Analyst designs computer program to assist missing-person cold cases

GIS analyst Randy Dalit of the B.C. coroner's office in Burnaby has created a program which helps match human remains to people reported missing.

Randy Dalit, a geographic information system analyst, spends his days at the coroner's office in Burnaby compiling a database on human remains, including all those severed feet that washed up on B.C. shores and made headlines across the country.

He's part of a team - the Identification and Disaster Response Unit - that just cracked a cold case involving the body of a man found dead in Vancouver nearly four decades ago.

The remains, discovered in 1975, are those of Alexander Francis Gammie, a man reported missing from Kamloops in May that year.

And Dalit is the first person to create a GIS program that uses Google maps specifically for human remains investigations.

The program is unique in Canada, and coroner Bill Inkster, acting manager of the IDRU, says Dalit is indispensable in helping solve missing person cold cases.

"At first I thought it was a crock. I mean, what can he do with GIS that I can't do with a big map putting pins in. Smart cops do that and they figure out patterns. Well, I was dead wrong. This GIS is one of our best tools and Randy has created an interactive database."

Inkster said with the help of Dalit's GIS software they could crack a missing-person case in a day, one that in the past may have never been solved.

Coroner's offices don't usually investigate cold cases, that is something typically left to police. But the program allows the four-member IDRU to take over cases from the police.

The IDRU has an inventory of about 200 unidentified human remains cases, the majority of which have probably been reported as missing, said Inkster. But to investigate, the IDRU needs information on missing persons, which falls under police mandate.

"We are responsible for identifying these human remains and we never give up, but we need to know about missing persons and we can't investigate, so we've come up with a system where we take queries on missing persons from police.," he said.

The coroner sends missing-person query (MPQs) forms to various police agencies. Officers then dig up old files, perhaps cold-case missing person files, and submit details.

The coroner then adds those details - such as their name, height, weight, possible tattoos and information from dental records and DNA samples - to the database.

The breakthrough in the Gammie case came after an investigator from the VPD found the human remains cold case and sent a missing person query to the coroner. The office applied modern forensic analysis and its own in-house enhanced identification model to determine they had the man's body.

The advantage of using GIS software for analyzing cases is that coroners can compare multiple cases in an instant.

"We do a lot more exclusions than identifications," said Dalit. "This is about exclusion and prioritizing based on space on time, and doing one too many comparisons. All of our cases in terms of unidentified human remains, missing persons and identified partial

remains, they can all be compared at the same time."

The team will also catalogue missing persons where they don't have a body. So for example, if a plane crashes in the ocean and there's no body, but they know the people were on the plane, the team will keep track of those, too.

"In case a foot washes up or we find a bone in a net, then we are going to know right away," said Inkster.

Inkster and Dalit demonstrated how the GIS program was used to identify the 10 severed feet found around B.C. between 2007 and 2011. Using Google maps, the foot is mapped with a description and the analyst then matches it against all other known information.

"So what are your chances of a dental match? Zero. Fingerprints? No. All you have is a damn foot. That's pretty tough. So what we do is track the production date of the clothing on the shoe. We know when this thing went on sale."

Inkster said all the feet have been identified except one - the False Creek case. Details of who the feet belong to have not been released. Dalit said they have a few leads on the foot found at the Plaza of Nations in 2011, and they are still hoping to crack that one.