No, real forensic science isn’t like CSI, but it’s still pretty damn cool. And in Fort Worth, scientists are hard at work matching DNA to skeletal remains in order to put names to the thousands of missing person cases in the United States.

Here’s my story from the Fort Worth Weekly:
The sisters were hungry. They had been doing housework and were ready for a break. So they got in the car and drove to Godfather’s Pizza — one of their favorite restaurants in their hometown of Kansas City, Mo. They sat down at a booth, ordered The Supreme, and talked about the Bon Jovi concert they were planning to see. Paula Davis, 21, was planning to buy tickets the next day. Stephanie Clack, 14, was excited to be hanging out with her cool older sister.

Stephanie remembers the Bon Jovi song Paula played on the jukebox and the aroma of fresh-baked pizza. It was August 1987, and Paula’s olive skin had tanned from the warm summer sun. Curly brown hair framed her heart-shaped face.

After dinner, Paula dropped her sister off at their parents’ house. It was the last time Stephanie would see her sister alive.

The family knew almost immediately that something was wrong. “We got a call from Paula’s roommate saying that something had happened because Paula never came home that night,” Stephanie said.

One day later, a couple of teenagers driving down an Ohio road thought they saw a dead body lying in the dirt. They called the cops. Englewood police officers found a young woman’s body, nude from the waist up, dumped near an entrance ramp to I-70, 587 miles and a nine-hour drive from Kansas City.

A coroner estimated that the young woman had been dead only about 14 hours. But it would take 22 years before the body was identified as that of Paula Davis. Even then, it only happened because of a sister’s persistence, a rose and a unicorn, and the help of a national database now maintained in Fort Worth by the University of North Texas Health Science Center.

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Stephanie graduated from high school, got married, had five children, and moved to Independence, Mo. But wherever she was, she kept up the search for her sister. She had little hope that Paula was alive.

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