Analyzing Forensic Clues for Burial Sites

"It's a way of taking in a lot of data, organizing it and analyzing it for spatial patterns."
"If nothing else, it's going to help people search more efficiently for missing persons."
"It's a huge problem [searching for dead remains lost in countries in conflict]. It's bigger than we realize."
"Ideally, you'd like to say, this is a very kind of human behaviour [how and where soldiers, terrorists or secret police dispose of the dead] and we see a lot of consistencies. That way you can take a lot of information from other countries and make reliable predictions about a country you've not been to."
Derek Congram, forensic anthropologist, researcher, University of Toronto

Canadian forensic anthropologist Derek Congram tests soil during work for the U.S. Defence Department locating remains of missing soldiers in Vietnam.          Handout

An ordinarily little-thought-of problem resulting from civil wars, attempts at genocide, tyrannical governments, is that all too often tens of thousands of people disappear never to be seen again, victims whose bodies have been concealed, shut away from public discovery as a way of shielding their murderers from justice. Derek Congram, a forensics anthropologist based in Toronto, has developed a computer system he hopes will aid the search for victims of war and others.

Families want to know the ultimate disposal of their loved ones. Governments that succeeded those who destroyed peoples' lives look for accountability demanded by their populations. Justice can often not be seen to be served when no proof exists that people have been slaughtered, their bodies buried in mass graves, hidden and awaiting gruesome discovery, from Spain to Rwanda to the Congo, let alone Syria and Iraq.

This man's work leading to the production of his computer-based program that seeks the geographic locations of bodies, was published recently in the journal Forensic Science International, and the attention it attracted led a large U.S. Defense Department program to consult with him in the effort to discover the whereabouts of still-missing GIs from foreign war zones.

Mr. Congram is on the cusp of leaving his work in research at the University of Toronto to take up work as a forensic coordinator for the Red Cross in South America where political violence is not unknown. Colombia awaits his attention as it recovers from a civil war where thousands of civilians were killed. In Spain the search continues for the estimated 115,000 people murdered after being taken from their homes half a century earlier.

In the United States the search for its missing soldiers rings up a price tag of $200-million annually. Developing countries where conflict or genocide has occurred represents a vast field of unmarked mass graves crying out for discovery and identification. A UN investigation in Bosnia and Rwanda went forward to solve the location of those who died in mass slaughters.

The Saddam Hussein Iraq years produced countless unsolved murders, among the 20 countries where Mr. Congram has been involved in a U.S. Justice Department project in the past. His new search system is set to analyze known data surrounding the disappeared, to develop an algorithm to predict their possible locations with inputs when possible, including information about such bodies already previously recovered.

Distance of the burial site from where people went missing, and the area under control by the killers are all added to the data base resulting in a map that identifies possible "hot zones" where such remains might be revealed to be buried. Five known civil-war burial locations in Spain became part of a test of the new program. Three of the locations were proven to be within the hot zones identified by the software, with the remaining two located a short distance off.

His work, which comprised his doctoral thesis, led to three years working with the U.S. Defense team to discover the whereabouts of soldiers' graves who were killed in Southeast Asia and Korea in the hopes that the mapping could make the search more efficient when and if they gain access to territory as yet closed off to entry.