Online network spawns new breed of detectives

The man was found wrapped in a tarp, floating gently in the Sudbury River. His killing was a mystery, and so was his identity. There was just one clue: the letters "PK" tattooed on his right shoulder.

For nearly a year, the Framingham case grew colder and colder. Then last spring, Bobby Lingoes happened across a description of the dead man and his tattoo. Lingoes posted the details on the Doe Network, a website for volunteers like him who search for missing people in their spare time.

"I just threw it out there to the network," said Lingoes, a civilian dispatcher at the Quincy Police Department. "Two hours later, I got a response."

Another member of the Doe Network -- as in John Doe -- remembered reading about a Texas man who had been missing for about a year and had "PK" tattooed on his arm. Lingoes contacted Framingham police with information about the missing man, Peter Kokinakis, 40, who had disappeared from Texas in 2002. Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley announced the break in the case and credited Lingoes for his work.

"It worked," said Lieutenant Lou Griffith of the Framingham Police Department, which had released photos of the unusual tattoo.

Lingoes, who has no home computer and often works on cases at public terminals at the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, is a new kind of detective: a volunteer cyber sleuth who never visits the scene of the crime or searches for forensic evidence. His territory is cyberspace. He surfs websites and tries to draw connections between the missing and the found.

He belongs to the Doe Network, which has members around the world who work to solve cases. The network's website, www.doenetwork.org, posts unexplained disappearances that are at least nine years old as well as information about unidentified victims who died in 2002 or earlier.

"It's not at all surprising," said Robert McCrie, a crime historian and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "We have tens of millions of people interested in lost-and-found issues and detective stories. Now, some are just using these skills in the Doe Network."

The network has helped solve 17 cases around the country within the last few years; Lingoes has been involved in six of them.

Once members believe they have found a match, they turn over their information to local authorities for DNA analysis or other confirmation. Police are sometimes grateful and sometimes annoyed, unwilling to have civilians working on their cases.

There is currently no single site that lists every missing person -- or every unidentified body -- although the Doe Network, which now has 200 members, is trying to create an international clearinghouse.

"This is a large country with lots of police jurisdictions," said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University. "It's not just missing persons -- it's almost every kind of crime where local jurisdictions don't communicate nationally."

Some volunteers are retired law enforcement officers or people who have learned firsthand the pain of a missing relative. In the solemn faces of people who died, they see wives and husbands, mothers and sons.

"The police tend to be busy focusing on current cases," Levin said. "What's left is those missing persons cases that are more difficult. That's where the average citizen can make a difference."

Sheree Greenwood, a mental health therapist and owner of an embroidery store, got involved in the Doe Network after the disappearance of a Warren neighbor, Molly Bish, the 16-year-old lifeguard who went missing in 2000. Greenwood's son was Bish's classmate.

Greenwood had helped publicize Bish's description, before the girl's remains were found last year in Palmer. When Greenwood discovered the Doe Network website on a slow day at her store, she got hooked. In 2001, she and other members of the Doe Network helped identify a murdered woman found in Baltimore.

The woman was discovered wearing a custom-designed T-shirt from a family reunion. Since Greenwood's store also does silk-screening, she knew the T-shirt would be an important clue. That, and her mother's knowledge of genealogy, helped other network members track down the missing woman's roommate.

"That was pretty cool," Greenwood said.

Many of the members have one particular case that gnaws at them. For Hillary Keller, the network's Massachusetts coordinator, it's the Lady of the Dunes. The woman's body was discovered by a teenager walking her beagle in Provincetown's Race Point dunes in July 1974.

The decomposed body was resting on a beach towel, her long, reddish-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Police estimated she was between 25 and 35 when she was killed by a powerful blow to the head.

Her hands had been severed from her body and her toenails were painted pink. In 2000, investigators thought they might have identified her, but her DNA did not match that of the missing woman they suspected she might be.

Keller, a 21-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, thinks the woman's unusual dental work -- as much as $10,000 worth -- might provide a clue.

"Did she just go on vacation to the Cape?" said Keller, who also works at a Filene's department store in New Hampshire. "Where did she come from?"

Lingoes was gripped by another case: a young woman killed in 1992 after she was struck by a train in Waco, Texas. The woman had several distinctive tattoos, including one with the word "Tonk." He sent a query to the National Crime Information Center and found a match.

The woman was Angela Marie Parks, a 23-year-old mother of two young children in Kentucky. Lingoes later learned that one of her sons had particularly agonized over her disappearance.

"When she left for so many years, he thought she left because she didn't love him," Lingoes said. "The boy had been quite troubled all these years over that."

Lingoes understood his pain. In 1988, his 15-year-old nephew was killed in Quincy as he tried to break up a fight. "I knew what my sister went through when she lost her son," he said. "So I can only imagine what it'd be like if somebody lost their child and didn't know what happened to them."

Now Lingoes is raising money so Parks's children can exhume her body from a Texas cemetery and take her home to Kentucky. He has collected $600 so far.

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com