Scott McGrath

10/11/17

Current Event 4

https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/local/curious-internet-users-may-have-solved-akrons-oldest-active-missing-persons-case

In this article, the author describes how a genealogy researcher by the name of Christina Scates helped solve a homicide that was previously ruled unsolved. Scates, a biology major at Cleveland University, who stumbled upon the grave of a set of unknown bones. She later found out that the case was closed after no avail in locating a killer, and decided to take matters into her own hands. She received the case file from a compliant officer in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where she learned that on February 5th 1975 a skeleton had been found by some teens strolling through a park. The coroner deemed the death a homicide, and the the hunt for the killer began. The killer, nor the identity of the victim, was ever discovered. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. Scates posted the information of the file in a reddit forum, a forum which had already been successful in discovering the identity of a man killed in  a car crash 20 years earlier. The case began to draw attention, where a forensic artist eventually drew up a sketch based on details found from the crime scene, such as hair in the mud, etc. This forensic artist used programs to recreate the face of the victim based on bone readings, and eventually got a call from the same officer who gave the files to Scates. They learned that the bones had never been submitted into a database for missing persons, due to a typo. With the correction made, a name and photograph appeared to them, looking awfully like the drawing made by the forensic artist. The body was discovered to be that of Linda Pagano, a girl gone missing 6 months before the skeleton was found. She fit the missing person's file, and was ruled to be the skeleton. With The help of Reddit, the family of Linda Pagano was able to receive some sort of closure, even though a killer or real cause of death has yet to be determined.

This article is very significant in the world of Forensic science. It goes to show that a group of people dedicated to a task, can sometimes complete this task through hard work, even when the odds are stacked against you. A group of reddit users was able to discover the identity of a skeleton found in 1975, through some good detective work and determination. They located errors that made the case insolvable, and corrected them, something the police had not been able to do. With a case like this being solved by a few curious minds on the internet, who's to say what will be solved next.

I think that this article was well written, but became confusing at times. The information was thrown at the reader all at once, and was hard to take in all at once at times.The author did a good job at emphasizing the fact that this case was solved by someone who stumbled upon it on reddit, making sure that that aspect of it was not overlooked. Overall, this case interested me very much, seeing as I had not heard of anything of the sorts before, and was a generally well written article.