No One Really Knows What to Do With All of America’s Unclaimed Corpses

Sarah Krebs is used to corpses going missing. As a detective who works in the missing-persons unit in Detroit, she has solved dozens of cases by matching up disappeared people to unidentified bodies left in state custody. But for older cases in which the county was supposed to have buried the body, Krebs says it’s common for her to order an exhumation from the local cemetery and discover that the body she’s looking for is not there.

Anywhere from a few days to a few years later, those bones might turn up in a separate burial plot, or in a box on a medical examiner’s shelf, or in a law-enforcement evidence room, or in a county employee’s house. “I have multiple, multiple cases where we thought the body was buried and we found