This North Texas program wants to help families find missing loved ones

Francine Frost vanished from a Tulsa grocery store parking lot on Feb. 16, 1981.

The anguish of losing her mother and not knowing what happened to her went on for 35 years for Vicki Curl of McPherson, Kan.

But with the help of the National Missing and Unidentified Person System (NamUs) at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth, Curl was notified in August that her mother’s remains had been found in Martin, Okla., a little over an hour southeast of Tulsa.

“It was a miracle,” Curl said in a recent telephone interview. “It took a lot of work from so many different people and agencies, and everything had to line up just right for this to end, but it did.”

Curl said NamUs was one tool that helped her family find her mother, whose death was a homicide. Her killer has not been found.

“NamUs is not a guarantee for every family,” Curl said. “But it gave us a chance.”

Officials with NamUs want to give North Texas families with missing loved ones a similar chance next month with a daylong event at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.

On June 4, NamUs officials and volunteers will be on hand to take down information on missing persons and collect DNA samples.

“We’re reaching out to families and friends of missing persons for more information,” said Bobbie Spamer, director of NamUs forensic and analytical services. “Even if a missing person police report has been filed, we’re taking any other documents or reports that families have available.”

The event is the first of its kind in North Texas. NamUs officials have conducted similar events across the country the past few years.

Spamer said the Fort Worth event might draw just a handful of families or it could be up to 50 people.

On average, there are more than 80,000 active missing persons reports on file with law enforcement agencies in the United States at any given time, according to NamUs figures.

“No matter how long someone has been missing, we want families to come,” Spamer said. “We have a lot of resources to solve cases.”

Curl said her family didn’t have those resources in 1981.

“We filed a missing person report and our family pleaded for help on Tulsa television news, and that was it,” Curl said.

Curl gave this account of how her mother’s remains were found:

Francine Frost’s car keys were found in the door lock of her vehicle on Feb. 16, 1981, in Tulsa. There were few other clues.

Unbeknown to her family, Frost’s remains were found Jan. 5, 1983, in Martin, about 60 miles from Tulsa. An autopsy was done, but because no one claimed the body, Frost’s remains were returned to Martin and buried.

In 2008, a year after NamUs was created, Curl and her family gave DNA samples to NamUs, and a file on Frost was created. Five years later, the autopsy report completed on Frost was entered in NamUs, but there was no DNA.

In 2013, Curl’s son made a discovery on a website.

“My son was searching Google and found a site and it talked about human remains found in Martin,” Curl said. “On it, there was a clothing description and it mentioned a girdle. I just knew it was my mother.”

Curl contacted NamUs officials and with the tedious work of Oklahoma authorities, the remains were found to be buried at Greenhill Cemetery in Muskogee, Okla., about 15 miles north of Martin. Sloppy paperwork on where the remains were buried caused delays in 2015.

Two graves had to be exhumed before the remains mentioned on the autopsy were recovered.

“We waited a year on the DNA results,” Curl said.

On Aug. 12, Curl and her family were notified that the remains were her mother’s.

“We are so grateful,” Curl said. “I can now put pretty flowers on my mother’s grave.”

This story was originally published May 22, 2017 at 1:46 PM with the headline "This North Texas program wants to help families find missing loved ones."