Introducing What Remains, a new podcast where true crime meets forensic science. Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains are found. But matching the remains to the missing people is not an easy task. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families left without answers.  What Remains follows forensic anthropolgists, genealogists, criminal investigators, facial reconstruction artists and volunteers dedicated to matching unidentified human remains to missing and murdered people. WRAL Studios, the creators of Follow The Truth present What Remains, hosted by veteran crime reporter Amanda Lamb. 

More than twenty years ago, a newborn baby was found dead inside a garbage bag on the side of the road near a military base in North Carolina. The officers working to solve his murder called him Baby Michael, named for the patron saint of police. With no leads on who the baby was, or who his mother was, the mystery turned into a cold case – another unsolved murder – but investigators never, ever quit on Baby Michael.  Meet the incredible investigators who made it their mission to identify Baby Michael and find his killer, and learn how they tapped into an innovation in forensic science to crack a 21-year old cold case.  This episode features two cold cases: Baby Michael and Ebonee Spears, a woman who vanished without a trace from Wilmington, North Carolina. One solved and one that still needs a miracle. If you have any information about Ebonee Spears, please contact the Wilmington (NC) Police Department.

Dr. Ann Ross is surrounded by bones, literally. Everywhere you look in her osteology lab at North Carolina State University there are skeletal remains on metal tables laid out like jigsaw puzzles – a mosaic of hundreds of pieces that only she knows how to put together. Ross is a forensic anthropologist, often called on to help solve murder cases using forensic science. In this episode, we walk you through the definition of forensic anthropology with the disappearance of Laura Ackerman, a young mother of two boys. The frantic search for her leads across state lines from North Carolina to the gruesome discovery of her dismembered remains in a Texas creek filled with alligators. The clues point to her ex, Grant Hayes, and his current wife. When the skeletal remains arrive in Dr. Ross’ lab, the work of solving the case with forensic science begins. But solving this takes creativity. That’s where a pig carcass and a reciprocating saw from a hardware store come in handy.