About this episode
The episode discusses the efforts of female investigators to identify over 200 forgotten murder victims in Detroit.
The Story of 200 Forgotten Murder Victims By Robert Riggs They were daughters. Mothers. Sisters. Strangers. Their lives ended violently—and their names were lost to time. For more than half a century, Detroit’s forgotten dead lay buried beneath weeds and silence—unidentified murder victims dumped into paupers’ graves, sometimes stacked in vaults three-deep, known only by numbers in crumbling cemetery logs. No names. No justice. No answers. This is the remarkable five-year journey of a team of relentless female investigators who pledged to identify more than 200 victims of Detroit’s outstanding murder cases. Led by Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones and FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen, this group of dedicated women—detectives, agents, forensic anthropologists, and scientists—literally dug through the past to bring closure to families and justice to the murdered. Their quest became known as Operation UNITED , the largest coordinated exhumation of cold case murder victims in FBI history. Katherine Schweit tells the story of this unprecedented, five-year mission in her book, Women Who Talk to the Dead . Schweit is a former FBI Special Agent Executive , Chicago prosecutor…
People in this episode
Host: Robert Riggs
Guest: Katherine Schweit
Topics covered
- murder victims
- investigation
- cold cases
- forensic science
- justice
- female investigators
Keywords
- murder
- investigation
- Detroit
- cold cases
- forensic anthropology
- justice
- female detectives
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: FBI, National Missing and Unidentified Persons System
Books & works: Women Who Talk to the Dead
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