Internet Sleuths

Special to - BBC Radio 4

There are more than 100,000 missing people in the United States alone and at least 6,000 unidentified bodies. With the authorities struggling to solve so many cases, thousands of volunteers are using the internet to try to match the missing with the unidentified.

It all started for me with the "Tent Girl", so called because her body was found wrapped up in a canvas tent bag. I heard about the case when I first met my future wife Lori at school. She had come to Tennessee from Kentucky and told me how her father had found a murdered girl in a field near Georgetown in the 1960s.

Her name, "Tent Girl" struck my soul. It was as if it were almost familiar. As Lori and her family became part of my own family, so did the Tent Girl. Two of my siblings died of natural causes as infants early in my life. She was no different to them in my mind. I had a place to visit my siblings, but Tent Girl didn't have any family. So she became part of my own family. And I became determined to find out who she was.

I went to her grave many miles away in Kentucky. I visited newspapers in the area to look through hard copy archives, searching both for stories about the Tent Girl, as well as any accounts detailing a missing person that matched her description.

For 10 years that is how I conducted the search. I spoke to investigators and journalists by phone or in person, looking for any shred of data. I felt so close yet so far, as if the information was just outside my field of view. As I worked, I also learned many things about how to search for information.

When the Internet arrived, the main thing it changed was communication. In the early days the vast online resources available today did not exist. But I could do my searches by e-mail, and information about how to contact government and media offices was easier to find. Research was much easier, more affordable and realistic. Distance was no longer an obstacle.

But perhaps more important was that it ended the isolation of individual investigators. Once the World Wide Web connected the planet, a natural gathering took place. I found other like-minded people doing the same kind of work.