A story in Sunday's Butler Eagle revealed facts that most people might not have regarded as plausible — that a country as advanced as the United States doesn't have a centralized system for identifying bodies that are found and that there were more than 5,900 unidentified bodies listed in FBI files as of November.

But according to the story, the situation could be much worse. Jerry Nance of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Bill Hagmaier of the International Homicide Investigators Association use 50,000 as a more believable number for the actual number of unidentified bodies under the jurisdiction of authorities across the country because most law enforcement agencies are not required by law to report information on unidentified human remains to any central database.

A legitimate question for people here is whether any mysterious disappearances with ties to Butler County could be solved if such slipshod investigatory coordination were not in existence.

Fortunately, activists are pressing ahead for new laws requiring better reporting of information on unidentified bodies. Model legislation has been developed by a Justice Department task force, and that proposal deserves serious consideration by all of the states.

Massachusetts is doing just that. Proposed legislation in that state that is based upon the Justice Department task force's work would require family members to submit DNA samples to local, state and national databases if a missing person is not found within 30 days. The legislation also would require agencies to report missing persons and unidentified bodies to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and prevent disposal of bodies before DNA samples are acquired from them.

In regard to solving missing-person cases in which the missing person is no longer alive, Nance made an important observation on which all law enforcement agencies should reflect.

"Many times we've run across cases where it's a simple matter of one county talking to another county," he said. "And those have fallen through the cracks."

Only a few hundred DNA samples from unidentified bodies and families of missing persons have been entered into a national database known as CODUS for comparison. But now the federal government has launched a long-overdue initiative to change that unacceptable scenario.

The government has begun a five-year, $1 billion effort to log more DNA information and improve forensic testing. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is sponsoring other initiatives for better handling of missing-persons cases and unidentified bodies.

As reported in the Jan. 15 story, Roy Weise, an FBI official who works with the NCIC, said he believes most missing people are reported to the FBI file — there were 110,460 unsolved missing-persons cases as of November — but that it's a different story regarding unidentified bodies, with the reported caseload at just 5,900.

It's time for the unconscionable lapse in information-sharing to be addressed.

Families desire closure, even if the news is bad. The current situation regarding reporting and centralized compilation of data is an avenue for closure to remain elusive.

— J.R.K.