One was an infant discovered in a basement trash compactor in September 1992 in Northwest.
Another was a young man whose decomposing body was discovered in September 1993 in a basement hallway of an apartment complex in Southwest. He had been shot.
One of D.C. detectives' unidentified slaying victims had a half-finished tattoo of a demon on his back.
(D.C. Police Photo)
A man clad in nylon running pants, long underwear and a white collared shirt was found in a patch of grass off the 1900 block of 12th Street NW in November 1998. A trail of blood led from the street, where he apparently had been beaten. Police believe that the man, who was in an area frequented by immigrants, was probably a recent arrival from Africa. His family may not know he's dead, investigators said.
A few others probably were immigrants, adding another layer of difficulty in locating relatives who can identify them, police said.
Several D.C. homicide detectives said they continue to think about deaths in which they couldn't perform one of their most basic functions: notifying the victims' families.
One case struck Detective Ralph Durant as particularly tragic: a woman who was fatally stabbed and beaten in August 1990. Wearing fashionably frayed jeans and a multicolored blouse, her body was found in a trash bin in the 5100 block of Sargent Road NE. Police made sketches of the victim and numerous public appeals for help. But no one came forward with information about her.
The woman was brutally killed, Durant said, and "just thrown away, like a piece of paper."
The District has had no new "John Doe" cases since 2000. Investigators attributed the drop-off to a sharp decline in homicides, stricter identification standards for many residents and better forensics and DNA testing.
The city has the most unidentified homicide victims in the area. Montgomery County reports no such cases. Fairfax County police said they had three unidentified victims going back to 1972, including a teenage girl whose remains were discovered in September 2001. A construction crew found her bones in the Tysons Corner area, and police said she died from a shotgun blast.
James Trainum, a longtime D.C. homicide detective, is helping to oversee the city's effort to bring closure to the Doe cases as part of a broader project examining old homicides for new forensic clues.
For the most part, Trainum said, detectives did everything they could to identify the bodies. They put details in national databases and had fingerprints run through FBI computers. They canvassed neighborhoods and followed up on reports and teletypes describing similar people who had vanished.
Trainum said police might get lucky by harnessing the power of new technology or even just revisiting an old case.
Police plan to enter or reenter victims' fingerprints into the FBI's fingerprint database, which did not exist when some of them were killed. It has grown exponentially over the years as more police departments have made use of it.
Trainum said police also hope to add information about the victims to another database that contains records on 5,797 unidentified bodies and 102,000 missing people in North America. Police routinely use that database -- which contains such details as a person's eye color, height, weight, scars, tattoos and dental work -- to get clues about unidentified bodies.
