Luis Fernandez, who had been missing for nearly a year before his family went to police in 2008. Shields didn't have a lot on Fernandez, a known gang member who'd been in and out of jail-only gender, race, height, weight, age and some data on his tattoos.

It proved to be enough. Just a few weeks later, similarities were spotted with the unidentified remains of a homicide victim found in a farm field in Iowa in 2007. In January, a lab informed Shields it had a DNA match-and that he could break the news to Fernandez' family.

"I could say fairly certainly that this would never have been solved if not for NamUs," Shields said.

Some other recent successes:

Paula Beverly Davis, of the Kansas City, Mo., area, had been missing for 22 years until a relative saw a public service announcement on TV in October for NamUs and told her sister, who gave it a try. Among the 10 matches her sister found were a body dumped in Ohio in 1987 that had the same rose and unicorn tattoos as her sister. DNA tests confirmed the body was Davis.

? Sonia Lente disappeared in 2002. Last June, an amateur cybersleuth with the Doe Network, a nationwide volunteer group that helps law enforcement solve cold cases, noticed similarities between Lente's description in NamUs and an unidentified body found near Albuquerque, N.M., in 2004. Dental records later established it was Lente.

Detective Stuart Somershoe of the Phoenix Police Department said his agency, which has over 500 open missing persons cases, just finished entering 100 cases into NamUs. He's hopeful his department can make a match.

"It's kind of time-consuming but I think it's a worthwhile program," Somershoe said.

NamUs grew out of a Justice Department task force working on the challenge of solving missing persons cases. One need that the task force identified was to give people who could help solve cases better access to database information.

"Billy's Law" sailed through the House late last month and is pending in the Senate, where supporters are confident it will easily pass.

The bill would authorize $10 million in grants annually that police, sheriffs, medical examiners and coroners could use to train people to use NamUs and to help cover the costs of entering data into the system. It would also authorize another $2.4 million a year to run the system and ensure permanent funding.

The bill would also link NamUs with a major FBI crime database that's now available only to law enforcement, partly because it contains sensitive information about ongoing investigations. That confidential data would be withheld from NamUs when necessary.

Billy Smolinski, of Waterbury, Conn., was last seen Aug. 24, 2004, when he asked a neighbor to look after his dog. His pickup truck was later found outside his home, though not where he usually parked it. His wallet and other belongings were still inside.

The Smolinski family first struggled to get police to take a missing adult case seriously. It took a long time for investigators to finally conclude Billy had been killed, perhaps as a result of a love triangle gone sour. The family put up reward posters, searched places where they thought his body might have been hidden and kept pressure on police.

Smolinski said she came to see how police were often overwhelmed, but to her NamUs is a "no-brainer."

"If they find remains I'm hopeful they'll identify him through NamUs," Smolinski said.

___

On the Net:

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System: http://www.namus.gov

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