For 30 years, Peggy Sue Houser was listed as a missing person. For nearly the same time, the Ohio womans unidentified corpse lay buried in Hillsborough County, Fla.

Last year, DNA brought the two cases together, something that may happen more frequently as local detectives submit genetic samples to the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas Health Science Center.

Funded by a National Institute of Justice grant, the Center is taking DNA samples from law enforcement agencies and coroners offices across the country, in an effort to match missing persons cases with unidentified remains.

Cold cases, by nature, are tough if they were easy cases, they would have been solved, police said. But missing persons cases offer a unique set of challenges. There is no body, no crime scene. Sometimes its not exactly clear when the person disappeared. Often police cant even prove a crime has been committed.

In Butler County, missing cases involving Alana Laney Gwinner of Fairfield, Katelyn Markham of Fairfield, Ronald Tammen Jr. of Oxford and William DiSilvestro of Hamilton have went unsolved for years.

But in recent years, the federal government has taken steps to help match the cases of unidentified bodies estimated at more than 40,000 nationwide to those missing persons.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), an online tool administered by the National Institute of Justice, is now fully searchable by the public with databases of information from both missing person cases and those of human remains. NamUS is also administrated at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, like the DNA collection program.

Under the DNA program, law enforcement officials are given free collection kits to obtain the DNA from the close relatives of missing people. The kits are processed at the Center for Human Identification, also for free. The samples are then uploaded into the FBIs Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), so that it can be compared to those of unidentified remains. If relatives are not available, then police sometimes can get a genetic profile from the missing persons property, such as a hairbrush or toothbrush.

Bill Hagmaier, Executive Director of the International Homicide Investigators Association and a former FBI crime profiler, said the recent changes are long overdue. His group helped develop the DNA initiative a few years back, which he said he wanted to do 20 years ago.

He said the military has long done a far better job of matching bodies to those reported missing in action, just so much more than what were doing for our civilians here.

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DNA may help solve cold cases