Captain Herrero checks the fingerprints of unidentified deceased persons from 1985 on his computer screen to see if they match those of a person who disappeared that same year. With painstaking work, one by one, he compares the points of coincidence in these fingerprints to see if any of them fit. This Civil Guard commander, with more than 25 years of experience in identifying corpses, carries out the task with expertise. “No case is forgotten,” they insist at the National Centre for Missing Persons (CNDES), where Captain Herrero, who asks that his first name not be mentioned in the report, works as head of the data quality and identification department and collaborates with the Security Forces and Corps in the identification of long-term missing persons.
In 2023, 15,126 missing persons were reported in Spain, with a resolution rate of 95.4%, according to the center’s latest report. 66% of disappearances were resolved during the first seven days. However, on December 31, there were still 6,001 active reports and 7,548 cases of missing minors. The review of these fingerprints of long-term missing persons has served to establish the identity of bodies that until now had no known name or surname, and to alleviate, to a certain extent, the long suffering of their relatives, who will be able to close their mourning.
The CNDES, which is part of the Ministry of the Interior, has been responsible for missing persons nationwide since its creation in 2018. The centre pays attention to the needs of affected families – especially those whose situation is prolonged -, provides tools to improve the investigations of the different police forces and is responsible for the correct management of data and the identification of deceased persons. For four years, it has controlled and managed a programme called PDyRH (Missing Persons and Unidentified Human Remains), which was previously in the hands of the National Police, and which connects these two sources of information to try to clarify new cases. By the end of 2022, 3,517 unidentified human remains had been registered in Spain, according to CNDES data. The 2023 balance sheet does not provide this data.
The PDyRH system, which has been improved and updated, records not only the characteristics of missing persons (with their photographs, name, age, date of disappearance and a physical description), but also the data of other unidentified deceased persons about whom neither investigators nor forensic experts have been able to finish writing their story. One of these people is a young woman of about 25 years old with blonde hair who was found dead in the water, between the Balearic Islands and the Peninsula, four years ago. She was wearing a bikini. So far, there has not been a report that can link her to an identity, says Captain Herrero, who takes the opportunity to remind us of a mantra of the centre: “You should not wait 24 hours to report.” The first few hours are crucial, so it is advisable to report immediately.
One of the tasks of Captain Herrero’s department is to review unsolved disappearances that occurred before 1995, considered to be long-term. He goes year by year. He opens the folder from 1985 on his desktop computer. At that time, the police kept the fingerprints from national identity documents on small yellow cards. The expert has the police files, previously scanned, and begins to compare them on his computer. The cases are almost four decades old. “At that time, DNA samples were not taken, which began to be used in 2000,” he explains. Identification through fingerprints is the best way to identify these cases.
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Not everything is DNA, the commander argues. “All identification methods have pros and cons. There are cases in which DNA alone cannot solve a case. The advantage of fingerprints is that it is quick,” he adds. In addition to fingerprints, other techniques can be used, such as dental analysis – in Japan they have a centralised archive with this type of information – or medical implants, such as hip or dental prostheses, which have serial numbers. One of the cases they worked on was a man who was last seen when he went out to pick mushrooms and whose remains could be identified thanks to his dental record. Other characteristics, such as tattoos, may have been useful in another era, although they are no longer useful, since they are very common and many of them are the same.
In recent years, the CNDES has refined the information in the PDyRH system so that in 2023 the identification of 294 corpses was recorded, a number that far exceeds the results of recent years, which were already on the rise. In 2022, the identification of 185 was reflected. These latest identifications “did not necessarily” occur last year, Herrero says, but have been recorded and these files have been formally closed in the system.
Another of the centre’s tasks has been to ask the different police forces (National Police, Civil Guard, Mossos d’Esquadra, Ertzaintza and Foral Police) about the reasons why in some cases DNA samples from relatives of the missing were not available and to request that they be incorporated into the cases.
The Ministry of the Interior has had agreements with the Ministry of Justice since 2019 so that they can also consult and provide information to the PDyRH system. To date, doctors from the National Institute of Toxicology and Institutes of Legal Medicine from communities that do not have transferred powers, such as Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, the Balearic Islands and Murcia, have the possibility of adding information. This is information that forensic doctors have collected over the last few decades and that, until this agreement, had not been incorporated into this system. The centre is working hard to achieve the incorporation of other autonomous communities so that the greatest number of administrations can shed some light on these cases.
Joy or peace for the family
“When the family of a person who has been missing for a long time, say ten years, finds the person, if he or she is alive, it is a joy, and if what they find are remains, and the Judicial Police have determined through DNA tests that they correspond to that person, it is certainly a peace for the family,” sums up Joaquín Amills, co-founder and president of the Sosdesaparecidos Association. “A new phase opens up regarding what could have happened, whether it was a murder, whether it was an accident,” he adds. “I think that knowing the truth is always good and even more so when so many years have passed that for the family the hope that the person is well or will suddenly appear is very remote.”
Amills, whose son has been missing since September 2008, when he went sailing with a friend, stresses that remaining untraceable for years is very difficult nowadays, not like before. “This person will have to renew his driving licence, identity card or passport. It is possible that he will be caught in a traffic check. The alarm can go off at any time. In this world it is not impossible, but it is very difficult.” Last March, a man was found alive in Navarra whose disappearance was reported in 2009 and whose alarm went off precisely when he went to renew his ID. The man told the Civil Guard that he lives with a family of fairground workers and that his disappearance had been voluntary. However, he authorised the agents to provide a contact to his relatives.
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