Meet the Minnesota forensic anthropologist working to solve 192 cold cases

A baby found inside a bus terminal locker, a dead man whose fingerprints belonged to someone else — Jessica Campbell’s laboratory is filled with mysteries and unanswered questions.

A forensic anthropologist, Campbell is the steward of 192 sets of unidentified remains from across Minnesota that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office has received over more than 60 years.

With the help of a $500,000 federal grant, Campbell is leading a three-year effort to categorize those remains, extract new evidence, investigate leads and hopefully identify them. It is the most concentrated review of cold cases in the office’s history.

“Everyone deserves a name,” Campbell said of her project. “Everyone deserves an answer.”

Ana Negrete has seen that need for answers first-hand as the interim director of Minnesota’s Missing Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office, which was created to address the disproportionate number of Native American women who go missing or are murdered. The office wrote a letter of support for Campbell’s grant.

“These families have unanswered questions that’s hard to wrap your head around,” Negrete said. ““It really stays with you. They can’t start the healing process until they know what happened.”

But those answers can be hard to find, especially when cases have been cold for decades. A 2018 survey by the U.S. Department of Justice found there were 11,000 unidentified remains in coroner and medical examiner offices nationwide.

Forget what pathologists call the “CSI effect” — these investigations are more complex and time consuming than what’s on TV.

The condition of the remains Campbell and her colleagues are dealing with vary widely because of how and when they were found.

There are skeletal remains from roughly 50 individuals in the anthropology lab — ranging from a few bones to more complete skeletons. There are about a dozen lone skulls turned into the office over the years, some of which may have been used for teaching.

Most of the unidentified remains were interred at local cemeteries. From those cases, Campbell has access to blood and tissue samples in cold storage, genetic information from previous testing and notes in case files from autopsies and stalled investigations.

She started the project by reviewing all 192 cases, logging the usable evidence so investigators can decide whether exhuming a body is needed to collect more samples.

DNA technology is always evolving, so investigators can use new samples to compare with genetic genealogy databases that include millions of samples users submitted to trace their family trees. Pathologists also use medical records, 3D facial approximations, carbon dating, even chemical isotopes with geographical markers to try to identify someone.

“There are new technologies all the time that might assist us,” Campbell said. “We might be able to yield something now that we couldn’t 10 years ago.”

The office’s oldest cold case is an infant male discovered in 1964 in the locker of a Minneapolis bus terminal. The stillborn baby was there long enough that travelers noticed the smell of the decomposing body.

At the time, investigators were able to get a blood type, but not much else. Campbell hopes DNA from the boy might be enough for a genetic profile to lead to members of the extended family.

Then there are cases with more to go on, but the evidence just doesn’t add up.

As in the 1994 case of the body of a Hispanic man who was discovered by a roommate in the Minneapolis home they shared.

The death was recent enough that the body was autopsied and fingerprinted. But in a twist, the prints led to a man who was still alive and apparently using the same identity.

Investigators followed up leads locally, in California and Mexico, but could never identify the body.

Some of the toughest inquiries are those when only a few remains are recovered, leaving investigators with little to go on. That’s the case of a skull that a Goodhue County resident found in a rural area in 1984.

It was determined to belong to a man, but genetic material recovered from the skull was only able to yield a partial profile. It’s another case where newer technology could lead to an answer.

“DNA degrades over time, and it can be difficult to get enough, particularly with skeletal remains,” Campbell explained.

Sometimes, ever-evolving forensic technology leads to a breakthrough.

That’s what happened with the reinvestigation of the victim of a 1986 Minneapolis boxcar fire. It’s an effort that began before Campbell received grant funding to re-examine the office’s cold cases.

Two people died in the fire, but only one of the bodies was identified at the time. The other, a white male about 5’8” and 145 pounds, was a “John Doe” until last year.

Medical examiner’s office staff submitted forensic evidence in 2023 to Othram, an advanced genetic laboratory in Texas, which was able to extract a suitable sample to create a profile. That led investigators to the victim’s family and a brother who provided genetic information to help identify the victim, James R. Wakkinen, born in January 1947.

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Campbell didn’t know her career existed until after she’d finished a degree in history and recreation management at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

After college, she worked for the Navy as what sailors called a “fun boss” on the USS Tarawa, coordinating fitness regimens and recreation activities like video game tournaments.

On a trip to Hawaii to visit a friend, Campbell learned about the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which works to identify soldiers missing from past conflicts from around the world.

That’s when it hit her.

“I worked backwards to get myself into this field, because I just knew, this is what I was supposed to be doing with my life,” Campbell said.

Campbell went back to school to earn a master’s degree in human biology and a doctorate in biological anthropology and archaeology. She is a certified forensic anthropologist who worked in several states before joining Hennepin County in 2024.

Before he hired Campbell, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said he typically relied on consultants or the FBI for the analysis she specializes in. But that took time, and the answers were often less precise.

With Campbell on staff, Baker says, they can identify people “who no longer look like their driver’s license” — because of fire, decomposition and other factors — more quickly and accurately. Pathologists who work with her are also learning new skills.

“Some of the day-to-day stuff Jessica has been able to do for us has just been amazing,” Baker said.

Later this year, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office will add a page to its website highlighting Campbell’s work on cold cases. The page will also serve as a portal for community members to submit tips and learn about resources to help find missing loved ones.

The plan is to highlight organizations like the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Minnesota’s offices for missing and murdered Indigenous relatives and Black women and girls.

“These cases do gnaw at you,” said Baker, who’s led the office for over two decades. “When you have a truly unidentified case, there’s not a day that goes by that you think, did I miss something? Is there something I could have done differently?”