By Matt Bean
Court TV

It is hard to remain detached from a Child Doe case, as Sgt. David Bernard, a police officer with the Kansas City, Mo., homicide department, found after he began work on the case of Precious Doe. The little girl was no older than 4 when she was beheaded and dropped in the woods outside of Kentucky in late April 2001. Now, Bernard can't get her out of his mind.

"They haunt you," said the detective. "This has gotten to me and my detectives more than any case we have investigated. The ones that really stay with you are the murders of the children. You try not to get close to the victim. But in this case you can't help it. It's just this cute little girl."

A police artist's rendering of the 4-year-old Precious

Precious Doe was found in the woods on April 28, 2001, a mile or so from the community zoo and about five miles south of Kansas City. A few days later, a volunteer found her severed head, hair still arranged in neat cornrows, wrapped in a plastic bag and tossed elsewhere in the woods. Bernard and his detectives pored over missing persons reports and contacted day-care centers and schools to see if a child matching the description had gone missing. Nothing turned up.

The case began to heat up when investigators followed a lead out of Miami. A little girl named Rilya Wilson was missing from foster care there.

Bernard was used to false alarms. A Tacoma, Wash., girl who seemed to match a computer-generated sketch had already been ruled out via DNA testing. But the circumstances of Rilya's disappearance seemed to explain much. She had no family. She had fallen through the cracks of the foster care system.

"We thought we found her. We thought this was going to be our victim," he recalled. "Everything in [the Rilya] case fit ours perfectly. It explained why nobody came forward." In the end, palm prints and DNA ruled out Rilya as well, and now both cases remain unresolved. "The truth of the matter is now we have two tragedies," Bernard said.

Bernard has since taken the search for Precious Doe to an international level, enlisting the help of the FBI, which took blood samples from the families of 27 missing black girls about the same age as Precious Doe, and Interpol, the international intelligence agency. One possible match came from the Netherlands, and FBI agents followed another faulty lead to Jamaica. Police distributed a poster of Precious Doe in 172 different countries, and her story was profiled on "America's Most Wanted" and NBC's "Today Show." But despite the new breadth to the case, and more than 850 new leads, no one has been able to provide a name for the brown-eyed Doe.

"Maybe it will reach that one person that knows something," said Bernard. "I'm just one phone call away from solving this case. "

Investigators in Bernard's position are often faced with a common problem: Child Doe cases defy traditional means of investigation. Typically, an investigator's first line of inquiry is the national database for missing persons maintained in Quantico, Va. The database is part of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a catch-all for U.S. law enforcement information on everything from stolen goods to warrants.

Without a name or identifying number, Bernard began paring down the 54,159 missing juveniles in the system (as of April 2002) using Precious Doe's identifying characteristics. She was about 3 feet tall and weighed 41 pounds. She was black, with braided hair. She had a moon-shaped birthmark on her shoulder. But no potential matches panned out.

Even if Precious Doe had been reported missing, she might not have come up in a database search, explains Billy Estok, an information specialist with the FBI offices in Quantico, Va. According to Estok, the longer a person has been around, the greater the chance they will have made a mark in the database. And even then, the NCIC database is only as good as the information it has been fed. "It's important [law enforcement professionals] enter the information timely and correctly," he said.

Just as the information in the database can be imprecise, so can the information available to investigators. As a body decays, the identifying marks do too. With each progressive stage — fresh, bloated, decomposing, wet skeleton and dry skeleton — there is one less method that can be used to identify the body. Once a corpse begins decomposing, fingerprints can become distorted, for example. And DNA analysis may be possible on a "wet skeleton," but not a "dry skeleton."

Until now there has been no central repository for all this information, but a new database created by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children may finally solve problems that have plagued Child Doe investigators for decades. Not only will the Congress-backed system put more than 1,200 Child Doe cases in their own category within the database, it will also give police departments, medical examiners and coroners a more powerful search tool with which to sift through the cases.

According to Jerry Nance, a case worker at the center, the Computer Assisted Post Mortem Identification (CAPMI) system enables investigators to whittle down the pool of cases using identifying details such as hair and height, an area in which the current NCIC database falls short. "We're already doing comparisons now and sending out to police and medical examiners the possible matches," said Nance.

The data-rich CAPMI system could help break open cases like Precious Doe's, piecing together links that even wide-ranging searches like the one led by Bernard have yet to uncover. "That's what we're waiting for," said Bernard. "Without an identity, we have nothing to go on."