Hundreds of Texas bodies remain unidentified despite new tech that helps solve cases faster

The last time anyone saw Patricia Elaine Thomas-Wardell was back in the summer of 1970. The 18-year-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 remains went unnamed, listed as “ML71-0299.” The corpse sat in the morgue there 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 1,850 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.