Solving Mysteries Locked in Death

The woman was lying on a rustic trail in Fullerton when a police officer found her, the apparent victim of an alienation so deep that she had doused herself with gasoline and struck a match.

Officer Michael DuFresne asked the dying woman her name. She responded, “Shut up--leave me alone.”

When she died without having identified herself, the task of discovering who she was fell to Kurt Murine, 40, the Orange County senior deputy coroner in charge of putting names to the unknown dead.

“Somebody, somewhere knows who she is,” Murine said of the woman, who was found near West Las Palmas Drive on Oct. 22 and died hours later at a local hospital. “If anybody is a John Doe for more than five days, I start looking into it.”

Of the estimated 8,000 deaths handled by the coroner’s office annually, Murine said, about 200 arrive unidentified. The vast majority are identified within hours, but a handful each year--generally victims of suicides or homicides or pedestrians killed by drivers--may remain unidentified for months, even years.

His office has open files on about 50 John or Jane Does, the oldest dating to 1967, when the partial remains of a man washed ashore at Seal Beach. The newest is the woman who burned herself last month.

“Sometimes it just takes time,” said Murine, who thought he would be a doctor but changed his mind halfway through medical school. “I didn’t want to be around sick people all the time,” he said, and realized that his real fascination was with “the mystery of death--why and how people die.”

In his 13 years on the job, he has had some notable successes in solving that mystery.

Five years ago, using a new fingerprint database linking the western United States, he identified a victim of convicted serial killer Randy Kraft, 22 years after the murder.

Clark R. Bailey of Vero Beach, Fla., the father of that victim, recalled being a little stunned to learn that Murine had identified the body found in Huntington Beach in 1973 as that of his son, Kevin Clark Bailey, who disappeared at the age of 18.

Chief Deputy Coroner Jim Beisner, who supervised Murine on that case, said at the time, “I think he did a great job. . . . A lot of it was on his own time, at home on his own computer.”

Deputy Orange County Dist. Atty. Bryan Brown, who led the successful prosecution of Kraft in 1989, praised Murine for work he characterized as innovative and important in providing “some comfort and an end to suffering” for families of murder victims. “That’s just incredibly great,” he said.

Exploiting New Databases

Murine also solved a 10-year-old mystery recently when he figured out the identity of an illegal immigrant who made it safely across the border to Santa Ana in 1990, only to die under the wheels of a car that struck him as he was crossing 1st Street. His name: Manuel Munoz-Guerrero, 29, a Mexican national who had been arrested and fingerprinted by federal officials in Scott’s Bluff, Neb., two years earlier. “Apparently,” Murine said, “the fingerprints hadn’t been available before.”

While some of Murine’s successes stem from sheer persistence, colleagues say, many result from the expanding databases that he checks regularly. “He’s really taking the whole use of databases and applying it to the coroner’s side,” said Curtis Hill, president of the California State Coroners’ Assn., which represents the state’s 58 agencies. “He is doing good work and is very well thought of.”

Some cases continue to defy Murine’s detective work at the morgue, a large refrigerated room filled with gurneys that hold bodies, each with a green toe tag. Those that will be there for an extended time are wrapped in plastic and stored on shelves.

He is haunted, for instance, by the teenage girl who took a cab to Dana Point in 1987 and jumped off a cliff. Thirteen years later, investigators are no closer to knowing who she was than they were on the day that she died.

Also eluding him is the identity of the man who jumped off the roof of an Anaheim hotel in 1992. When authorities found the bespectacled man, Murine said, he was wearing an “Arizona” T-shirt and carrying a Disneyland ticket dated the previous day and had a bus pass from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. “There were all sorts of identifying pieces of evidence on him,” Murine said, “but we have just never been able to get him identified. It’s frustrating.”

The latest Jane Doe, the self-immolation victim, left a number of clues: a small patch of green material believed to be from the clothes she was wearing and the charred remains of two rabbits that may have been her pets.

At the morgue, Murine followed his typical routine, first looking for identifying marks such as tattoos, scars, artificial limbs and birthmarks. During the autopsy, examiners checked for missing organs or implants bearing serial numbers. None were found.

Next, he instructed experts to take fingerprints and dental imprints, which were examined by a forensic dentist. The imprints showed evidence of careful early care but recent serious neglect of the teeth, indicating that the woman might have been homeless.

A forensic anthropologist examined the skeleton and estimated the woman’s age at 30 to 46. Finally, a forensic artist sketched a portrait of Jane Doe 00-06494-GA as she would have looked in life.

All of the material was assembled in a packet to be distributed to law enforcement agencies nationwide or posted on the coroner’s Web page for public perusal. Local, state and national databanks were checked for matching fingerprints; again, there were none. Local newspapers were sent press releases and copies of the sketch. Murine personally checked with local police departments for reports on missing persons.

The deputy coroner says that he will pursue every means of finding out the woman’s name, a process that could take several months. If she remains unidentified, her body eventually will be taken from the morgue and cremated at county expense. But the records will stay in the county’s databanks, testament to the efforts of Murine and his colleagues to identify all of the county’s John and Jane Does.

“Mostly it boils down to persistence and not being willing to give up,” he said. “I can’t imagine how families must feel” when loved ones disappear. “I think it’s important to help them get some closure.”

That’s what he would want for his own family if a tragedy ever occurs, said Murine, who lives in Laguna Niguel with his wife and 10-year-old daughter.

What he sees on the job, in fact, has affected his personal habits. As he jogs through his neighborhood every morning at 4:15, Murine said, “I make it a point to carry my house keys with my business card and phone number in case I drop dead or get hit by a car. I would hate to be a John Doe.”