This episode contains discussion of homicide, autopsy, and exhumation.

This is the Fall Line.

Last year, friend of the show and frequent guest, biological anthropologist Dr. Amy Michael, called our attention to a singular project.

In Detroit, Michigan, there are numerous agencies, including the local medical examiner, the regional FBI office, and the Detroit Police Department, among others, who've launched an initiative.

And as far as we know, there's nothing else like it, not on the scale and organized by both federal and local authorities, anywhere else in the United States.

The project is called Operation United. That stands for Unknown Names Identified Through Exhumation and DNA.

The project is the brainchild of Detroit Police Sergeant Shannon Jones, who works on missing persons and cold cases.

She knew that unidentified persons, homicide cases, and missing persons' cases could be closed through the use of DNA testing.

As in most large cities, there are dozens of unidentified persons buried in the Detroit Metro area, and what are popularly known as Potter's Fields or Poppers graves.

These plots are often designated areas of cemeteries that also sell private plots, and organization of them can vary.

One cemetery might keep exhaustive records of where each individual's remains are buried, where another might bury several decedents in a comparatively narrow area, without a marker.

And that can become a challenge when a department, medical examiner, or another group, like the DNA Doe project, hopes to fund testing in a case.

As the last few decades have shown us, DNA testing is vital to closing cold cases. The issue is that perforantic magazine in Detroit, again as in most cities, quote,

the unidentified remains date back to cold cases, originating in the 1950s, way before DNA analysis was available. Even as late as 2013, it was not standard procedure to obtain DNA of unidentified victims.

This combination led to about 100 unidentified people buried between 1959 and 2013 in the city of Detroit.

This information was the inspiration for Operation United. Working with anthropologists from a number of local universities in teams of volunteers from law enforcement, emergency services, and related agencies.

The FBI Detroit Police and the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office began to excavate graves, match decedents to records, and take samples for DNA processing.

The multi-agency cooperative effort took months to plan, and the case files were scrubbed in preparation for the excavations.

Sergeant Shannon Jones of the Detroit Police and special agent Leslie Larson of the FBI explained to us that scrubbing a file simply means to go through it again with painstaking precision.

It's re-examine for anything that could be retested with our advanced technology or new leads that could be followed.

That way, even as DNA is tested, other avenues are also pursued, say a partial fingerprint that couldn't be properly examined in the 1990s, or DNA samples from clothing that can now be processed.

Her forensic magazines coverage, which was published in 2020, the 2019 Operation United excavation of 12 homicide victims identified two people, including a mother whose son had been searching for her since the late 1980s, and since then the work has continued, and the identifications have kept coming.

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