The Nameless Dead

The woman was dead, her body crumpled at the bottom of a barren hill, with cuts and bruises on her head and legs. A prescription bottle lay in the dirt nearby, but the label had been torn off, as if to hide her name.

She was white, likely in her 50s or 60s, with hazel eyes and shoulder-length, brown-gray hair. She wore blue jeans, a yellow windbreaker and giant rounded bifocals that made her look like an owl. There was a wedding ring on her finger, cash in her pocket and a clear amber pendant around her neck. Her face was painted with pricey Clinique makeup.

It was 2:15 p.m., Feb. 10, 1997. A construction worker stumbled upon her body behind Desert Crossing Shopping Center in Palm Desert and then called police.

Soon, authorities had swarmed the scene. They found the woman's day camp, a small collection of food and belongings, up the hillside from her body. They combed the camp for answers, but uncovered only riddles.

For example, they found a photograph of a beach, but it looked as if someone had been cut out of the picture, erasing a clue. They found a Hallmark birthday card, but the sender's name had been torn off. And they found an unfinished love letter, written in English and Scottish Gaelic, addressed to no one.

"Dear love of my heart ..." the letter began, before fading into nothing. "A ghraidh mo chridhe." ("O love of my heart.")

A few day after the woman's body was found, an autopsy revealed that she had died due to heart disease. The cuts on her face and legs were likely sustained when she rolled down the hill, maybe after death. Investigators were relieved to know that she had not been murdered, and yet — despite their best efforts — they still had no idea who she was. Everywhere they should have found her name, they found a blank instead.

"It was like everyone knew her face, but no one knew her name," said Warren Horton, a retired deputy coroner who worked the case.

Eighteen years later, this woman is still a mystery. Her body lies in an unmarked grave in Corona. Her story sits in a filing cabinet at the Riverside County coroner's headquarters in Perris. Her only name is a case number — "#97-009."

And she is not alone.

Over the past 120 years, a total of 141 bodies have defied identification in Riverside County. Of those, the coroner's office has classified 55 as "Cold Cases," which are cases with the most clues and the greatest likelihood of being solved.

The earliest unidentified body in Riverside County was a man who was shot to death in Riverside on Nov. 11, 1895, only two years after the county was incorporated. A record of this death was handwritten into the city ledger, setting a foundation for all the mysteries that would follow.

Since then, the unidentified deceased have been men, women, newborns and the elderly. Some are the victims of unsolved homicides who have been found buried, burned or bullet-riddled. Some died in accidents, or took their own lives. For a few, there is simply no explanation for the death.

For example, in 2001, police found a man's skeleton — dressed in blue jeans, a leather jacket and cowboy boots — sitting on a hillside in Cabazon, overlooking the interstate. The coroner's office believes the skeleton may have sat there for 10 years. No one knows how he died or who he was.

When bodies like this one are found, the coroner's office follows a well-tread checklist to try to identify the deceased. The strategy starts with the obvious, like a search of the decedent's wallet for photo ID. In most cases, the mystery ends there.

However, when no ID can be found, investigators dig deeper. They search for clues that lead to friends or family who might be able to identify the body. They comb through recent reports of missing persons. They collect fingerprints, dental impressions and DNA samples, then search for a match in law enforcement records. And, if none of that works, the coroner's office submits all the clues and samples to a statewide database, hoping that a match will be made someday.

In the vast majority of cases, this system works. Each year, more than 10,000 people die in Riverside County, and yet the county averages only one unidentified decedent.

Unidentified cases are so rare, in fact, that when they do happen, they are hard to forget. Some investigators are dogged by the mysteries of the nameless dead for years.

"It's haunting, because you know that, somewhere out there, there is a friend, or a family, who wants to know what happened," said Sgt. Anthony Townsend, a longtime coroner's investigator.

For Townsend, that haunting case came 14 years ago.

On March 18, 2001, a middle-aged man was found dead in a riverbed near Limonite Avenue in Riverside. The man had been dead for several days, but no one had reported him missing. He was likely homeless.

Townsend had very little to work with. The man had no ID, and his looks were generic — brown eyes, brown hair, no tattoos. His fingerprints had no match. He had no teeth, so, comparing dental records was not an option.

Townsend followed every lead he could, but in the end, the answer eluded him. Today, the man's name is still unknown.

"You keep a case like this on your case profile forever, and you think about it routinely," Townsend said. "You think about that there is someone out there that wants to lay these remains to rest. And that drives us. That's the whole reason we have a long-term unidentified unit. That's why we keep these cases going indefinitely."

It was the summer of 1983, within the cold walls of a Texas jail cell, when Henry Lee Lucas began to confess to murders. Lots of murders.

Lucas, a scruffy drifter in his late 40s, had been arrested by Texas Rangers for illegal firearms possession. After a few days behind bars, Lucas admitted to killing Frieda Powell, a school girl from Florida. Soon after, Lucas said he had also killed Katherine Rich, an elderly Texas woman.

That was just the beginning. What followed was one of the most notorious confession sprees in the history of American crime.

Over the next few months, Lucas spoke to detectives from across the country, providing convenient answers to unsolvable mysteries. Lucas confessed to hundreds of murders, claiming he drove across the country from 1975 to 1983, randomly killing on an endless road trip.

Among his hundreds of confessions, Lucas admitted to killing five people in Riverside County, including two unidentified women. In August 1984, police escorted Lucas through the county, touring murder scenes, trying to confirm his claims.

First, Lucas confessed to killing a middle-aged woman who was found at the Cactus City Rest Stop in 1977. The woman had been shot in the head, her hands had been cut off and her body had been burned. Investigators believed she had been killed elsewhere and dumped at the rest stop, but knew little else.

Secondly, Lucas said he had killed a young woman who was found in the open desert near Blythe in 1983. The woman's skeleton had been in the desert for months, if not years, so decomposition had left few clues to her identity.

Lucas said her name was "Judy." He said he had picked her up in North Carolina, then traveled with her for three days before raping her, strangling her, and then having sex with her corpse.

Police believed him. They closed both cases, confident the killer of two unidentified women had finally been caught.

But there were problems with Lucas's story. Soon, journalists at the Dallas Times Herald began to poke holes in Lucas's claims, showing that his killing spree would have required him to drive a seemingly impossible distance in a mere month, and that evidence of his whereabouts often conflicted with his confessions.

By the time Lucas died in prison in 2001, the vast majority of his confessions had been debunked. Law enforcement ultimately determined that Lucas had confessed to killing people he had never met, in places he had never been. Across the country, police had no choice but to reopen investigations that had been closed by Lucas's landmark confession spree.

The same was true in Riverside County. Today, the cases of the two unidentified women — once closed — are open and unsolved. Their names are still unknown, their deaths are still unexplained and their killers remain uncaught.

Of the 55 unidentified "Cold Cases" spotlighted by the coroner's office, 30 are classified as homicides. Of those 30, nine were in the Coachella Valley.

They are:

• Mecca, Oct. 4, 1975: The body of a twenty-something white man was found floating in the All American Canal. The man had been killed by a blow to the head, then thrown into the canal with an iron weight tied to his neck.
• Near Palm Desert, Feb. 16, 1980: The body of a twenty-something white woman was found dumped in a ravine in a mountainous area off Highway 74. She was well-dressed, wearing a tan-colored velour blouse, and had recently manicured fingernails. Her purse was missing.
• Coachella, March 16, 1980: The body of a man, who was either white or Latino, was found on Avenue 50 between Polk Street and Tyler Street. He had several gunshot wounds, and authorities believe he was dumped in the road after being killed elsewhere.
• Mecca, Nov. 10, 1983: The decomposing remains of a young man were found in a dirt field off Avenue 62 in Mecca. Authorities believe he was killed two to five months beforehand, and that his body was dumped in the field. The man had a tattoo of a monarch butterfly on his upper right arm.
• Thermal, Jan. 22, 1991: The skeleton of a middle-aged white woman was found by hikers in the open desert south of Avenue 62. Authorities believe she died about eight months prior.
• Thousand Palms, May 26, 1991: The body of a man, who was either white or Latino, was found in a shallow grave off Interstate 10 near the Bob Hope Drive exit. He had been dead less than a month.
• Thousand Palms, Oct. 24, 1994: A woman, estimated to be between theages of 65 and 80, was found partially buried in the open desert north of Varner Road.
• Indio, Dec. 14, 1996: A man, who was white or Latino, was found with multiple gunshots off a dirt road near Monroe Street.
• Cathedral City, Oct. 22, 2002: The body of a middle-aged Latino man was found in the Whitewater wash north of Ramon Road. Authorities believe he was killed elsewhere and dumped in the wash.

In each of these cases, investigators face two mysteries — Who is the deceased, and who was the killer? If coroner's investigators can answer the first question, it may help police answer the second.

That may sound like a long shot, but it is not impossible. Just last year, the coroner's staff used DNA evidence to identify a skull that was found near Idyllwild, uncovering a new clue in a 15-year-old Palm Springs murder.

The murder investigation began on July 15, 1999, when a telephone line repairman stumbled upon a naked, mutilated body off the edge of Tipton Road in Whitewater.

The victim was Raina Chessman, a 55-year-old transgender woman who had been missing for a few days. Someone had chopped off Chessman's head, fingers and toes, then dumped her body and fled.

Eleven years later, a skull was found in the mountainous forest along Highway 247, north of Idyllwild. The skull appeared to be its own mystery until last year, when the coroner's staff used DNA to match the skull to Chessman's body.

Chessman's death remains unsolved, but for the first time in years, investigators have a new lead in the case. The Palm Springs Police Department now knows that someone drove Chessman's head into the mountains, where it lie hidden for more than a decade. Sgt. Harvey Reed, a police spokesman, said the skull has "evidentiary value."

The break in the case has also impassioned the Transgender Community Coalition, a Coachella Valley group that unites transgender residents to provide support and influence public policy. Coalition Director Thomi Clinton said the group had never heard the story of Chessman's murder until they were contacted by The Desert Sun for this story.

Chessman was so far "forgotten" that she might as well have been unidentified, Clinton said.

The Coalition is now planning to hold a vigil for Chessman on March 29 at the Newport Beach pier, close to where Chessman's ashes were scattered in 2004. Chessman's name will also be added to the coalition's annual Transgender Day of Remembrance Event, which memorializes victims of violence against transgender people. Previously, this event has honored transgender victims from beyond the Coachella Valley, without ever realizing that there was a victim in Palm Springs.

"We will make sure that she is not forgotten, like she was," Clinton said.

Debi Faris was cooking dinner in her kitchen in Yucaipa, listening to evening news, when she heard something that made her stomach churn.

Police in San Pedro had found a newborn baby, stuffed in a duffel bag on the side of Interstate 110. The bag had been thrown out of a speeding car. The baby boy was dead.

It was May 1996.

"All I could imagine was, as a mother of three children, and knowing those children were gifts, how could this child end up like this? Just thrown away?" Faris said. "My humanness was screaming at me that we can't just let this be OK. We can't just throw away a baby like it's yesterday's garbage."

The next day, Faris called the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, asking if she could host a funeral for the unwanted, nameless child. The coroner's staff were stunned, then suspicious, but Faris was persistent, insisting she only wanted to help.

After a few months, the coroner's staff relented. They said Faris could bury the boy, and asked if she was willing to do the same for other unidentified children. They said the county morgue also held a newborn boy, found in a trash can in downtown Los Angeles, and a 2-year-old girl who washed up on a beach in Malibu.

Faris claimed all three. She named them Matthew, Nathan and Dora, and buried them side by side on Aug. 26, 1996.

They were the first.

Nineteen years later, Faris' nonprofit, Garden of Angels, has buried 110 children at the Desert Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont. The babies come from throughout Southern California, including Riverside County. If not for Garden of Angels, these children would have been unceremoniously cremated, or buried in unmarked graves, like hundreds of California's other nameless dead.

At the Garden of Angels, there are names on all the headstones, despite the fact that many of these children are unidentified. There is a headstone for Jesse, who was abandoned in a hotel room in Riverside. And one for Jorge Andrew, found in a storm drain in Glendale. And one for Sarah, who was dumped on Highway 74 outside of Hemet.

Some of the babies were named by the police that found them. Faris names the rest.

"Legally, the name they are given by us is not on their paperwork. But no child ... will ever be buried in the Garden of Angels without a name that has been lovingly thought of," Faris said. "I couldn't imagine it any other way."

Currently, Garden of Angels operates out of a small office in Garden Terrace, an hour from the western edge of the Coachella Valley. The nonprofit still buries a few babies a year, but now spends a majority of its time spreading awareness about California's Safe Surrender law, working to prevent burials.

The Safe Surrender law allow parents to surrender their newborn children at hospitals and fire stations within three days of birth. Parents can't be prosecuted for surrendering their children, so anyone who is considering abandoning a baby has no reason not to surrender them instead.

Faris was instrumental in the creation of this law. In 1999, after burying dozens of babies with Garden of Angels, Faris decided to do more. She approached then-state Sen. Jim Brulte, hoping to create a legal option to surrender children.

Brulte introduced a bill the following year. It was signed into law, and took affect on Jan. 1, 2001.

"In my 14 years in the Legislature, this is by far the most important, most impactful legislation I authored," said Brulte, who is now chairman of the California Republican Party. "I believe it has led to saving baby's lives."

Today, every state in the nation has some form of Safe Surrender law, but California was one of the first. Since the law was enacted, more than 650 newborns have been legally surrendered to the state. If not for the law, at least some of these children would have been fatally abandoned by their parents. Some would have ended up buried by Garden of Angels. At least a few would have ended up as nameless mysteries in the unidentified files at the Riverside County Coroner's Office.

Faris now buries far fewer children than she did in the late '90s, before the Safe Surrender law took effect. There is no way to know exactly how many children have been saved, but for every baby that lives because of the law, there is one less headstone at Desert Lawn.

"But even one is too many," Faris said.

Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.