How a WMass task force works to give cold case trans victims their names back

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2 days ago

ORANGE — On the morning of Sept. 25, 1988, a man in Lake County, Florida, discovered the remains of a woman's body.
Severely decomposed, the woman's skeletal remains were sent to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory on the University of Florida campus.
It would be decades before the involvement of a group in Western Massachusetts helped uncover a key fact in the case: the woman's name.
At the time, the laboratory observed that the woman was between 24 and 32 years old and would have stood around 5 feet, 10 inches tall with a robust build. She had silicone breast implants and scarring on her pelvic bone which, at the time, was thought to be an indicator of childbirth.
Those remains, however, told investigators nothing about who Jane Doe was.
Twenty-seven years later, in 2015, advances in DNA testing led to the discovery that this person had both X and Y chromosomes and was therefore a transgender woman. Jane Doe received a new nickname — Julie Doe, a moniker inspired by the 1995 film about drag queens, 'To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.' A new artistic reconstruction was done.
The sketch, released to the public in 2015, depicted a masculine face, someone with a chiseled jaw and prominent Adam's apple.
'The individual, while technically a very skilled artist, had clearly put some kind of bias in here about what he believed trans women would look like,' said Anthony Redgrave, co-founder of The Trans Doe Task Force.
Redgrave works with his partner, Lee Bingham Redgrave, out of a third-floor office in Orange, in Franklin County. They founded the task force in early 2018 as part of a larger national nonprofit, the DNA Doe Project.
They worked to spread awareness about Julie Doe's story, especially among the LGBTQ community. That meant revisiting what her forensic sketch looked like.
'That's the purpose of forensic art, to make people look longer,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said. 'It's to capture somebody's imagination, to make them think, 'Could I have known this person?''
The task force worked with forensic artist Carl Koppelman and in December 2018 a new sketch was shared to social media in a plea to determine Julie Doe's identity. The new sketch depicted softer, more feminine features.
'Somebody that you could look at and say, 'this is a face I want to keep looking at,'' Anthony Redgrave said.
After more than three decades, in March 2025, Julie Doe finally had both her name and identity back: Pamela Leigh Walton. Officials are still investigating how Walton, who was born in Kentucky, ended up in Florida.
The one-room office of the Trans Doe Task Force sits in the Orange Innovation Center, past the Orange YMCA, a Pilates studio and a laundromat.
Inside, the walls are filled with newspaper clippings and before-and-after forensic sketches of victims — many of which were drawn by Anthony Redgrave himself. Red string connects cases on a wall-sized map.
Anthony Redgrave is the team's lead forensic genealogist. He holds a doctorate of education in transformative leadership and has held trainings for the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, along with international organizations like the Australian Federal Police, Netherlands Forensic Institute and the Brazilian Forensic Identification Institute.
The work of the task force comes at a time of uncertainty in the transgender community.
President Donald Trump in January signed an executive order that bars federal funding to organizations that support 'gender ideology.' That has forced national databases like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to remove mentions in their public records if a person was possibly transgender.
The executive order, issued the day Trump took office, declared that it is the policy of the federal government to only 'recognize two sexes, male and female.'
However, the task force has continued to track that information.
The Redgraves said the task force added 209 unidentified dead and 1,021 missing persons cases to its database in 2024. The cases were from more than 30 countries.
Anthony Redgrave said the task force has a team of volunteers from across the country — and a few internationally — working to mine online databases to find missing persons and homicide cases that suggest a person could have been nonbinary or transgender.
Those cases are then added to the Trans Doe Task Force's LGBT+ Accountability for Missing and Murdered Persons (LAMMP) database.
'A lot of skeletal remains are ambiguous,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said. 'A lot of cases, especially from the '70s and '80s and early '90s, need updated anthropological analysis and estimates. They need to have their sex estimates reevaluated. Julie Doe's case is a perfect example of why it's important to update your forensic estimates to not close any doors. This is how people fall through cracks.'
'I have no idea what my skeleton looks like,' said Anthony Redgrave. 'I don't even really entirely know what my chromosomes are doing. So, who knows how I would be categorized if I died, became a skeleton, and got lost in the woods.'
Anthony and Lee Redgrave are both transgender men. Their volunteers are all transgender individuals, or trusted allies — often the parent or spouse of a transgender person.
'We want to assure our community that our cases are in the hands (of people) that they would trust,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said. 'We don't want them to have to trust us to trust them.'
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 56% of violent crimes against transgender individuals in 2024 were targeted towards Black transgender women, and 38% of victims were misgendered or deadnamed by authorities or the press.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance website, which tracks the number of instances of violent crimes against transgender individuals, reported 384 crimes in 2024. The number for 2025 is up to about 68.
That number doesn't account for all of the people who may be wrongly gendered as male or female in national databases like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, according to the couple.
When unidentified remains are analyzed, Anthony Redgrave said, the sex is just an estimation, a nuance that is often lost during a law enforcement investigation.
In a statement issued to NBC News Washington, a spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children wrote: 'We are responding to this direction in a balanced way, reviewing our publicly facing materials to ensure compliance while not impacting our 40-year mission of child protection.'
Similarly, on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System website, a message on the home page still reads: 'The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable.'
Meanwhile, Lee Bingham Redgrave said the task force has seen some cases it has been monitoring disappear from the database.
'Some of them were later updated and reuploaded to make it look like they weren't transgender,' he said, 'but that's rolling back to where we started. When we started Trans Task Force, nobody was doing anything about missing transgender cases.'
A local attorney said any steps to remove this information from databases poses hazards.
Jennifer Levi, who is transgender and senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders), is challenging the Trump administration's ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military for the second time. She was involved with the litigation against the first Trump administration's military ban in 2018.
'By turning transgender people into a political football, the administration is displaying callous cruelty toward some of our most vulnerable neighbors, friends, and loved ones,' Levi said. 'Purging key identifying information from missing persons databases — information that could help find missing children — is part of this broader attack and puts these community members at even greater risk."
The Trans Doe Task Force is a nonprofit and is not federally funded, so its work continues largely uninterrupted. It has increased security, however, and the LAMMP database is now accessible only by request from law enforcement agencies and investigators.
The couple also co-own Redgrave Research Forensic Services, in which they conduct in-house forensic investigative genetic genealogy testing. They do not directly handle DNA samples or evidence. Rather, they use genetic information from online companies like GEDmatch to help identify victims of violent crimes.
'DNA is the ultimate equalizer. That's a record that doesn't go away, as long as you capture it before everything's degraded,' Anthony Redgrave said. 'The nice thing about the digitizing of DNA is that you're capturing exactly all the information that's there at that moment in time. Even if things continue to deteriorate or just degrade, then you still have that information and it doesn't rot or get lost like paper.'
For the couple, what's most important is making sure that nobody slips through the cracks. Lee Bingham Redgrave carries that reminder with him on his body, where all of his tattoos are memento of past cases.
A tattoo on one arm reads 'John Doe' and the other, 'Jane Doe.' A double helix strand of DNA with 12 connecting rungs runs down his inner arm. Each of those rungs represent the first 12 cases that the Trans Doe Task Force solved in its first year of operation.
The task force hasn't made much headway in partnering with Massachusetts law enforcement agencies, largely because it is a smaller organization, Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
'We have attempted to reach out on a number of occasions, and it seems that Massachusetts primarily wants to go with the much larger companies that are much more well-known,' he said. 'We're quite a bit smaller than some of the really large companies (out there).'
That doesn't mean that the occasional Massachusetts case doesn't come across their desk. Such was the case with Benji Palmer, a transgender man who was found unresponsive at his Boston-area apartment in January 2021. Palmer (who used him/them pronouns) was an immigrant who sought asylum in the United States. The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was unable to locate his next of kin.
'If the (Massachusetts medical examiner) determines that somebody has been unclaimed for a certain period of time, what happens is a local funeral home will donate their time to come and transport the unknown person to a pauper's section of a graveyard or cemetery somewhere,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
Pauper's fields are designated areas in graveyards and cemeteries where unclaimed individuals are buried. They are unmarked areas, and those buried in these fields do not have headstones.
That's what happened to Palmer, Lee Bingham Redgrave said. He and Anthony Redgrave came across Palmer's case in a database of unclaimed persons, and upon examining his post-mortem photos, thought that he may have been transgender.
'Being transgender ourselves, you can just get a feeling about somebody,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said. '(Looking at them), you think, this person may have been gender variant in some way.'
In this case, the task force dug through social media and search engines, and after some time, was able to locate Palmer's social media profiles, identifying their chosen name and their close friends.
Lee Bingham Redgrave's efforts to inform the state's medical examiner of the task force's findings didn't go as well, however.
'I asked if she could tell me what cemetery they went to so that their friends could go and visit, and I was told no, that's not information that I can give you,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
The medical examiner's office told the task force that it could only release that information to a family member, but because Palmer was both transgender and an Irish immigrant, it was possible they were estranged from their birth family. As a result, Lee Bingham Redgrave was unable to find a direct family member.
According to Code of Massachusetts Regulations 505 CMR 2.00, an unidentified body is released to the Department of Transitional Assistance only after the medical chief has ensured that 'reasonable efforts have been undertaken to identify the body.' The chief must make a record of the person's characteristics through charting, photography, fingerprints and a dental examination.
Instead, after some internet sleuthing, Lee Bingham Redgrave found the funeral home that would have likely handled Palmer's remains. He was able to learn where Palmer was buried — the Mount Benedict Cemetery in West Roxbury.
'We asked (the cemetery) if we would be allowed to use our own funds to place a headstone and we were told, 'no, that's not allowed,'' Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
All the task force could do was to create an online memorial for Palmer on its website, which it did, under a new section of their website called community memorials.
Palmer's memorial page shares where they are buried, including the GPS coordinates to the pauper's area of the cemetery. His close friends — Lee Bingham Redgrave said these were likely his 'chosen family,' nonbiological family relationships built through close ties and mutual support — came together to write Palmer's obituary.
'Benji was truly a generous, kind soul who wanted the best for everyone, even if it meant them sacrificing things for themself,' his friends wrote.
One of Palmer's friends, Sabrina Hewitt, echoed those sentiments in a phone interview with The Republican.
'He made such an impact on my life, and I never actually got to meet him,' said Hewitt, who is transgender.
Hewitt met Palmer online through a Facebook group that they co-moderated together, New England Transgender. It's still active today with a goal to provide support and resources for people who identify as transgender.
'He meant so much to me and to a lot of people. He was a really big part of the group, and he helped so much,' she said. 'To this day, I think about them now, and their soul is so pure. They were such a good person,'
Hewitt still keeps the Facebook group active in Palmer's honor.
'I want his memory, I want every ounce of what he meant to people to be talked about because he deserves it,' she added.
Solving decades-old cold cases isn't all the Trans Doe Task Force does. It has also established a database to help preserve peoples' information — especially that of transgender youth — before something might go wrong.
The #IFIGOMISSING project is a self-submit database, where people are able to submit their names, pronouns, basic information and photos so, in the event that they do end up missing, their information would be used accurately.
The project was inspired by the social media trend #IFIGOMISSING in 2023, in which thousands of people — especially transgender youth — were making videos on TikTok and other social media platforms using that hashtag.
'The kids started posting videos saying 'I'm not going to kill myself, I'm not suicidal, I'm not going to run away. So if I go missing, I want people to know this is my name. If I go missing, please don't use my dead name, please use this picture of me and not an old picture,'' Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
Anthony and Lee are parents themselves. They have a transgender daughter who was a teenager when they first started the task force.
'We could only imagine if we were in a different state where there was this legislation starting to happen saying that parents could be criminalized, kids could be removed from their homes,' Lee Bingham Redgrave said.
Because the #IFIGOMISSING database includes so many people under the age of 18, it is secured and cannot be accessed by the public. The information would only be used in the event that a person in the database went missing.
On June 5, Anthony Redgrave will give a presentation at the Springfield Museums about LGBTQ+ cold cases. It comes at the start of Pride Month, which is observed in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots.
'We're here and we're approachable and anyone can ask us anything,' he said. 'If you're in law enforcement, if you have a relative who's in law enforcement, let them know we're here, and if you're a family member or a friend of a trans person, it's good to let them know that we're here. But also, for parents to know that we're basically filling in a gap that exists at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. If you have a missing trans kid, the NCMEC is not the place to turn right now.'
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Read the original article on MassLive.