On a mid-Autumn day in 1977, a member of the public called police to the wide salt and sand flats of False Bay, 27 kilometres north of Whyalla, South Australia.
A human skull had been found.
Police quickly uncovered more remains searching the immediate area – pelvic and femoral bones.
Who did they belong to, and how did they get there?
While a skeletal examination found the bones were from the same person, there was not enough evidence to give them an identity.
The remains were boxed up and labelled UHR77/01, to be stored by Forensic Science South Australia in case of future breakthroughs.
It would take another 45 years, and the arrival of specialised DNA techniques in Australia, to solve the case.
A backlog of bones
Until recently, exhibit UHR77/01 was just one of 850 unidentified human remains cases stored in police and health facilities across Australia. Like UHR77/01, many have been in storage for decades.
It's a huge backlog that forensic DNA specialist, Associate Professor Jodie Ward, has been determined to solve ever since she first became aware of the issue back in 2011.
Back then, Dr Ward had been recruited by NSW Police to set up a dedicated laboratory to extract DNA from unidentified remains held in that state.
"I think the number of unidentified human remains did come as a shock initially," she says.
Through the process of setting up the lab, she began to realise how state borders were hampering efforts to potentially match unidentified remains to the 2,600 long-term missing persons across the country.
"If you go missing in New South Wales, it doesn't mean that your remains are going to be located in New South Wales," she says.
"What I could see is that by every state and territory taking their own approach with identifying their remains and using separate facilities and separate databases, there was real potential for unidentified or missing persons cases to remain unlinked."
That set Dr Ward on a years-long campaign to establish a national approach to testing and comparing cases, in the hope of reuniting families with their deceased loved ones.
Families left in limbo
Sally Leydon's mother Marion Barter has been missing for 25 years, but Ms Leydon has never stopped looking.
"Definitely it was my assumption that if a bone washed up on the beach or someone stumbled across some bones in the bush, that [police] would test it against missing persons," she says.
Over the past three years, Ms Leydon's search for her mum has been the subject of a high-profile podcast The Lady Vanishes, which has led to a homicide investigation and a coronial inquest.
She is determined to leave no stone unturned.
"To sit there and think that my mum could be in one of those boxes, and I'm dredging myself through everything to find her, and she could have been sitting in a box for 25 years in a morgue — that's just horrifying for me," she says.
It was a common assumption which Dr Ward encountered, not just among families, but also police officers and coroners – that found remains were being routinely tested and compared against missing persons nationally.
In reality, DNA testing capability varied from state to state, and a national database to search across borders, first introduced in 2015, was plagued by technical problems and rarely used.
Without that capability to routinely compare, it's highly likely that many of Australia's missing persons are among the 850 unidentified remains in storage.
"And that's where I saw the program; that's what we should have in this country, so we could guarantee the families that we had exhausted all of the forensic science options available to identify their missing loved one," Dr Ward says.
Lessons from Bosnia
The National DNA Program for Unidentified and Missing Persons, spearheaded by Dr Ward, was launched in 2020.
Four years earlier, she had travelled overseas on a Churchill Fellowship to find out how the best labs in the world were tackling these challenging cases.
The stand-out example was the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), set up in the aftermath of the 1990s Yugoslav wars.
The conflict left 40,000 people missing, and authorities grappling with thousands of unidentified bodies piled in mass graves.
"By the very nature of the genocide and the way that these people had died and were buried, DNA was going, in many cases, to be the only way of identifying these individuals," Dr Ward says.
There were two key aspects to the ICMP's approach.
The first was to establish cutting-edge technology to extract DNA from the remains. The second was a public outreach campaign calling on families of the missing to provide DNA samples.
Both sets of data were then centralised into a single database, allowing matches to be made.
"To date, the ICMP has identified over 70 per cent of the 40,000 missing people as a result of that genocide," Dr Ward says.
"I guess that's what I wanted to try and replicate back home."
After years of tireless campaigning, Dr Ward finally secured a grant through the federal government's proceeds of crime funding, in collaboration with the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
"For me, this seemed like the perfect example of repurposing criminal assets for the benefits of thousands of Australian families," she says.
Working with the AFP's National Missing Persons Coordination Centre (NMPCC), Dr Ward recruited a team of specialists, implementing brand new techniques never before used in Australia.
The team has refined its processes to extract DNA from the most compromised samples.
They're building emerging capabilities too, where a full facial reconstruction could be achieved from skeletal remains, based on what the DNA can reveal about biological sex, eye colour, hair colour, and genetic ancestry.
Who is UHR77/01?
The DNA laboratory is only one aspect of the national program.
To get the whole sector up to date, State and Territory Police Forces have conducted audits on unidentified and missing persons cases to collate on the revamped national database.
South Australian Police Senior Constable Trevor Schneider has been reviewing his state's unidentified and missing persons cases since 2018, under Operation Persevere.
That work included a reinvestigation of exhibit UHR77/01, the skull and bones found at False Bay in 1977.
The police investigation at the time did pinpoint a handful of potential missing persons cases that could be connected, including a Whyalla man by the name of Mario Della Torre, who was reported missing six months before the remains were found.
Mr Della Torre was an Italian immigrant who arrived in Australia in the late 1930s. He was 54, without children of his own, but was close to his parents and only brother.
When he disappeared, they made several media appeals for information, but to no avail.
Back in the 1970s, the DNA technology to compare the cases didn't exist.
But on reviewing the case, Senior Constable Schneider arranged for a sample of the bone to be sent to Dr Ward's lab for testing – which would be the first police case the team processed.
"The National DNA Program offers a unique opportunity for us to use the most up-to-date forensic techniques to progress some of our investigations, some of which are not available here in South Australia," says Senior Constable Schneider.
For any hope of a match, Senior Constable Schneider also needed to find a living relative of Mario Della Torre to obtain a DNA sample to compare it to.
Mr Della Torre himself had no children, but fortuitously his brother was still alive.
"It was exciting, but emotional, sad. I think it brought a lot of feelings back up and anxiousness. Could this be real? Could it be possible?" says Mercedes Bourgonjen, Mr Della Torre's niece.
When the DNA results did turn up a match, the South Australian Coroner swiftly reopened the inquest and found in February this year that the remains known as UHR77/01 were in fact those of Mario Della Torre.
"We've had a burial, so now he's buried with my grandparents. And now we can all be at rest."
Appeal to families
Ms Bourgonjen's message to other families of the missing is to never give up hope.
"Having this technology in DNA testing… and to find out it's actually him is wonderful, it's just amazing, even after 45 years," she says.
With the pandemic causing delays, the National DNA Program is only just getting started processing cases.
Sally Leydon has provided her DNA in the hope of a breakthrough in her mother's case, even after 25 years.
"No one wants their loved one to be in a box, in a morgue," she says.
"But after looking for so long and not having any answers, if that's the best we've got, well, at least we can know where she is. And we can have a celebration of her life."
Ms Leydon is urging family members of the missing to provide a DNA sample at their local police station, and if they have already done so, to check it is the right type of sample that can be uploaded to the national database.
Dr Ward is also encouraging anyone who hasn't reported a loved one missing to do so as soon as possible at their local police station.
The National DNA Program has this week launched an online family portal, allowing family members to upload records and information online.
"We need to know about their physical appearance, we need to know their medical history, their dental records if they still exist. We need a DNA sample," Dr Ward says.
After more than a decade in the sector, Dr Ward is determined to make up for lost time, and give families the answers they desperately crave.
Watch this story on 7.30 tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview.
