It’s one of the most common questions for the receptionist at a cemetery: “Do you have records of someone buried here named—?” 

I spent a good portion of my time in a cemetery office on a stepstool by the filing cabinets, thumbing through a card catalog and bouncing between drawers with the phone off its hook on my desk, on hold, trying a different spelling or another last name for a long-lost friend or relation who was hoping against hope they had finally found their answer. Not uncommonly, I found them— but not always. Some people came by for advice, trying to find out if the person they were looking for was even really dead. What would happen if no one was around to identify the body? If they’d been in an accident out of state, or died while unhoused, or no one could reach their family? 

In our industry, we know more of these answers than most, but some things fall outside of our usual purview— or outside of our region. The handling of unidentified and unclaimed remains isn’t standardized in the United States, so there’s no full database or exact statistics, but the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System estimates that around 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered in the US each year, and 1,000 of those remain unidentified a year later. In 2021, the Washington Post’s investigation of the rising number of unclaimed remains produced an estimate that 1-3% of remains go unclaimed across the country, a small-sounding number that translates to, at the least, tens of thousands of cases. 

But despite how many there are, the systems in place aren’t as streamlined or as regulated as anyone might hope. In the last two years, two major scandals have broken on national news over disposition of unclaimed remains, and many more minor court cases and local crises, too. As always, scandals in deathcare affect far more than just those involved, and there are new questions we might be asked— and new questions we might need to ask.

In Jackson, Mississippi, over two hundred burials of unclaimed remains in a potter’s field have come under scrutiny after a man was buried as unclaimed, even while his family called for updates on their missing person report, and were told for months on end that there was no news. Once the story broke it began to snowball—local news sources published a list of those who had been buried as unclaimed, and numerous other families discovered for the first time that their loved one had died, including those of homicide victims who learned about months-old murders from an article on burials behind the city jail. The root of the trouble? The police department of Jackson, Mississippi had no actual policy whatsoever on informing next of kin of recovered bodies. They were inclined to suggest it was the coroner’s job—but the coroners thought it was the job of the police, in cases with open investigations. In at least the first of the instances that came to light, the coroner followed up with the police repeatedly, checking to hear if they had any news on relatives being located, or any next-of-kin responding, while the family called to ask if anything was known about his disappearance, and both were told there was no word. The police department has since put a policy in place, after the story came out in 2023. 

Then, in the last few months of 2024, an even larger story broke in Texas, where two counties—Dallas and Tarrant— had formed a financially lucrative relationship with a local medical school’s body donation program, leasing unclaimed decedents’ limbs and bodies for scientific use to other schools, private companies, and the government— including a man whose fiancée had reported him missing to police, and a veteran who had been eligible for a government veteran’s burial. Numerous families, once again, discovered the fate of a missing loved one from the news coverage of this story, with over a dozen being contacted by NBC and expressing their incredulity that NBC could find them through social media and the internet while the police were unable to do the same. 

The money made from these sales, combined with the over 1,000 dispositions now in question, has made the situation all the worse. The companies who used the county-sourced donations have largely disavowed any knowledge that the decedents were unclaimed, some asserting that, as the program was called the “Willed Body Program”, they had presumed all the bodies were arranged donations by the decedents themselves or next-of-kin. 

Even worse still, the decedents were not cremated thereafter—the medical school used alkaline hydrolysis, which the state’s Funeral Commission considers an illegal method of disposition, as state law allows for only cremation or burial. The Texas administrative code lists alkaline hydrolysis as one of the potential methods of disposal for remains used for medical research, which was the school’s explanation—but the Funeral Commission made clear in reply that state laws supersede that portion of the code. Those whose bodies were donated by consent, per NBC, had signed a form that told them cremated remains would be returned to them, with no disclosure of the potential for aquamation. Regardless of the method of eventual disposal, though, many families have been distraught that their missing loved one was used for research without consent, and, by the nature of scientific donation, some of those who discovered this too late were told they could not reclaim their loved one’s remains until the contracted usage of a body part by a third party was complete—probably a worst-case-scenario phone call for anyone to make or receive. 

How do these things happen? How can someone file a missing person report while someone else is failing to locate a next-of-kin? Unfortunately, it happens more easily than it should. News stories and court cases in Louisiana, Michigan, California, and Rhode Island, to name a few—in addition to the controversies in Mississippi and Texas—show that it’s not uncommon. But how?

A dangerous combination of lack of oversight, lack of specific policies, error-filled reporting, and internal miscommunication—and the unpopularity of a free service offered by the Department of Justice created for situations like these.

It’s not unheard of, as it turns out, for individual jurisdictions to have no policy in place to say who reports deaths, how, and when, leading to medical examiners and police pointing fingers at one another weeks or even months after the fact, or claiming an effort was made to contact a next of kin by leaving a business card in their mailbox, or calling from a detective’s personal cell phone with an out-of-state number and not leaving a voicemail. Even some regions that do have broad policies lack specifications on how to find a next of kin, so the efforts can be piecemeal and incomplete— there are no standardized channels through which they’re expected to search or make contact. Additionally, in numerous cases, mistyped names with a substituted letter, or one ‘r’ instead of two, or other inexplicable errors (one report listed a relation to be searched for as a “Gavin” instead of a “Godwin”, another substituted an ‘e’ for an ‘f’ in the decedent’s last name) were never caught or corrected, and in spite of other data matching up, these close-but-not-quite records were never pulled or checked, even when worried relatives called. In Louisiana, one parish coroner’s office, after dealing with a clerical error that lead to an unresolved missing person who was simultaneously considered unclaimed remains for two months, advised a local news source that there was no way for them to produce a list of all the unclaimed remains in their possession or disposed of by them—their system did not log them specifically, so they had no way to tell which or how many decedents had never found their way home. 

These problems are clearly widespread, and while the most apparent solution is establishing more thorough internal policies, that has to be done by each individual county or regional jurisdiction separately, and even that wouldn’t solve every issue. What if someone goes missing from their home, and is recovered, deceased, in another state, or across the country? There is often an assumption that records like missing persons are shared nationally, but the database used—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, which is completely free, publicly accessible, and run by the US Department of Justice— is only required to be used in 16 states. Everywhere else, it’s optional, or decided by jurisdiction policy. 

The database, usually referred to as NaMUS, is best-known for the “Missing Persons” side of its model, but law enforcement, death investigators, and the public can all access its database. Members of the public can even file their own reports of missing persons in jurisdictions where law enforcement do not, and they will be vetted and confirmed before becoming nationally searchable. The NaMUS database holds descriptions, vital record data, pictures, fingerprints, and even DNA— they offer free analytical services to law enforcement and death investigators, including forensic, dental, fingerprint, and DNA analysis. But there’s another service that NaMUS offers, which is even less widely-used than those related to missing persons or to unidentified remains— listing unclaimed remains. County and regional medical examiners and coroners can use the database, also for free, to list unclaimed decedents in a publicly-searchable database, and even make use of free analytical assistance from NaMUS to locate contact information for the decedent’s next of kin.

While NaMUS’s services, started in 2007, have been underutilized, participation has been growing, especially as the number of unclaimed decedents has increased with population densities, funeral costs, and families increasingly spread over larger and larger areas with no ease of contact. At the time of writing, there are over 18,000 listings of unclaimed remains in the database, but there are still many jurisdictions and many members of the public who don’t know that it exists at all.

This issue is only a short step removed from funeral homes in more than one direction—in many areas, county or parish policies rely on local funeral establishments to handle disposition for unclaimed remains, and while it most often falls outside our legal purview once the county decides no next of kin can be reached, that doesn’t prevent the local public fallout from including the funeral home, if an unclaimed case comes into question. Our crematory performs cremations for two local counties, cremating unclaimed decedents on their behalf—cremation is now by far the most common method of disposition for unclaimed remains—and most of the other surrounding counties near us use a rotation of local funeral homes to handle cremations of unclaimed cases. In the counties for which we cremate, the Medical Examiner’s Office has specific policies for waiting 30 days while attempting different methods of contact before cremating the remains, and then stores them in a mausoleum space with clear labeling, so they can be held with dignity and accessed if a next of kin comes forward in the future. They keep a publicly-available up-to-date pdf list on their website of all their unclaimed persons, and list them in the NaMUS database, as well. If called on to handle dispositions of unclaimed remains, it may be wise to look into both the policies in your county regarding contact for next-of-kin as well as the storage methods of your county or parish—there are some places in the country where cremated remains of unclaimed persons are scattered in a potter’s field, or are otherwise rendered unrecoverable, due to the expense and difficulty of storage.

Moreover, what do you do with unclaimed remains within your funeral home? If you’ve picked up a decedent and then been unable to contact the next-of-kin thereafter, or performed a cremation and then found the family unwilling to pick up the remains, how are these remains stored or handled? How clearly are they labeled for potential future claiming, and where are they kept? How well do you document your attempts at contact? How easily can you produce a list of those who have never been claimed? With these stories in the public eye, it's all the more important to ensure that you have answers at the ready.

Over 30,000 decedents go unclaimed every year in America—estimates ranged from 34,000 to 100,000 in 2021. The cost and difficulty of storage and of managing their dispositions are handled by different regions in different ways, but with no universal method and no universal place to check, there are undeniably thousands of family members and friends looking for those people, too. Hopefully, with the scrutiny of these cases and stories, new policies will be made to establish more thorough and more standard methods of finding and contacting next of kin, logging unclaimed persons, and ensuring that dispositions are traceable, dignified, and well-documented, for the sakes of everyone involved.

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