Authorities have undertaken a major effort to identify murder victims going back to the late 1950s.
The initiative, known as Operation UNITED, which is an acronym for Unknown Names Identified Through Exhumation and DNA, began two months ago as an effort by the Detroit Police Department to exhume the remains of murder victims from cemeteries. According to Detroit television station WJBK, Detroit police are being assisted by the FBI, Michigan State Police, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office as well as anthropologists.
Police confirmed that they had exhumed seven bodies from a Canton Township cemetery in late May, saying that those were the remains of homicide victims. WJBK reported that DNA found on the bodies was being cross-examined with information on file with the Wayne County Examiner's Office.
Detroit station WXYZ reported that all of the seven bodies exhumed in Canton Township have since been successfully identified.
The operation is expected to last into the fall. The information being collected is being sent to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System for processing.
Seven additional bodies were exhumed from a cemetery in Plymouth on June 19, according to WXYZ, but police later said that those remains did not correspond with victims of homicide. A search warrant was obtained to examine cemetery records and identify the cause.
Operation UNITED focuses on murder victims with no DNA currently on file, dating back to 1959.
