Volunteers, Web site aim to solve cases
By day, Barbara Lamacki is an assistant vice president at LaSalle Bank.
By night, she's a missing persons sleuth, working to crack old, unsolved cases and put names to unidentified remains.
The Lockport resident oversees Illinois operations of the Doe Network, an international volunteer organization devoted to helping police solve missing persons cold cases in North America, Australia and Europe.
"I put on my suit and go to work. They think I'm normal. Then I come home and do this," the true-crime buff says.
Begun in 1999, the Doe Network maintains a Web site featuring hundreds of open missing persons cases from 1998 and earlier, and unidentified bodies discovered in 2005 and before.
The group works with volunteer forensics artists to create facial reconstructions and age progression images for police.
Volunteers also try to link unidentified bodies with missing persons and, so far, 40 of those cases have been cleared.
"We're people who cannot understand how there could be an unidentified body found, and no one claims it. Someone is looking for these people," said Lamacki. "It's so heartbreaking."
Her group has been working on the case of Johnny Doe, the toddler who was found dead more than two years ago in DuPage County but never identified. He was buried this month.
Lamacki joined the group in 2005 and spends hours poring through old news clips for cases that were never solved, contacting police and coroners for information, and getting details onto the Web site, www.doenetwork.org, so the general public can provide leads.
She's trying to solve the case of Elgin resident Karen Schepers, who disappeared at age 23 in 1973 after a night out with friends. "Her mother's been waiting 25 years for closure," said Lamacki.
Then there's Doe Case 973UMIL, an unidentified man found Oct. 1, 2003, in Lake Michigan, near Navy Pier. "He was 28 to 42 years old, and between 6 feet 5 and 6 feet 10. How many missing people do we have that tall?" she asked. "But no one's reported someone like that missing."