One mid-autumn day in 1977, a member of the public called the police on the large salt and sand plains of False Bay, 27 miles north of Whyalla, South Australia.
A human skull had been found.
Police quickly discovered more remains looking for the immediate area: pelvic and femoral bones.
Who did they belong to and how did they get there?
Although an examination of the skeleton found that the bones belonged to the same person, there was not enough evidence to give them an identity.
The wreckage was packaged and labeled UHR77 / 01, to be stored by Forensic Science South Australia in case of future advances.
It would take another 45 years, and the arrival of specialized DNA techniques in Australia, to solve the case.
To date, there has been no national approach to comparing the cases of missing persons with unidentified remains stored in storage. (Provided by: AFP)
A backlog of bones
Until recently, exhibition UHR77 / 01 was just one of 850 cases of unidentified human remains stored in police and health centers in Australia. Like UHR77 / 01, many have been stored for decades.
It is a great setback that forensic DNA specialist Associate Professor Jodie Ward has decided to address since she first learned of the problem in 2011.
Dr. Ward had then been recruited by NSW police to establish a dedicated laboratory to extract DNA from unidentified remains preserved in that state.
“I think the number of unidentified human remains was an initial shock,” he says.
“When I looked around the room, which contained file boxes full of debris, I guess what I saw were hundreds of Australians whose names, faces, families and stories were yet to be discovered.”
During the process of setting up the laboratory, he began to realize how state borders were hampering efforts to link unidentified remains to the 2,600 long-term missing people across the country.
Dr. Ward is leading the national effort to resolve the cases of missing persons. (Provided by: AFP)
“If you disappear into New South Wales, it doesn’t mean your remains are in New South Wales,” he says.
“What I could see is that each state and territory taking its own approach to identifying its remains and using separate facilities and separate databases, there was a real potential that the cases of people not identified or missing remain untied “.
This put Dr. Ward on a years-long campaign to establish a national approach to testing and comparing cases, in hopes of reuniting families with their dead loved ones.
Families are left in limbo
Sally Leydon’s mother, Marion Barter, has been missing for 25 years, but Mrs. Leydon has never stopped searching.
“I definitely assumed that if a bone was washed on the beach or someone found some bones in the bush, this [police] I would try it with missing people, “he says.
“But then you hear that there are all these bones sitting in the morgue that haven’t been tested. It just made me chill down my spine.”
Sally Leydon has never stopped looking for her mother Marion Barter, who has been missing for 25 years. (ABC News: Marc Smith)
For the past three years, Mrs. Leydon’s search for her mother has been the subject of a high-profile podcast The Lady Vanishes, which has led to a homicide investigation and a coronary investigation.
She is determined not to leave any stone unturned.
“Sitting there and thinking my mom might be in one of those boxes, and I’m going through everything to find her, and she might have been sitting in a box for 25 years in a morgue, that’s horrible for to me, “she says.
The case of Marion Barter appears on the current podcast, The Lady Vanishes. (ABC News: Marc Smith)
It was a common assumption that Dr. Ward encountered, not only among families, but also among police officers and forensic scientists, who found that the remains were being routinely tested and compared with missing persons. at the national level.
In fact, the ability of DNA testing varied from state to state, and a national database of cross-border searches, first introduced in 2015, was riddled with technical issues and was used. hardly ever.
Without this ability to routinely compare, it is very likely that many of Australia’s missing persons are among the 850 unidentified remains stored.
“And that’s where I saw the program; that’s what we should have in this country, so we could assure families that we’ve exhausted all available forensic science options to identify their missing loved one,” he says. Dr. Ward.
Lessons from Bosnia
In 2020, the National DNA Program for Unidentified and Missing Persons was launched, led by Dr. Ward.
Four years earlier, he had traveled abroad with a Churchill Fellowship to find out how the best labs in the world were tackling these difficult cases.
Jodie Ward visited the International Commission on Missing Persons in 2016. (Photo: Jodie Ward)
The most prominent example was the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), set up following the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The conflict left 40,000 people missing and authorities fighting with thousands of unidentified bodies piled up in mass graves.
“Because of the very nature of the genocide and the way these people died and were buried, DNA was going to be, in many cases, the only way to identify these individuals,” says Dr. Ward.
There were two key aspects to the ICMP approach.
The first was to establish cutting-edge technology to extract DNA from debris. The second was a public outreach campaign that asked the families of the missing to provide DNA samples.
Then, both data sets were centralized into a single database, which allowed for matches.
“To date, the ICMP has identified more than 70% of the 40,000 people who have disappeared as a result of this genocide,” said Dr. Ward.
“I guess that’s what I wanted to try to replicate at home.”
After years of tireless campaigning, Dr Ward finally secured a grant through federal government crime funding, in collaboration with the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
“To me, this seemed like the perfect example of reusing criminal assets for the benefit of thousands of Australian families,” he says.
Working with the AFP National Coordination Center for Missing Persons (NMPCC), Dr Ward recruited a team of specialists, implementing new techniques never used in Australia.
National DNA Program Director Jodie Ward and expert collaborators examine a set of unidentified remains. (Provided by: Jodie Ward)
The team has perfected its processes to extract DNA from the most compromised samples.
They are also building emerging capabilities, where complete facial reconstruction could be achieved from skeletal remains, based on what DNA can reveal about biological sex, eye color, hair color, and genetic ancestry. .
Who is UHR77 / 01?
The DNA lab is just one aspect of the national program.
To update the entire sector, state and territorial police forces have conducted audits on cases of unidentified and missing persons for collection in the renewed national database.
South Australian Higher Police Officer Trevor Schneider has been reviewing cases of unidentified and missing persons since 2018, under Operation Persevere.
Senior Agent Trevor Schneider with a package containing 10 samples of unidentified human remains. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)
This work included a re-investigation of exhibition UHR77 / 01, the skull and bones found in False Bay in 1977.
Mario Della Torre arrived in Australia in the late 1930’s. (Supplied by: South Australian Police)
Police investigations at the time identified a handful of possible cases of missing persons who could be connected, including a Whyalla man named Mario Della Torre, who was reported missing six months before the remains were found.
Della Torre was an Italian immigrant who arrived in Australia in the late 1930s. He was 54 years old, childless, but close to his parents and only brother.
When he disappeared, several calls were made to the media, but to no avail.
In the 1970s, DNA technology for comparing cases did not exist.
But in reviewing the case, Chief Agent Schneider arranged for a bone sample to be sent to Dr. Ward’s lab for testing, which would be the first police case the team processed.
Senior Agent Trevor Schneider delivers the bone samples to Dr. Ward for DNA testing. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)
“The National DNA Program offers us a unique opportunity to use the most up-to-date forensic techniques to advance some of our research, some of which is not available here in South Australia,” says Chief Agent Schneider. .
For any hope of a match, Chief Agent Schneider also needed to find a living relative of Mario Della Torre to get a DNA sample to compare.
Mr. Della Torre himself had no children, but fortunately his brother was still alive.
“It was exciting, but emotional, sad. I think he regained a lot of feelings and anxiety. Could it be real? Could it be possible?” says Mercedes Bourgonjen, Mr. Della Torre’s niece.
Mercedes Bourgonjen’s uncle Mario Della Torre disappeared from the regional city of Whyalla in South Australia in 1976. (ABC News: Tony Hill)
When the results of the DNA matched, the South Australian coroner quickly reopened the investigation and found in February this year that the remains known as UHR77 / 01 were in fact those of Mario Della Torre. .
“He was lost and now they have found him,” Ms Bourgonjen says.
“We did a funeral, so now he’s buried with my grandparents. And now we can all be at rest.”
Appeal to families
Mrs. Bourgonjen’s message to the other families of the missing is to never lose hope.
“Having this technology in DNA testing … and finding out who he really is is wonderful, it’s amazing, even after 45 years,” he says.
It is not known how Mario Della Torre died, but his family is grateful that his remains have finally been identified. (ABC News: Tony Hill)
With the pandemic causing delays, the National DNA Program is just beginning …