Forensic anthropologist Colleen Milligan examines human remains at Chico State’s Human Identification Laboratory. Credit: Jason Halley/University Photographer
Rain threatened under a gray sky as the all-terrain vehicles splashed through a shallow crossing of the Eel River. Two days earlier, a family kayaking in Mendocino County had stumbled across two tennis shoes emerging from the waterway’s muddy banks and reported it to law enforcement, which summoned Chico State’s Human Identification Lab (HIL) to aid with recovery of a body and identification.
As the team approached the site that Halloween morning in 2012, all they could see were feet protruding from the sodden soil, Pro Wings sneakers pointing skyward.
They spent days processing the body and providing as much forensic analysis as possible, concluding the decapitated victim was a white male, likely in his 20s, wearing shoes popular in the 1980s. Yet, no leads came forward and the “Skeleton in Sneakers” was one of several cases the HIL has assisted on that remained unresolved.
Twelve years later, the forensic anthropologists had not forgotten the case. In late 2024, genome-sequencing and genetic genealogy technology confirmed a match and identified the victim as a Washington man, ending a mystery disappearance that had spanned nearly 40 years.
“One of the worst feelings is when your case goes cold, when the case you worked on wasn’t identified, when they don’t have somebody responsible for what happened,” said Colleen Milligan. “Those are cases I’m definitely keeping track of. I’m constantly asking if there was something more I could have done, is there something more we can look at now?”
The case’s closure is one more nod to the remarkable legacy of a laboratory that has been five decades in the making. Because of the nature of the work, each case has significance and personal connection to the anthropologists who lead its operations. Closing cases, however long it takes, is the heart of what they do.
As the only full-time forensic anthropology laboratory in California and the largest lab west of Texas, the HIL has conducted over 638 investigations in 51 California counties in the last five years to serve dozens of local, state, and federal law enforcement partners, including the California Office of Emergency Services (CalOES), the U.S. Department of Defense, and the FBI.
The team has responded to natural and human-caused disasters, ranging from wildfires to the San Bruno Pipeline Explosion, tackled crimes and mysterious deaths, and provided training to law enforcement across the state. And they do it all with a team of just five forensic anthropologists, and about 20 graduate and undergraduate students who participate in a competitive internship process each semester.
In the Lab
At any given time in their aging Plumas Hall laboratory, several tables are occupied with active cases, skeletal remains laid out across brown paper with the case numbers and assigned anthropologist flagged on a strip of masking tape. Vertebrae sit in a tight row, flanked by scapulas, tibias, and rib bones. Every digit of a hand or foot is set neatly in order, and inventory lists note the diameter, length, and circumference of each bone.
Quarters are tight, with a mortuary cooler, photography station, freezer, and 50-year-old cabinets housing gloves, calipers, and other essential tools. Around the corner, white file boxes stretch from wall to wall, filled with a few dozen teaching cases or cold cases. A whiteboard tracks the active investigations, noting the agency contact and status, whether it’s been X-rayed, photographed, or if draft reports are complete.
Most cases begin with a recovery. Members of the HIL are deployed to private property or public lands, hiking across fields and ravines, and even boating or helicoptering into some of the most remote locations. Among the more unusual recoveries they can recall were under floorboards of a home, in a septic tank, and in an oversized household aquarium.
Back in the lab, they rely on an incubator to slowly heat the remains to separate the soft tissue, a job once done by beetles that were eventually outpaced by case volume. Within 24 hours, the bones are ready to lay out for analysis, starting with age, sex, stature, and ancestry. They may be working to identify the individual or conducting trauma analysis— or both. They are also experts in understanding how the environment alters bones over time and differentiating between animal damage and human-caused trauma.
Milligan explains how she could be looking for a mark as small as a millimeter, indicating a knife had penetrated soft tissue all the way to the bone. Or perhaps a mark by something sharp is readily apparent, but scrutinizing it under a microscope will allow her to tell by the ridge lines if it was single or double-bladed, or perhaps serrated. For blunt force trauma, the anthropologists discern how widespread the damage is, such as from a hammer or baseball bat. With gunshots, the direction of the trauma can denote whether it was a suicide or homicide. Investigators often want to know the number of blows, the sequence, and where damage was inflicted.
It takes an incredible amount of time to scan the body looking for trauma, and brings with it incredible pressure, because of what’s at stake if something is missed, Milligan said. It admittedly also can be difficult, especially for the anthropologists who are parents, when they receive cases of children with the task of identifying fatal trauma, as well as any ongoing abuse or neglect. It’s in those moments, Milligan said, that their motivation resonates most strongly.
“Making sure even the smallest victims have a voice is really important,” she said.
Building a Global Reputation
Forensic anthropology was a small and relatively new field in the 1970s, with the Anthropology Section of the American Academic of Forensic Sciences establishing itself in 1972. Soon thereafter, Shasta County Sheriff’s Department approached Professor Turhon Murad, who had a background in physical and biological archeology, with a request to analyze human remains. Once authorities realized the University was an asset, other cases began to trickle in. By 1974, Chico State officially established the Human Identification Lab.
Each year, the number of requests continued to grow, eventually spurring the hiring of Professor P. Willey in 1989 to help manage cases and teaching. With that hire, Chico State became one of two universities in the nation with board-certified forensic anthropologists. The numbers increased, albeit slowly, with Eric Bartelink (MA, Anthropology, ’01) joining in 2006, Milligan in 2010, Ashley Kendell (MA, Anthropology, ’10) in 2017, and Amber Plemons in 2023. Today, the lab’s anthropologists represent nearly half of those working in the field statewide.
They serve the majority of California counties, support requests from other states, and are called upon to consult nationally and internationally. Because of its advanced expertise, the lab handles some of the more difficult cases in the state, providing services at minimal or no charge. They assist in everything from unintended deaths to homicides, as well as archaeological and historical cases. The U.S. Emergency Management Assistance Compact lists the HIL as a “deployable” state resource, and Chico State is the only university on its list.
The caseload averages 120 annually and has grown sharply in recent years. A driving factor, as California’s landscape and climate continue changing, is the HIL is responding to an increasing number of mass-casualty wildfires.
The Camp Fire was a turning point. The HIL’s team, with support from alumni and other state and federal partners, led the recovery and identification of more than 80 individuals from California’s deadliest fire to date, just 15 miles from their University lab.
They have since partnered with CalOES to respond to a dozen mass-fatality wildfires. They were deployed to Maui for the 2023 wildfires, and this January they were called to respond to Los Angeles, spending several days combing through ashen ruins as the Palisades and Eaton Fires continued to burn.
“Pre-Camp Fire, if you would have said Hawaii would request us as a resource, I would have said you are crazy. That is how much our lives have changed,” Milligan said.
“It’s a little astounding that LA County is requesting critical resources from Chico State,” Bartelink added. “We did not set out to be the world experts in wildland fire victim recovery, but it’s just happened because of the number of events we’ve had locally and because people know we have that expertise—they know we can do this and do it well.”
Their particular expertise lies in differentiating between what is osseous or bone material and fire debris, no easy task when the remains have often been charred nearly to ash themselves.
“Our main focus is recovering victims completely so families don’t have any loved ones left behind. What we do in the field really plays out in the morgue for identifications, so there isn’t any misidentification due to comingling or mixing of individuals,” Kendell said. “We’ve really developed a keen eye on how we get these people recovered, identified, and returned to family members as quickly as possible.”
Awaiting a New Facility
A state-of-the-art facility is now in the works to meet the caliber and demand of the lab’s services. The 2023–24 California state budget included an allocation to secure bonds that would fund a new facility, projected to cost $58 million.
The new facility will empower the lab to match caseload volume with the advanced technical expertise necessary to operate it, mobilize at an even faster pace to provide search and recovery in large-scale disasters, speed identification of remains, and train the next generation of forensic anthropologists who will search, recover, and identify missing persons to provide closure to families, bring criminals to justice, and make communities safer.
As an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, Melanie Beasley (MA, Anthropology, ’08) said she still uses the casework, skeletal analysis, and ethics she learned during her days with the HIL to guide her research and teaching. She was among the dozens of HIL alumni who returned to Butte County during the Camp Fire to use their skills to support recovery and identification.
“The Human ID Lab has had a huge impact on the discipline and served the needs of California on a shoestring budget with outdated facilities for too long,” she said. “I cannot imagine what the Human ID Lab will be able to accomplish with the new facility.”
The site for the new facility is planned at First and Cedar Streets in Chico, adjacent to the main campus. It will serve as headquarters for the HIL’s services, triple the number of refrigeration units, significantly increase both wet and dry lab space, and add more workstations for lab techs.
The new HIL will also offer classroom space for Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) short courses, a Certificate in Forensic Science, the graduate program, and other workshops and trainings. Officially supported by the CalOES, the HIL training program and protocol are included as continuing education for county personnel, law enforcement, coroners, medical examiners, and emergency personnel involved in search and rescue efforts throughout the state. Hundreds of individuals take their courses annually, on topics ranging from homicide evidence to excavation methods and bone identification to best practices for wildfire response.
“If first responders know this is what we do in a wildfire, this is how we search for victims, this is how we get them back to their families quickly—if that becomes known and familiar— I’m really excited about that,” Milligan said.
Looking to the Future
After 50 years, much of the anthropologists’ forensic analysis remains the same—using calipers to measure bones, radiographs to aid in personal identification, and microscopic analyses to look for trauma. But the emerging technology is advancing the impact they can make in ways they never imagined.
During the Camp Fire, the scale and scope of victim identification and recovery needed to accelerate. A company called ANDE Rapid DNA Technology volunteered its services to expedite identification.
Despite longstanding beliefs on heat’s impact on DNA, thermal damage from the fire did not impede results. As an added benefit, the rapid DNA technology can provide analysis in two hours, compared to up to nine months that it would often take to wait for results from the Department of Justice.
“It’s been a crazy whirlwind of watching how technology progresses,” Milligan said.
To advance the science, ANDE donated equipment to the HIL at a $500,000 value and annually provides enough supplies to run 100 samples. The lab team continues to test its limits, and publish its findings, using the machine in cases and research.
Meanwhile, forensic genetic genealogy technology offers other advances. Similar to popular services like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, the science examines a much broader spectrum of DNA markers and creates capacity to find relatives that can be used as anchor points to winnow the identity of the victim. The success has been astronomical, closing notorious cases like the “Golden State Killer” as well as the HIL’s own “Skeleton in Sneakers.”
As a result, they’ve been reexamining a number of cases, including exhuming bodies or working on cold cases held by law enforcement. In addition to the Eel River case, they recently solved another that dated back to 1988 and in January, the HIL submitted new DNA in four additional cases to be run through the system.
“For the first time since the advent of DNA, there was a giant leap forward and we might have the chance to identify the hardest-to-identify cases through this technology,” Bartelink said.
Access to technology sets the lab’s pace and efficiency. While the team eagerly awaits their new facility, they have a wish list of more than $2 million in equipment that would further support and enhance their work.
Topping the list is a full-body X-ray scanner to conduct head-to-toe scans to look for bullets or other trauma before a body is processed into skeletal remains. Additionally, they would like to secure drones and ground-penetrating radar to search for clandestine graves, rather than relying solely on probing and shovel tests.
They’d also benefit from a portable X-ray fluorescence instrument to identify bones in the field, helping with commingled cases, and to differentiate bones from structural material or animal remains. A microCT to expand research capacity, a stereoscopic microscope for trauma analysis, a microscribe for digital measurements of bones—the list goes on.
“If we can get the funding and donations to do these, it will allow us to increase the efficiency of cases and move them through the medico-legal system faster,” Kendell said. “Ultimately, it will reduce the amount of time families have to wait for answers and to get their loved ones returned to them, while also making sure we are getting the most accurate and broad scope of information to provide justice for that individual.”
Training Tomorrow’s Leaders
On a recent afternoon, Arielle Zohara Sperber, a master’s student in anthropology, ducked into the lab between classes to work on her thesis for a presentation at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Conference in late February. She’s been working on a study of how muscle and bone react to fire to create better DNA identification practices and improve search methods in burnt environments.
“I had no idea this is what I’d be doing when I came here, and I’m so glad this is my focus,” she said. “It’s good work. It’s important work.”
After her undergraduate studies, Sperber worked on a repatriation project at UCLA and then with the Department of Defense on a project to identify fallen service members. When she decided to pursue her master’s, she had no doubt Chico State was the program.
“This is where you go if you want methods training,” she said. “I’m learning so much in applied field work—you are learning how to do the work you want to do. And it’s really clear in the way faculty communicate with us and hold us to professional standards how important this work is, and how important that we do it right.”
Sperber has helped with wildfire response, cold cases, and homicides and learned how to recover bodies from water and burnt cars. With a goal of making a career out of forensic analysis, perhaps with a focus on disaster victims, she believes there is no better program to have on her resume than the HIL.
“Whether you are at a conference or in the field, when you say you are at Chico State, it means something,” she said.
Alumni of the program are a point of pride. Many go on to work in education or public service, with professions and careers including coroner’s departments across the nation, teaching at universities, and overseeing emergency management programs. Others identify remains along the US-Mexico border, run the donated body and decomposition facility at Western Carolina University, and help the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency identify the remains of American service personnel who died in World War II, the Korea War, and Vietnam War. They’ve also volunteered on global disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, and 9/11, where an alumna led the recovery as New York’s first full-time forensic anthropologist.
The program accepts just four master’s candidates each year from a pool of 60 applicants. The only constraint from accepting more is having enough faculty to teach and mentor them. Similarly, the lab aspires to one day offer a PhD in forensic anthropology, but that would require doubling or even tripling its faculty numbers.
“There are very few PhD programs across the country, and we would be the first in California,” Kendell said. “One of the reasons we are so well-suited for it is the hands-on opportunity we can offer our students—in the field and in the lab. With our new facility, it will even further enhance our ability to train the next generation of forensic anthropologists.”
Bringing it Home
While field work is important to Bartelink, who has exhumed mass graves in Bosnia and coauthored a book with colleagues Willey and Milligan on a Civil War-era doctor’s army hospital in San Francisco, he says the work he does at Chico State is among the most meaningful—shaping the forensic anthropologists of tomorrow by providing his students practical experience and professional exposure.
Also working to improve the industry’s science and standardization, he hopes to advance a field to which he has dedicated his career.
“Forensic anthropology is still a relatively new science but has a very bright future with much left to learn,” Bartelink said. “At Chico State, I have had the honor of working with top-notch students who bring new ideas and perspectives to casework and research. The enthusiasm of the students is one of the things that drives me forward.”
Admittedly, the work takes its toll. All of the HIL’s faculty manage full-time teaching loads, chair thesis committees, present at regional, national, and international conferences, and secure countless grants to conduct research.
The extra time they spend deploying and working in the lab adds significant hours to their schedules. While each says they are great at compartmentalizing the nature of what they do, it’s important to devote time to other areas of their lives.
Kendell spends time with her children, ages 6 and 3, volunteering at the eldest’s school when she can. Bartelink focuses on time with his wife and 15-year-old-daughter, reads nonfiction, and takes his dogs to Bidwell Park. And Milligan also prioritizes time with her young family, as well as coaching the Chico State Rowing Team.
“What we do outside of work is something that is grounding, something that allows us to see a world outside of the worst parts. It would be really hard without that,” Milligan said. “I get to be on the water, it’s calming, and I get to interact with undergrads in a more unique way than I do in the classroom. It lets me have a different view of Chico State and its students, and that’s really grounding.”
Though each of the faculty never imagined where their academic career would take them, they are heartened by—and proud of—the work they do.
“It’s a different skill set that I never thought I would hone,” Kendell said. “We are just in such a unique position to give back to the state and the local community, and we can offer skills that no one else can.”
Case Spotlight
Some of the most memorable cases in the Human Identification Laboratory’s 50-year history include:
Polly Klaas
Year: 1993
Two months after 12-year-old Polly Klass was abducted in Petaluma, her killer led law enforcement to her remains. With no obvious cause of death, the case was submitted to the HIL. The resulting forensic report bolstered the case and led to a conviction of her killer. Public outrage regarding the case spurred the passing of California’s Three Strikes Law in 1994.
Mountain Bike Inventor
Year: 2008
When the inventor of the mountain bike went suspiciously missing, there was enough evidence to convict the suspect of a “no body homicide.” Years later, when a body was found at a clandestine grave, the HIL’s forensic anthropology analysis affirmed four gunshot wounds as the cause of death. The suspect dropped his appeal of the homicide conviction.
Speed Freak Killers
Year: 2012
Between 1984–98, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog were responsible for at least 10 homicides in California while high on methamphetamines. In 2012, Shermantine began providing details about victim burial sites. The HIL aided in the analysis of the remains of three victims from an earthen well in San Joaquin County, sorting the comingled remains to the proper victim, and continues to be utilized in the search for additional possible victims.
Helicopter Recovery
Year: 2011
A whitewater rafting group came across mummified remains near the base of a waterfall on the American River. Initially thought to be from a black bear, the HIL quickly identified them as human and then traveled to the scene by helicopter, descending by harnesses, to recover additional remains. The biological profile led to a positive identification of a missing man who had left his snowbound residence on foot and likely died of exposure.
14-Hour Recovery
Year: 2012
When a clandestine grave was discovered during a drug-related search warrant on a rural property in Butte County, the HIL was called in. The team spent 14 hours excavating a 5 ½ foot-deep grave— one of the most complex recoveries in the lab’s history. Ultimately, they recovered a victim who had been kidnapped five months earlier and killed by gunshot on the property. Evidence the team recovered led law enforcement to the suspect.
Republished courtesy of Chico State