Despite international appeals for help, the identity of the young woman killed on a motorway in the early hours of 18 February 1975 remains a mystery. She is known only as the Girl in the Afghan Coat. Her anonymity is not unusual: the UK Missing Persons Unit has a database of 13,000 names, a figure that has risen sharply in recent years.
The devastation of families left behind is lifelong. Misha, whose relative went missing 20 years ago, said it never stopped. “You’re always searching,” he said. “It’s emotionally as well as physically and mentally exhausting – you have to think of new ways to search all the time.”
This is where Locate International comes in. The charity is the brainwave of Dave Grimstead, a retired detective, and its ultimate goal is to investigate every cold case in the UK – finding loved ones if possible, or if not then providing a degree of peace to friends and families with the reassurance that every lead has been exhaustively scrutinised.
Locate International is still only a pilot scheme but nevertheless it investigated 128 missing person cases last year, including the Girl in the Afghan Coat. They identified 26 people – one in five.
The success has taken Grimstead by surprise. “It amazes me that our volunteers are able to find answers to cases that have remained unsolved, sometimes for decades,” he said.
The charity has three strands: community investigation teams, university investigation teams and graduate investigation programmes.
The community investigation teams already have more than 325 volunteer detectives from around the world. From all walks of life, from carers to ex-GCHQ, they undertake a 32-hour training course, with another 118 hours of optional expertise in modules including the use of DNA in human identification, open-source intelligence and forensic human identification.
The teams pursue every line of inquiry to the very end. “Because we’re not publicly funded, we can research small details for months,” said volunteer Emily Cairnes, who is an investigator at the Criminal Cases Review Committee, the body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice.
Supporting the community teams are 13 university investigation teams, experts in areas including policing, forensic psychology, forensic science and forensic anthropology.
These teams focus on creating increasingly effective appeals and tools for Locate to use. Goldsmiths, University of London’s forensic psychology unit, for example, has devised a self-administered interview to help families jog deeply buried memories. The University of Winchester is researching geo-forensic searches for clandestine graves, and the University of South Wales is researching triggers that might indicate homicide in missing person reports.
Locate International has also got industry onboard: Solv Technology is testing digital marketing techniques for appeals, while Thing Link is developing a “touchscreen” approach to bring reconstruction images to life.
The charity’s digital expertise throws that of the police into sharp relief, said Neil Smith, who leads on the charity’s open source investigations. “What we do at Locate is ingenious but it’s not rocket science,” he said. “One problem with police inquiries is that although all missing person cases now have a digital element, police are still only trained in physical-world techniques.”
“The missing child unit in one police force asked for help recently to find a vulnerable youngster,” he added. “I found the child’s TikTok account where they were posting disturbing messages in real time. I gave the details to the police, who said their computers were blocked from TikTok.”
On a Tuesday evening in March, 125 volunteers around the world logged into the charity’s weekly Zoom meeting. After a briefing in open-source investigation techniques, the teams broke away to discuss individual cases.
Vicky Vella has been working for months to identify a body discovered with no identification other than a belt. “It had an inscription that could indicate it had been worn by a traffic warden,” she said. “I’ve spent weeks following that up. These tiny details are all we’ve got.”
It’s the minutiae that fascinates Vella. “One tiny thing could unlock a massive mystery,” she said. “I’ve researched tidal forecasts, sea burials, the distribution of a particular bar of soap decades ago. We never admit defeat.”
Dr Maureen Taylor, a co-director of the Scottish cold case unit at Glasgow Caledonian University, has spent 18 months trying to uncover the identity of Balmore Man. “I’ve gone to the four corners of the world for him,” Taylor said. “I’ve even consulted a forensic odontologist because of an unusual chip on his front tooth.”
Taylor’s team have made hundreds of phone calls, sent emails and curated an enormous list of all the people and places Balmore Man might have been in contact with.
Their work has generated 247 separate news appeals across the world, but Taylor said it was still not enough: they still don’t know who he was. “We have to find more creative ways to get the message out,” she said. “He had a name. Someone, somewhere must know it.”
