JACKSON – Officials across all branches of Wyoming government and law enforcement are trying to develop new tools to solve cases of missing and murdered indigenous people.
The two most recent attempts occurred in bills passed during the state legislature's 2024 budget session: House Bills 29 and 58. One is creating a new database of cold cases under the jurisdiction of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and the other is establishing a pilot program for forensic genealogical DNA analysis and searches.
The bills were sponsored by the Legislature's Joint Judiciary Committee and the Special Committee on Tribal Relations.
Select committee lawmakers heard Wednesday from members of Gov. Mark Gordon's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Task Force and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation about the implementation timeline.
Both laws come into force on July 1st. However, the DCI has already begun deciding how the Wyoming homicide and sexual assault cold case database will operate and how to allocate $150,000 in grants to local law enforcement agencies for forensic genealogical DNA analysis to support criminal investigations and human remains identification . The funding is available until 2029.
“Our update is that we have evaluated various databases,” said DCI Commander Ryan Cox. “And after the evaluation, we feel we can implement an internal database that meets all of our needs. It will look similar to the missing persons database currently available on the Wyoming DCI website.”
DCI officials have spoken with law enforcement officials across the state about how they plan to collect and disseminate more than 100 fields of information through the database.
The database will also be available to the public, but some government-prohibited information will not be included to protect the integrity of the cases. Cox said that as they work through their unsolved cases, agencies will also be incentivized to look at forensic tools and the new pilot program that is currently being established.
Cox said genealogy lab work can often cost $4,000 to $10,000 for local law enforcement agencies. The issue of reimbursement rather than providing the grants in advance has been the subject of debate as the cost could be a barrier to participation in the pilot program for smaller agencies.
“The cost can be up to $10,000,” said Scott McWilliams, deputy director of the State Crime Laboratory. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable given the amount of technology that’s out there. And once you've done the lab work to find these connections within a family tree, it takes a lot of research and many hours of work. And so it is, it is expensive.
“But given the $150,000 the state has committed to this project, I believe it is a reasonable starting point because there is only a very small subset of cases that actually qualify for it.”
Cara Chambers, director of the Wyoming Division of Victim Services, not only got a preview of the agency's plans for the new resources, but also hinted at the legislative initiatives she plans to share with the committee in the meantime.
However, Chambers will first present “Patricia’s Law” — a bill that has been passed by other states across the country — to the governor’s task force. The law sets new guidelines for police to follow in missing persons cases, including collecting DNA material and entering a missing persons report into the national database within two hours of filing high-risk cases. Other cases would need to be investigated within 24 hours of their initial filing, according to New Jersey state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, the bill's sponsor in her state.
This could be another resource for a population in Wyoming that has a disproportionate number of homicide or missing persons victims compared to whites.
Indigenous people make up just 3% of Wyoming's population, but the five-year murder rate for all genders was 19.6 per 100,000 people in 2023. For whites of all genders, the rate was three murders per 100,000 people, according to a 2024 report on Indigenous victims in Wyoming. This means that the murder rate for indigenous residents was almost seven times higher.
In 2023, law enforcement added 177 missing person registries for 110 Indigenous people to National Crime Information Center records. Wyoming accounted for 18% of all missing person cases entered into the system.
Most reports involved missing women, 93% of whom were between 5 and 17 years old.
The 2024 report noted that there is no federal law requiring the inclusion of all adults reported in the national system, “so it is likely that the numbers we present do not include information about all missing persons.”
State Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, sits on the Special Committee on Tribal Relations and is passionate about the issue in his own community. He pointed to the Riverton Ranger's reporting on the new Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons database now available, and that 10 youths have gone missing in the past five months – most of them between February and March.
“This data was not available before, but it is now,” he said. “But I am completely dissatisfied with the fact that ten young animals that come from really small communities have been missing here since the beginning of the year. It was amazing and tragic.”
This story was published on May 3, 2024.
Comments are closed.