Silent Proof by Clea Koff

Three, two, one: thirty-two and one. Forensic anthropologist and author Clea Koff discusses writing her spine-chilling thriller, Silent Evidence.

Unidentified corpses are a heartbreaking feature of wars and conflicts. The dead, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, are sometimes buried in mass in the graves. Other times they are scattered, abandoned where they fell.

National and international authorities nevertheless recognise that the dead represent part of the humanitarian crisis that must be addressed. The laws of war require this: Article 32 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions affirms “the right of families to know the fate of their loved ones”.

I kept a pocket copy of some key protocols of the Geneva Conventions when I worked as a forensic anthropologist in the late 1990s and early 2000s for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. These tribunals were the first international attempt since Nuremberg, after World War II, to bring to justice those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity.

I was 23 years old on the first mission to Rwanda, the youngest member of the first forensic team tasked with collecting physical evidence of such atrocities for use in an international tribunal. I went on many missions from Bosnia to Kosovo, and my pocket copy of the Conventions accompanied me on every mission.

The UN work ultimately upended my comfortable perception of forensic anthropology as a science that helps the dead “speak.” As I worked on exhumation after exhumation, sometimes with the families of the dead nearby, it became clear to me that, ultimately, forensic anthropology is practiced in service of the living.

Working in the war crimes field, I became aware that after a body has “testified” in court through forensic evidence interpreted by scientists, the families of the dead are still waiting their turn. They need the bodies of their loved ones. I absorbed this in a way that I had not been able to absorb during my training or work in the United States, where postmortem identification is done behind closed doors, with the families of the dead in another part of the medical examiner’s office, on another day, in another week.

I came back to my work as a forensic anthropologist after the UN missions. Immediately and without thinking, I understood that a statistic I had known for some time – that the United States had an estimated backlog of 40,000 unidentified bodies – was the real humanitarian crisis.

I was reading news articles quoting the families of 100,000 missing persons in the United States and I noticed that they were similar to the families in Bosnia who were searching for their missing loved ones after the war. They described the same pain, the same desires, the same needs – and families in the United States felt all of this in peacetime.

Meanwhile, on the cop shows of the day, like “CSI,” it seemed that forensic science could solve every case imaginable. I wanted to see that force deployed in the real world, to help the 40,000 dead return home. And I had the idea that the large-scale forensic work that our UN teams had done in war crimes might play a role. Above all, I wanted to be of service to the living.

I had also brought home from the UN mission my now-crumpled paperback copy of the Geneva Conventions. So I turned to it and really connected with this affirmation of the “right of families to know the whereabouts of their loved ones” in Article 32 of Protocol I. I then founded a nonprofit, the Missing Persons Identification Resource Center (MPID), to provide new ways to connect unidentified persons and missing persons in the United States.

One of the major innovations of MPID was to redefine unidentified bodies as missing persons who have been found. This redefinition allowed us to filter through this staggering number of 100,000 missing persons nationwide and find that 40,000 of them have actually been found. findThe only problem is that they are all dead and unidentified, even with the advent of DNA samples.

At MPID, we knew that police were working hard to file missing person reports and locate victims, with many successes for the living. But the numbers on unidentified bodies pending showed that those missing person reports didn’t always match up with autopsy reports from coroners’ offices when state and federal databases tried to compare them. The reports from these two agencies could be like ships passing each other in the night.

We envisioned the MPID as a waypoint, with searchlights on, for these two ships to meet. How? By using forensic anthropology to profile missing persons using intrinsic features in their bones, teeth, and hair—features that would resist postmortem decomposition or even skeletonization.

For example, where police reports on missing persons collected information about scars, marks and tattoos, the MPID forensic profile was designed to determine whether these scars or marks were from injuries that had scarred the bones beneath the skin. In developing these profiles, the families of missing persons would also be given priority, as they are often best placed to provide information about the characteristics of their loved ones.

As I worked on all the elements of the nonprofit, I began writing my hopes and dreams for MPID into a fictional story. It came naturally to me—I’d been writing since I was twelve; by high school, I’d won local and national awards in English and was editor of the literary magazine. I knew I could take my vision of connecting the missing and the dead further, faster, in fiction.

My detective thriller Silent proof is the result. It will be followed by two more installments in a series starring Jayne Hall and Steelie Lander, two former UN war crimes forensic anthropologists who help the FBI unmask the killers using their unique skill set of profiling missing persons to identify the dead.

Jayne and Steelie live in Los Angeles and run a nonprofit designed to serve as a conduit between law enforcement and coroners. The name? Agency 32/1. So when you get to the penultimate chapter of Silent proof where an FBI boss asks Jayne’s ex-lover, Special Agent Scott Houston, why the agency is called “Thirty-Two-One”… well, you already know the answer.

(c) Cléa Koff

Photograph by author (c) Kelly Ridgeway

About Silent proof by Cléa Koff:

Everyone has secrets…

Jayne and Steelie founded Agency 32/1 with one goal in mind: to use their specialized forensic skills to help the police solve crimes.

When a pile of frozen body parts falls out of a van onto a Los Angeles freeway, FBI agent Scott Houston knows exactly where to go for a confidential autopsy. But to everyone’s horror, Jayne and Steelie quickly determine that the body parts aren’t from one body. The body parts are from multiple bodies.

A serial killer is on the loose. Worse yet, Scott’s call has put Jayne and Steelie’s lives in danger, as their unique skills may reveal evidence that could help unmask the killer. Can they find the killer before he finds them?

The perfect thriller for Patricia Cornwell fans.

Order your copy of Silent proof by Clea Koff online here.