Seventeen years after a missing person search went cold, an amateur sleuth helped change that (2024)

In 2019, Marissa Rhodes contacted the Buffalo Police Department to say that a man who disappeared in 2002 appeared to match the files she found in a national database with unidentified remains found nearby.

She never heard back.

Four years later, the department reopened the case as a death investigation, confirming that the remains were identified as Daniel Greishaw.

Rhodes, a college professor with a degree in library and information science from the University at Buffalo, used the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs database, to match the case of Greishaw.

She said she is glad the police have moved the case forward. But she finds it frustrating that it took them so long, and that no one seemed to notice the information she was trying to pass along through email and the Buffalo Police Facebook page, where she shared links on a post highlighting Greishaw’s case.

“Whoever does their socials didn’t ever read it or care or notice or whatever,” she said.

For Jennifer Greishaw, Daniel Greishaw’s daughter. the road to his identification by Buffalo Police has been painful and frustrating. She and her siblings, a younger brother and sister, have been asked to submit DNA to police and contacted multiple times for the investigation in the 22 years since their father went missing, opening old wound again and again.

Like Rhodes, she questions why police didn’t link the remains, which were found blocks from her mother’s house, to her father’s missing persons case, which was opened just over a month earlier. But she’s glad there are people out there looking to make the connections, and is looking to move forward and find closure.

“We’re grateful for the person that did it,” Jennifer Greishaw said.

Rhodes speculates the connection wasn’t made sooner by Buffalo police due to inaccuracies on the medical examiner’s report that made it difficult to trace the remains, which had decomposed over time before being discovered more than a month after Greishaw went missing.

“The entry on NamUs did say that they were not identifiable because they were too decomposed, so when that happens, the medical examiner is supposed to put estimated weight and they’re supposed to put ‘unknown,’ or ‘unable to estimate,’ ” Rhodes said. “In this particular case, they just weighed the remains as they were – the near-skeletal remains – and they came out to 45 pounds.”

The exchange between a citizen and a law enforcement agency over an open case highlights a growing trend: the intersection of the amateur sleuth and the professional investigator. The dynamic has led to a rise in true crime podcasts and other newer forms of mass communication, and tension as hobbyists present evidence in cases that they say police should have solved. But police agencies say that with such a wide level of expertise in the hobbyists, they have to sift through piles of submitted tips and separate good information from bad, a process that takes resources and time.

In the four years between her tip submission and the department’s reopening of the case, Rhodes says she saw several other people in online forums make the same connection between Greishaw and these remains, including someone from the DoeNetwork, a nonprofit that tracks missing persons reports across the country, in 2022.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia, who stepped into that role in the spring of 2022, said police do not give up on older investigations. But resources are limited and the backlog of old cases is long.

“We have a couple of detectives that are assigned solely to cold cases, and they’re working dozens of cases,” Gramaglia said. “Unfortunately, we don’t always have the ability to call somebody back and give them the update on that tip because it’s an investigative tool, so we really can’t.”

Adam Wandt, deputy chair for technology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says that internet sleuths like Rhodes, with their access to massive amounts of information, often spend more time looking at unsolved cases than most law enforcement.

“The problem with both unsolved cases and active cases like missing persons is that very often, almost always often, amateur sleuths provide information that’s not helpful to law enforcement,” Wandt said. “It doesn’t mean law enforcement doesn’t want the information, because they do. It doesn’t mean law enforcement doesn’t care, because in my experience, they do. It means they are not resourced enough to be able to handle the number of tips they get.”

Rhodes said she recently returned from a true crime convention where retired FBI agents and other members of the law enforcement community were concerned that some older detectives were not using technology available to them in their investigations.

“What I think it comes down to is which detectives are working cold cases at the time and whether they’re computer literate or not,” she said.

Wandt says that despite their struggles in handling the volume of online tips, the majority of law enforcement feel confident in their digital literacy. However, Wandt also points out that only a small percentage receive formal training on how to use social media in investigations.

“We train cops in how to deal with emotionally disturbed people, we train cops in how to respond to domestic violence calls, we train cops in how to do vehicle and traffic stops,” he said. “We put effort into training cops into doing almost every single aspect of their job. When it comes to the use of social media within investigations, I still am upset that that number nationally seems to be hovering around 10%.”

The rise of social media

The availability of information on the internet has changed the way the public views expertise and the dissemination of information in myriad ways. In the past, information could be controlled by institutions, especially information around sensitive topics like missing persons or police investigations. Now that information is often much more widely available, and to a much larger audience, than before the widespread use of the internet.

And with the explosion of popularity in true crime media – Hulu even has a fictionalized show depicting three tenants coming together to try to solve a murder in their apartment building and chronicling their investigation in a podcast – so too has the number of people forming online communities investigating real crimes.

Rhodes, who lived in Western New York when she first submitted her tip but has since moved to Florida for work, said she belongs to several such groups.

“I’m in various Facebook groups that are (for) true crime people who are into that kind of stuff,” she said. “So I started posting in those kinds of groups and saying, like ‘Hey don’t you think that these two match up,’ and we would talk about it.”

That accessibility to information creates opportunities and challenges, said Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University.

One of the positive developments to come out of the ever-expanding information pool available to the general public has been the ability for people with particular skill sets and areas of expertise, like Rhodes, to help solve problems in their free time.

“The information rich environment allows people with a skill set to do things and make connections that they would have never been able to make before,” L’Pree Corsbie-Massay said.

Gramaglia said his department looks at every tip submitted by the public and sometimes gets important information through that process.

“They’re helpful, and honestly it’s great,” he said. “They just need to communicate with police, ultimately. When they’re following up on things, make sure you communicate with the Police Department, especially when you find something. And then let us track down some of the nittier grittier details.”

And there are dozens of stories across the country where citizen investigations have been crucial to helping law enforcement move cases forward.

However, all of that information is also available to people who have no expertise in the areas they are researching. This means that people without the technical skills to read academic research or understand database information can easily misinterpret information and then spread bad information publicly over the internet.

“We have this other side where people just become kind of passionate about things and then find a whole bunch of crumbs and take themselves down a path with no expertise,” L’Pree Corsbie-Massay said.

This has led to some bad outcomes. In the days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the New York Post ran a front page image implicating two men who were not involved in the attack, based on the work of internet sleuths. Amateur investigators harassed and made targets of several innocent people as they combed the internet for clues surrounding the killing of four college students in Idaho in 2022.

L’Pree Corsbie-Massay said one of the biggest challenges with citizen investigations is getting people to think about their own level of expertise and how they could be sending false or misleading information out into the world.

“I would argue that all these people would think to themselves, ‘I’m adding to the collective good. I’m finding information that other people haven’t found,’ ” L’Pree Corsbie-Massay said. “And so, my question is, what is your obligation or responsibility to finding that information, processing that information and sharing that information?”

What went wrong?

Rhodes said that while she appreciates the work police do on these cases, she does not understand why she never heard from anyone at Buffalo police, even if just to confirm that they had received her tip. An email shared with The Buffalo News shows she first submitted the information to NamUs in June of 2019. The organization forwards tips to relevant law enforcement agencies. After not hearing anything for weeks, she posted the link to the NamUs case page on a Buffalo Police Department Facebook post highlighting Greishaw’s missing persons case and emailed the department directly, but never got a response.

“It would be nice if we knew that these tips weren’t just going into the ether somewhere and someone was actually looking at them,” Rhodes said.

Gramaglia said he understands the frustration. But, with limited resources, police don’t always have time to respond directly to every tip, he said. And they aren’t able to share internal investigation materials or the status of investigations with the public.

“At the end of the day, these old cold cases, they take time,” he said.

Still, Rhodes said she doesn’t understand why the detectives on the case couldn’t match the remains with Greishaw in 2002, given that he went missing in the area where they were found and that the clothes were an exact match for the description of the outfit he was last seen wearing.

“You would think that if a guy went missing and then you found someone … in the woods a month or two later that was his exact description that they would consider it,” Rhodes said. “You would think, right?”

Jennifer Greishaw still is not convinced the remains are her father. The clothes described in the medical examiner’s report are name brand — a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt — when he only ever wore plain white Hanes t-shirts by her memory.

“It’s a little hard to even accept the fact that they think that is my father,” Jennifer Greishaw said.

But the missing person status of her father has continued to harm her family in ways both emotional and practical. In addition to the memory of her father’s disappearance consistently being dredged up, her mother never received widow’s benefits and has been unable to sell her home without a death certificate, as Daniel Greishaw’s name is on the deed.

She hopes this development in the case will bring a lasting closure for her family.

“It’s kind of more or less like, ‘OK fine, sure, that’s him,’ ” Jennifer Greishaw said. “Just give us a death certificate so my mother can be at peace.”