SNOHOMISH COUNTY: Does
Welcome to Washed Away, a podcast that breathes new life into Washington state’s coldest cases. I’m Ashley Smith and I was recently invited to take a tour of the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office and I got to interview investigator, Jane Jorgensen. We talked about the details of her job, Snohomish County’s unidentified and recently identified cases, and how much of a role genealogy plays in finding out who someone was. You’ll hear a lot of names, dates, and locations on this special episode as we try to bring more attention to folks who either still need help to solve the mystery of who they were or to help figure out who killed them.
Sources for this episode include: SnoCo Unidentfied and SnoCo Identified. Find my episode with forensic artist Natalie Murry here. Other useful links related to how Medical Examiner’s do their job: NCIC, GEDmatch, The Shared cMProject Tool, Othram, and NAMUS.
If you have any information that could potentially help identify any of the people mentioned in this episode, please contact the Snohomish County Medical Examiner or Sheriff’s Office.
Transcript-
Ashley: Welcome to washed away, a podcast that breeds new life into Washington State's coldest cases. I'm Ashley Smith. And I was recently invited to take a tour of the Snohomish county medical examiner's office. And I got to interview investigator Jane Jorgensen. We talked about the details of her job, Snohomish county's unidentified, and recently identified cases. And how much of a role genealogy plays in finding out who someone was? You'll hear a lot of names, dates, and locations on this special episode. As we try to bring more attention to folks who either still need help to solve the mystery of who they were or to help figure out who killed them.
Jane Jorgensen:
So my name is Jane Jorgensen and I'm an investigator with the Snohomish county medical examiner's office. I started in late 1995 in king county. I fell in love with this type of work. When I did an internship at the Rapahoe county coroner's office, uh, out in Colorado. And I just loved everything about it. I identifying people figuring out what happened to them before they died, helping the doctor, uh, during the autopsies. I just love solving puzzles and mysteries. And, uh, that's what got me into it. It's not like on TV, cuz it's way more glamorized on TV. It's it's much more boring in person and we don't, you know, dress Ian heels and skirts like they do on TV to go to crime scenes. <laugh> the other thing I think that's misleading about television is it takes a long time for results to come back.
Jane Jorgensen:
Like some of our lab results can take up to a couple months and people used to on TV having all their results back in an hour in the case being solved. And it just doesn't work that way in real life. Also it's oftentimes very traumatic for people to view their deceased family members and on TV. A lot of times they show people going into the morgue and they pull out a body out of some cabinets on a wall and they identify 'em that way. And we so rarely do that because it's very traumatic on the family members. We try to do it other ways than that. So, but sometimes people expect that
Ashley:
If you've never been to a medical examiner's office, that's probably a good thing. But honestly it looked like any other office building. There was a front desk, a waiting room, some cubicles, uh, conference room where we recorded this interview and then a really large room kind of like a garage, very cold and gray and clean. And that's where autopsies are performed. I don't know why I was surprised that it smelled in there. We've all heard that before. Right. But I was, and it did though, just faintly. Jane was actually surprised. I even noticed. And of course, you know, she's used to it. She's there every day. She took me to another large room in that building with a storage closet where there was a handful of boxes sitting on metal shelves. That's where the remains the, the bones of unidentified folks wait to get their names back. And it's where the people we're talking about today are being kept safe. I had a million questions for Jane, as you might imagine, but I thought I'd start with where she starts on an investigation.
Jane Jorgensen:
So we start with, um, the scene and the items found at the scene. For example, if there's clothing or jewelry or sometimes there's a wallet with an ID on it, that's super simple. And that's what we hope happens, but it doesn't in a lot of cases. So we just start from there. Probably the first thing you would do is while we're there with the police, you know, uh, either unbearing the decedent or gathering them, they're usually skeletonized remains. We find out from the law enforcement agency, do they have any missing people in their area? And so we'll start looking at those people. First, once we get the dece back to our office, they get looked at by a forensic pathologist, a forensic anthropologist and a forensic ontologist. The forensic pathologist is looking for trauma and also post-mortem interval. And then the forensic anthropologist is the one who's going to also look for trauma and determine an estimate for race, sex, height, weight, those sort of things.
Jane Jorgensen:
And then the forensic Odontologist is, uh, basically a forensic dentist who does a dental exam and does dental charting, uh, dental x-rays and, um, gives us a report. What we're hoping for at that point, if we haven't IDed the person by anything at the grave with him or her is we enter the unidentified person into NCIC and the dentist enters the dental information that they've charted into NCIC and they run a matching report. And so a lot of times we'll get what we call a cold NCIC dental hit. So if a missing person has had their dental charting put into NCIC the family of the missing person has put their dental charting into NCIC . We'll get a hit right away. And the person is quickly identified. The process takes about a week, uh, to, you know, get the person back to her office, do an exam, do the paperwork to get 'em entered, get 'em entered into the computer, get the forensic odontology exam, get it all coded, and then get it put into the computer. So it can take up to a week.
Ashley:
Those are the basics of the job, but there's this whole other area to what Jane does now. And I was really curious when that started, when did DNA and genealogy come into the process.
Jane Jorgensen:
So in 2018, uh, detective Jim sharp and I of the Sheriff's office started working with Barbara Ray Ventor, uh, Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret press. And they worked on a couple of our cases for us. They solved a couple of our cases for us. And then we kind of just learned how to do it from them. We also work very closely with a genealogy from Oregon named Deb Stone. And she currently has a couple of our cases that she's working on and she advises us on our cases too. And so on two of our cases, right now, we're doing the genealogy in house and we've solved a couple, uh, ourselves. It is hard cuz I didn't have any gene experience before this I've since built my family trees. So it's easier now cuz I understand the relationships a little bit better. I'm still no genealogists. And I only get the easy cases, the harder cases we turn over to the, you know, the professional genealogists.
Jane Jorgensen:
But if we get a really good match, like a first cousin match, those are the ones we've been solving in house. It's kind of like a game where you just find the missing person looking at all the other people in the tree, but it's, it can be very complicated, especially when people have, you know, 10, 12 children and then those children have children and those children have children. There's a website called the shared cM project tool. And let's say you get a hit back from or a, a centi match back from let's say gen match and a good hit would be like a parent child relationship or a sibling relationship. So let's say you get a 3000 centi, um, relationship back. That's easy to solve because that you put that 3000 number into the shared centi project tool. And it tells you who you should be looking for. You know, you should either be looking for a parent child, a sibling and there's some different choices. So you kind of know where you should be looking in, in the trees.
Ashley:
Snohomish county currently has seven doe cases or unidentified remains that they're working on identifying. And some go as far back as the 1970s, I asked how much harder it is to work on a do case that's been cold for that long versus one. That's, you know, more recent
Jane Jorgensen:
The cases from the seventies are harder for a couple reasons. One, a lot of records from back back then have been destroyed. A lot of people have either forgotten or died that might have known, um, something about the case. We have a case, uh, from 1979, we call him Spencer island do. And he was found on January 3rd, 1979 near the Steamboat slew near Marysville. And we did a couple of news articles on him. And we had people call in who remembered him. He had a broken femur that had never been set. So one leg was a couple inches shorter than the other. And people remembered him walking around north Everett, but they couldn't remember name a couple of police officers from back then called in and could describe him very well. They said he walk like drag drug, his right foot behind him because of his, his leg injury. And they also said that he was missing a front tooth. So they remembered him. They just didn't remember his name. And so we couldn't, there's no records from back then existing to find out how or why they contacted him.
Ashley:
That has to be so frustrating. Cause you're so
Jane Jorgensen:
Close. So frustrating. Like
Ashley:
People actually saw this
Jane Jorgensen:
Person yeah. And remembered him. Yeah. We were even trying to get into old databases that have been saved on like CD files, but we just, we couldn't get in the past. We can't find the passwords. There's no software to run it anymore. Cuz we were thinking maybe some, um, information from back then got stored on it, but we just couldn't get in.
Ashley:
Another person found in the seventies was on September 7th, 1977 when a bulldozer operator at the Marysville landfill discovered human remains in garbage that had been collected from a business area in Seattle. The remains were determined to be a native American male with a fair complexion. It's assumed that he had long black hair was 25 to 40 years of age stood at five 10 to six feet tall and had long delicate fingers, which is such an interesting detail. The cause and manner of death for him are undetermined.
Jane Jorgensen:
McCollum Doe is our most recent unidentified case. And he was found on September 26th, 2020 in a shallow grave in south Everett. So the late Dr. Kathy Taylor examined him and um, told us that he's a male 22 to 43 years old and he's either native American, Asian, Hispanic, or mixed race descent. He's about five, three to five nine. And he's been deceased probably for many years. Uh, the official estimate is between one and 30 and he is a homicide. So we're currently working on him. Uh, we have done genetic genealogy. We have, we got very low matches back, but we are building trees and we hope to solve him sometime in the next couple years we sent off a bone sample Toor labs and they processed, it got a DNA file and we uploaded to Jed match and we got back some hits. They're relatively low. They're 20 30 centimorgans, which are fourth or fifth cousins. And so we're building ancestry trees, um, on those matches and we're hoping to find a missing person in their trees, but it's very difficult with those low matches because the trees just so big
Ashley:
On February 28th, 1991, a fisherman on the skykomish river found human remains on the riverbank. Additional remains were discovered in Monroe a month later. Then in August of that same year folks swimming in the south Snohomish river discovered even more remains autopsy and DNA testing connected all the discoveries to one man and whoever this poor soul was died of homicidal violence, not much is known about him, unfortunately, other than he was a white male, the other stats say unknown age, unknown height and unknown weight. I imagine without a DNA match, this dough will be very hard to identify.
Jane Jorgensen:
So Salton basin Doe I was found on April 9th, 2007, uh, by some loggers inspecting some land out near the Salton basin road near Salton Washington. And he was the forensic anthropologist determined that he is a white male, about 20 to 50 years old, unknown, heightened, unknown weight. And he's been estimated to be deceased about one to five years. And currently his co matter death are undetermined. So we have obtained DNA and it's running in cos we have not had any hits. Uh, we've not had any NCIC dental hits on him and we have done whole genome sequencing and we have a DNA file on him and it's uploaded to Jed match, but we've got very low matches. So we're building ancestry, trees on him, um, attempting to, uh, figure out who his family is.
Ashley:
So Snohomish county seems to be having more success with DNA matches and identifying people than other counties in Washington state. At least lately they've been in the news a lot with these breakthroughs. And I was really curious to ask why that is or if it was just my perception,
Jane Jorgensen:
We've been working very closely with the Snohomish county Sheriff's office cold case team since, uh, about 2016. And um, we made it our goal to identify all of our unidentified people, uh, cold cases that we've had, um, from the 1970s to 2016 were our cold cases. And I think the reason we're so successful is we committed to doing it and our bosses are supportive of us doing it, but let's talk about some solve ones. Our most recent, uh, solved case was a 1980 case on August 3rd, 1980, a homeowner up off of the Stanwood Bryant road found skeletal remains in the woods near his house. They'd been scattered in, uh, quite a large area. He is a victim of a homicide. He is a gunshot wound to the head and at the time, uh, he was determined to be a male whiter, Hispanic, 18 to 50 years old, uh, from five, three to five 11 tall.
Jane Jorgensen:
And it was estimated that he had been deceased about a year. We did, um, genetic genealogy and um did the work for us and they got a really good hit. And um, we have identified him as Ronald David Chambers. He was from Rome, Georgia. He was 28 years old at the time of his disappearance. And he disappeared from a motel, uh, down in SeaTech on December 17th, 1978. There are suspects in his murder and that's not really our purview, that's the Sheriff's office. But I do know that he was last known alive. He left the motel with a known felon who had a firearm and the known felon came back and Ronald didn't come back. So there is a suspect in his murder. He died in prison in California in the nineties.
Ashley:
So was he in NAMUS…
Jane Jorgensen:
The whole time? He was? And we, we had looked at him, he'd been on our radar, but he didn't have DNA in, uh, CODIS. So that's why, and he didn't have any dental information. So that's why it took us so long to figure out who he was. Cuz we knew he was a possibility. Um, Jan Gregory from the king county Sheriff's office, um, knew about our homicide victim and always thought that Ronald could be a candidate for him, but we just, uh, you know, were unable to match it until we did genetic genealogy
Ashley:
Though. You won't hear about them on this episode, Jane and I did briefly talk about Rodney Johnson and Lisa and Roberts who have both been identified recently. You can learn more about them on my episode with forensic artist, Natalie Murray.
Jane Jorgensen:
So Snohomish Jetty Doe was a male who was found in the Snohomish river, near deg Mars landing on June 20th, 1980. And he was estimated to be a Caucasian male, 20 to 40 years old from five feet, five inches to six feet tall, 160 pounds. Uh, his hair and ILO was unknown and he, his cause of death was drowning. His manner of death was undetermined. Uh, he was buried at a local cemetery in 1980 after he was not identified at the time. And then we exhumed him in October of 2018, um, to get DNA and tried to identify him. So we sent a sample toum labs and they got us a whole genome sequence, which we uploaded to Jed match. And we got, um, a sibling, um, relationship hit. So he was, we identified him in house pretty quickly. He was in the air force air force. Yep. We ultimately got his dental records from the air force and confirmed the ID that way. And it actually, we, we kind of knew that you could get dental records from the military, but we have since requested all of our missing, our known missing people records from the military, if any of 'em were in the military. Um, so it kind of opened up a new, uh, lead for us to, to get some dental x-rays for people.
Ashley:
Once the medical examiner's office figures out who someone was and how they died, they are then either released to their families or sent to detectives. What happens then is out of Jane's hands. And it's really just a waiting game is she's done her job and now someone else has to do theirs, but don't feel too helpless about things because there are some steps that families of missing loved ones and the public meaning you and me can do to help bring closure and justice to cases like these,
Jane Jorgensen:
You know, as you and I know the missing persons, people in the police are often overwhelmed. So you kind of need to be your own advocate for your missing person. So if you have a reported missing person, call the detective or the agency and make sure that person is still a reported missing person and get a copy of the case and a case number. And occasionally people get taken out of NCIC they're missing. It used to happen a lot more. When juveniles turned 18, they just kicked him out of NCIC I don't think that's happening anymore, but things do happen and people get taken out of NCIC. So you may think your person is reported missing and they've been inadvertently taken out the database. So, and it might be worth every year. So following up with that agency or that detective, and just making sure that, um, the person is still active in an NCIC.
Jane Jorgensen:
And the other part of that is if you know who their dentist is, let the police agency know and they'll get their dental charting and x-rays and upload it to NCIC. That way, if they're found they can be identified quickly. Oh, and the other thing is, um, if they're not in NamUs, you're reported missing person have 'em entered into NamUs and submit swabs, DNA swabs. So a lot of our unidentified people have Coda DNA, but there's no hits so you, it, so if they need close family members, but if they would upload their DNA to CODIS through the law enforcement agency, they could possibly get, uh, the person identified that way. CODIS is very specific in what they can do. They need a very close relative and they need two. So they need like a parent child or two siblings, a mom and a sibling.
Jane Jorgensen:
Otherwise it won't hit. Cause we've had a couple where one person was in, you know, one family reference sample was in and our person was in and they didn't hit. So they're very specific in what they can and can't do. But if you get at least two really close relatives, they should, there should be a Coda hit. If unidentified person is in there, Jed match, it's a whole different ball game. You don't, your actual family doesn't even have to have their DNA in there. Some cousin you don't know can have their DNA in there. And we, you can be that person can be identified. I don't understand exactly how the databases work, but I think it's a numbers game. If there were enough people in Jed match, you know, people are so interconnected that it would be much easier to identify and identify people.
Ashley:
That's true. If, if everyone was in there, like right, people were in there, you
Jane Jorgensen:
Would be getting was left and right. And you don't even need everyone. Like if my two parents' DNA is in there, you don't really need mine. So everybody doesn't have to be in there. But if a lot of people put their DNA in there, it'll make it way easier to help solve cases. I think it's just gonna get easier and easier in future years to identify people this way.
Ashley:
I of course wanna thank Jane and the Snohomish county medical examiner team for doing this interview and letting me spend time in their office. I didn't take many photos while I was there. I was recording and walking around and honestly it, it felt like it would be a little disrespectful to post photos of these people's bones anyway. But I did snap a photo of the lobby, which is filled with sketches of unidentified people. The cases you just heard and photos of those that have been identified. I'll be sure to post that in my show notes and on Instagram for research purposes. And just for someone who's like obviously interested in this work, I felt very honored to be able to spend some time with the folks that actually help solve the cases that I talk about on this podcast. And I hope you found this interesting or helpful or inspiring because I know I did
Ashley:
Washed away is a Cosmic Bigfoot production with music by I speak waves and Joe Presstone and artwork by Shane long, it's hosted by me, Ashley Smith. I'm also the producer editor and everything else of this podcast, meaning washed away is a one woman show. You can support my work by leaving a five star rating or review wherever you listen. And by sharing these episodes on social media, speaking of follow washed away on Twitter and Instagram at washed away pod to see show notes and sources for each episode, visit washed away podcast.com. And yes you can send in case suggestions, email me washed away podcast, gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening, especially through the credits. I'll have another episode ready for you very soon.
