2004-01-22 04:00:00 PDT Las Vegas -- Her naked corpse was discovered by accident by a pair of brothers more than 23 years ago along a dirt road on the edge of town. She looked like a teen, perhaps no older than 18, possibly a runaway. Her head was beaten with a hammer, but the coroner believes she actually died from stabbings of an unidentified 3-inch object.
The murder weapon isn't the only thing that remains unidentified. All these years later, the victim is still known only as Jane "Arroyo Grande" Doe, after the desolate desert path where her body had been dumped.
Over the decades, that path became a major interstate and the young officer who arrived on the scene became a seasoned veteran. But every effort by Detective John Williams to identify what he calls "my girl," including exhuming her body last year to gather DNA samples, have brought him no closer to closing the most vexing case of his career.
Now, in a controversial move, the coroner here is taking the search for answers to nagging cases like this to the Internet by posting, in what is believed to be a national first, the photos of dozens of unidentified bodies on the Clark County coroner's Web site.
Several coroner and medical examiner Web sites around the United States publish information about so-called "cold cases," and some even accompany the blurbs with artists' renderings or clay-model representations that approximate what the deceased looked like when alive. But at
www.accessclarkcounty.net, a prominent box beseeches visitors to "help identify human remains." A few clicks -- and a couple of warnings about graphic content -- later, the screen is filled with thumbnail-size pictures that can be enlarged to show actual shots of dead people.
The warning states that "no decomposed remains will be shown," and some of the photos have been retouched to erase the more gruesome trauma. But many remain difficult to view.
.... "I just don't know if actual photos are the best way to accomplish this," said Sgt. Mike Harper, operations manager for the Alameda County coroner's office in Oakland. "A good description of the Doe and the circumstances would probably be just as beneficial as having a photo. If the photo is a clean shot of the face, maybe that's OK, but I don't think there's a need to go into the grotesque end of things."
... Yet Clark County says its approach is working. Since the launch in November, the site has received more than 350,000 hits and has helped identify as many as a dozen people, said Assistant Coroner Les Elliot.
... "It's something we're exploring at this point to see if it's feasible," said Herb Hawley of the San Francisco County medical examiner's office. "I don't believe we'll be putting up actual photos. The most we would do is put up sketches."
But Todd Matthews of the Doe Network, a national organization of volunteers and aggrieved relatives searching for missing loved ones, said he supports the effort.
"They're showing reality, and sometimes it's hard to hide this reality from the public," Matthews said. "They're definitely bringing some attention to cases that otherwise have not seen the light of day for years."
Williams, still trying to bring justice to Jane "Arroyo Grande" Doe, holds out hope that Matthews is right and someone will someday help resolve his case.
"If you look on TV, you'll see worse than what you see in this photo of my girl," Williams said. "If it's my daughter, I'd definitely feel bad to see a picture of her dead. But it would not bother me if someone saw it on the Internet or TV to give me some closure and my family some closure. I'm sure things will offend people, but so be it. You got a young kid, dumped in the desert. That's more offensive."