Crime & Safety
How Technological Advancements Are Helping Solve Cold Cases From The 1800s
"I could tell, by the way my sister and I got along and how close we were, that something was not right," Durnall said.
It was Oct. 6, 1977, the day Doug Durnall's 27-year-old sister Linda Lebeau disappeared.
"I could tell, by the way my sister and I got along and how close we were, that something was not right," Durnall said.
Years turned into decades and into lifetimes, but there was no trace of Lebeau or if she'd ever come home. Durnall said his mother never gave up, hoping that her daughter would turn up one day.
She never did.
It wasn't until last year Durnell received closure when El Dorado sheriff's deputies knocked on the door of his Northern California home.
"The sheriff's department from El Dorado County came up and told me they found my sister's body and she was pronounced dead," Durnall recalled. "I said she's been missing for 47 years."
Authorities discovered Lebeau's bones down an embankment along the Ortega Highway in Riverside County in 1986, nine years after she disappeared.
Forensics determined someone shot her in the head, but no one could identify the corpse.
The Riverside County Coroner's Office holds onto the remains of more than 200 people they have yet to identify. Their records are listed in dusty old books which tell the stories of crime and mystery dating back to the late 1800s.
"Someone is someone's child," said Sgt. Nancy Rissi from the Riverside County Coroner's Office. "Someone is someone's family member. And for us to give them their name back to them is our driving force."
Rossi works hard to do just that; to identify the unnamed and grant their families closure. As a coroner sergeant in Riverside County, she grinds to uncover the name of every Jane and John Doe listed in the encyclopedias of unidentified remains.
Most of the remains lie in unmarked graves all over the county.
"I was able to get close to half a million dollars over the next three years to exhume some of the decedents, submit DNA and just do a lot of these things that require a lot of funds," Rissi said.
So far, her department has exhumed three bodies as she focuses on cases before DNA was ever heard of, let alone collected. But with new technology, she can now get the answers that were once unavailable.
"They're able to bore a hole into here, the thickest aspect of the femur, and still get DNA even with how old this is," Rissi said.
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