The Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state, bank tellers, grandmothers, schoolteachers, farmers, truck drivers, all walks of life are well represented. They search for information to identify the dead who are found under bridges, back roads, morgues, and buried in unmarked graves. They are often successful. There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the United States according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100.000 listed as missing.
The law enforcement agencies simply do not have the man-power or the time to look for information that could identify these unnamed bodies and missing people. This is where the Doe Network comes in. These volunteers sit at their computers long hours trying to find any information that will give a body a name. It is like piecing together a puzzle, and this late night repetitive work is sometimes disheartening and frustrating. Hours and weeks frequently lead to nowhere, but cracking the case is what makes the job worthwhile says Todd Matthews an automotive parts supplier. After work, he drives home and works another seven hours on his computer checking for information on bodies that have never been identified. He looks at morgue photographs; artist sketches, forensic reconstruction, and any thing that might help solve a case. Sometimes a simple thing like a mole on the face leads to an identification.
Matthew's obsession with "Does" began twenty years ago when his wife, Lori, told him about an unidentified young woman wrapped in canvas that Lori's father found in Georgetown Ky., in 1968. She had red-brown hair and a gap toothed smile. The townspeople called her "Tent Girl." Tent Girl haunted Matthew. He wondered what her name was, and who her family was. He began the search at the library and bought a computer. While searching for the name of "Tent Girl', Matthew discovered that people all over the country were doing the same thing -a network of amateur sleuths.
If the correct information- DNA, photographs, police reports, dental records is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing, and so the volunteers continue fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.
Every few months Matthew drives to Ky. to a lonely spot in Georgetown to visit the grave of the Doe that changed his life. He tells of the night in 1998 when searching the chat rooms for the missing, he happened upon a message from Rosemary Westbrook of Benton Ark. Westbrook sought information about her sister, Bobbie, who was 24 when she went missing 30 years earlier. Bobbie had married a man who worked in a carnival, and was last seen in Lexington. She had red-brown hair and a gap toothed smile.
