WOMEN WHO TALK TO THE DEAD
The True Story of 200 Forgotten Murder Victims and the Relentless Pursuit of Justice by an FBI Agent and a Detroit Police Detective
by Katherine Schweit
Schweit’s book offers a true-crime drama in which a team of investigators probes cold-case murders in Detroit.
The author, a former journalist and Chicago prosecutor who spent 20 years as an FBI agent, tells the story of Operation UNITED (Unknown Names Identified Through Exhumation and DNA), the largest coordinated exhumation of unidentified murder victims in Bureau history, spearheaded by FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen and Detroit Police Det. Shannon Jones in 2019. They and the team they assembled (and met with at their unofficial headquarters at BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse in Livonia, Michigan) examined old case files and then worked to put names to people who were still nameless, using technology that wasn’t available at the time of the original crimes. “Through rain and mud, facing bureaucratic hurdles and limited resources,” Schweit writes, “these women meticulously unearthed and documented remains, collected DNA samples, and piece by piece, began solving decades-old homicides that many had long forgotten.” The book’s setting is largely a Detroit that’s still reeling, to this day, from the effects of the riots of 1967; in the years that followed, poverty exploded, homicide rates tripled, and property values plummeted. “Hundreds of vacant buildings were available for drug houses, prostitution rings, runaway flophouses, and gang activities,” the author notes. “It became easy to drop a body in a building, alley, or even on a street.”
It quickly becomes clear that Schweit has a truly compelling subject on her hands, and she writes about Operation UNITED with a fierce, bravura energy. Her work is both heavily detailed and intensely readable, whether she’s exploring the many lives that have been disrupted for decades by long-unsolved crimes or describing the graphic forensic details of the crimes themselves. For example, she engagingly examines the various stages of decomposition in Detroit’s waterways, where moisture, heat, and bacteria make tasks difficult, even for experts, and can turn fat on a dead body into a soap-like material called “grave wax”: “Doctors hunting for the clavicle or the tarsal bones,” she writes, “must squeeze out the toothpaste-like substance to see if they have found their pot of gold.” There’s also a heartbreaking amount of pain in these old cases, and Schweit shows respect for her readers by not shying away from any of it. She writes about families torn apart, about dreams destroyed, and about the many cases that involve infant homicides, with babies “battered by abusive caregivers, malnutrition, drug overdoses, or exposure during…long, cold winter nights in the northern city.” The sheer difficulty of using forensics, anthropology, and other disciplines to piece together victims’ lives underscores the intense dedication of the women who made this work their mission. At one point, Schweit writes of someone watching with “equal parts squeamishness and intrigue…as the team brings up long-buried body bags now filled with groundwater and a mix of bones and whatever might have been buried with the corpse.” Many readers may feel a similar combination of emotions—but they’ll also feel immense satisfaction in Schweit’s accounts of long-delayed justice.An engaging real-life story of forensic detection.