For 30 years, Peggy Sue Houser was listed as a missing person. For nearly the same time, the Piqua 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.

Dayton Detective Patricia Tackett, who is assigned to cold cases, said she has collected DNA from the family members of nearly all of the eight open missing person cases she has, even the ones where the missing person has been declared dead.

Just because theyre declared dead doesnt mean weve recovered their bodies, and there are plenty of bodies out there, said Tackett.

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.

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.

The Center claims to have assisted with more than 180 identifications made from Hawaii to New York.

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Police hope DNA will help solve cold cases