Missing in America: A Savive Report

Indiana University sophomore, Lauren Spierer, has been missing back on 3 June 2011. Lauren’s story has received national attention—on CNN, America’s Most Wanted TV Show, etc—while others, such as the May 18 disappearance of 27-year-old Plainfield, Indiana resident, Morgan Johnson, go virtually unnoticed by the national media. Like Johnson, Spierer has a life-threatening heart condition that requires medication, but the pretty blonde woman’s case has attracted far more attention than that of the young African-American man.

An astonishing 2,300 Americans are reported missing every day, a number which includes both adults and children. According to the FBI, 692,944 people were reported missing last year, and fewer than 20,000 of those were cited as “involuntary.” That is still a big jump up from the approximately 150,000 people who were reported missing in 1980. Social scientists and criminologist say that of this dramatic increase in the past 25 years is due in part to the growing population. Yet, a big part of this increase is attributed to law enforcement and the fact that they take these cases more seriously now, particularly those of marginalized citizens.

Of those who went missing last year, 50,000 were above the age of eighteen—40 percent of missing adults were white, 30 percent were black, 20 percent were Latino, and the remaining 10 percent were of other races. While these numbers seem staggering, a large portion of missing persons are suspected runaways and another large percentage are family abductions. There are, however, a percentage of those who are abducted by complete strangers. Only a fraction (.3%) of those are considered to be stereotypical abductions or kidnappings by a stranger. Approximately 10 percent of missing persons in the United States never return. According to a Justice Department study, nearly 90 percent of the abductors are men, and they sexually assault their victims in half of the cases.


In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) developed the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Initiative (NamUs), which provides national access to clearinghouse capabilities for reporting, locating, and matching missing person’s records to unidentified remains records. NamUs is made up of two databases: one contains records on unidentified human remains; the other contains missing person’s reports.

Before NamUs, the problem with keeping records of unidentified human remains was abysmal, referred to by some as the Nation’s Silent Mass Disaster. According to the first survey of the nation’s medical examiners (ME) and coroners—conducted by The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)—there were 13,486 unidentified human remains on record at the end of 2004. That same report also revealed that only half of the ME and coroner offices surveyed had a policy for retaining records on unidentified human remains

The true scope of the problem is also hampered by the fact that many law enforcement agencies consider an adult missing person to be a low priority, because adults can have many reasons to disappear; and although all cases of missing children 18 and under must be reported to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), only a handful of states require law enforcement agencies to submit adult missing-person reports to NCIC. The result of this is inconsistent reporting.

College campuses are some of the safest places in the country. A recent government report—compiled by the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Education and the FBI— says that 17 million students attend 4,200 colleges and universities in the United States. Between 2005 and 2008, there were 174 murders on campuses and 46 negligent homicides. Yet, despite these encouraging numbers, losing one person is one too many.

Anyone with information about Morgan Johnson should call the Plainfield Police Department at 1-317-838-3562. He drives a 1995 white Grand Am.

Anyone with information about Lauren Spierer should call the Bloomington Police Department of 1-812-339-4477 or 1-800-CRIME-TV. You can also email your tip to policetips@bloomington.in.gov.

DNA Fingerprinting Using the PCR Process

DNA Fingerprinting (a.k.a. DNA Profiling or DNA analysis) is a sub-category of Biotechnology that has several uses among scientists as well as other fields. A broad definition of Biotechnology is, “any use or alteration of organisms, cells, or biological molecules to achieve specific practical goals” (Audersirk, Audersirk, & Byers, 2007).

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is located in the nucleus of every cell that has a nucleus. Its appearance is similar to a twisted ladder or staircase, which is referred to as a double-helix. DNA is an extremely long polymer made from four nucleotides: Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), and Thymine (T). It is the sequence of A, G, T, and C that codes information for each gene.

In 1986 Kary B. Mullis developed the Polymerase Chain Reaction process (PCR), that produces Short Tandem Repeats (STR) which are relatively small fragments of DNA (Audersirk, Audersirk, & Byers, 2007). This means that very small amounts of DNA, found at a crime scene for instance, can be multiplied by the PCR process.

There are two main reasons why the PCR process was such a huge breakthrough. The previous system took nearly four-five weeks for results to return from the lab, but PCR could return results within twenty-four hours (Ragle, 2002). Another reason was that the previous process required almost perfect samples of DNA, and there has to be a large amount to test successfully; while the PCR process requires a relatively small amount of DNA and is successful with almost every sample (Ragle, 2002).

Once in the lab, the DNA sample needs to be amplified. To do this, the DNA double-helix needs to be separated first. Heating a solution of the DNA to a temperature of 90C separates the two strands. After the strands unwind and cool, they are put into a DNA Amplifier and an enzyme called polymerase makes two new DNA strands; which are exact duplicates of the original. It takes approximately 4 minutes per cycle; each cycle doubling the amount of DNA. This process can be repeated every 4 minutes, which comes to 30 cycles every 2 hours. This means that in 2 hours, the small sample has been amplified 2^30 or 1 billion times.

“In 1999, British and American law enforcement agencies agreed to use a set of 10 to 13 STR’s…that vary greatly among individuals. A perfect match of 10 STR’s in a suspects DNA and DNA found at a crime scene means that there is less than one chance in a trillion that the two DNA samples did not come from the same person” (Audersirk, Audersirk, & Byers, 2007). In this can be realized the power and significance of this system.

In 1990 the FBI formed a “working group” to come up with a national data base that would hold all DNA Profiles collected (Ragle, 2002). They named this new data base, Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the genetic equivalent to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). By 1994, CODIS was operational, but it wasn’t until 1999-2000 that most labs nationwide started relying on it as the official data base for sharing among agencies (Genge, 2002). Once most labs began testing the same thirteen STR points (1999-2000), CODIS could then be used to cross reference DNA Profiles from all over the United States; a practice that is widely used today. As of December 2004, CODIS contained 2,132,470 DNA profiles; and as of June 2009, over 7,137,468 offender profiles; and has assisted in more than 91,800 investigations (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.).

Audersirk, T., Audersirk, G., & Byers, B. E. (2007). Biology: Life on Earth with Physiology (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall.

Federal Bureau of Investigation - Laboratory Services. (n.d.). In Federal Bureau of Investigation Homepage. Retrieved August 04, 2009, from http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/codis/clickmap.htm

Genge, N. E. (2002). The Forensic Casebook The Science of Crime Scene Investigation. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Ragle, L. (2002). Crime scene from fingerprints to DNA testing, an astonishing inside look at the real world of c.s.i. New York, NY: Avon Books.

Trimm, H. H. (2005). Forensics the easy way. Hauppauge, NY: Barron's.