August tends to arrive in forensic science labs with a kind of dual energy, one foot still in summer’s casework, the other already leaning toward Providence. ISHI 37 is just a few months out, and the August issue of The ISHI Report arrives in that window, a preview of some of the stories and conversations that will carry the field into October, and beyond.
That same in-between quality runs through the science itself this month. Nearly every piece in this issue is about the gap between the moment evidence exists and the moment someone finally gets an answer from it, and what it actually takes to close that gap.
The longest of those gaps runs 246 years. In 2022, archaeologists set out to recover four or five sets of remains from a mass grave outside Camden, South Carolina. They found fourteen. In “It Takes a Village: The DNA Identification of a Revolutionary War John Doe,” Allison Peacock, president of FHD Forensics, walks through what it took to turn one of those graves into a name: forensic genealogists, paleogeneticists, a coroner’s office anthropology team, and a network of living relatives who volunteered their own DNA. Private John Pumphrey died at the Battle of Camden in 1780. Not long ago, his family got him back. “To the relatives, here is your cousin and uncle, after 246 years, home from the war,” said Dr. Steven Smith of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, when the identification was ready to share.
A shorter version of the same gap runs through “From 15,370 to Near Zero,” this issue’s look at Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which opened 2016 with 15,370 people who should have had a DNA sample sitting in CODIS after a qualifying felony arrest or conviction, and didn’t. Eight years, one prosecutor’s office, and three unglamorous mechanisms, a courtroom policy, a data pipeline, and a handful of sweeps, closed most of that gap. Not new technology. Consistency, repeated quarter after quarter, until the gap finally closed.
“Reading DNA From the Water Itself: STR Profiling from Bathwater in Drowning Cases” is about shrinking the gap rather than closing it outright. A Tokyo Women’s Medical University team found that two liters of filtered bathwater can return a complete STR profile within minutes of immersion, a new option in drowning cases where the hardest question is often whether anyone else was in the room. The same researchers are just as direct about the limit: a profile recovered from bathwater proves exposure, not presence. The gap gets smaller. It doesn’t disappear, and it still takes a person to decide what’s left of it.
The gap shows up differently again in “Can Humanitarian Principles Work Inside a Domestic Death Investigation?” built on interviews with twenty-six professionals who have done identification work after armed conflict, natural disaster, and enforced disappearance, and inside domestic investigations here at home. Their conclusion, drawn largely from people who have stood in both worlds: the humanitarian and criminal justice systems, which move at very different speeds and answer to very different clocks, aren’t as incompatible as the field has assumed.
Providence is its own version of that same in-between. ISHI 37 gathers there this October 26 through 29, and this issue carries some of what will be waiting when the conference arrives. “The Conversation You Don’t Usually Get to Have” covers the return of complimentary one-on-one mentor coaching for Forensic Leadership Alliance members, matched to whichever mentor’s experience fits the problem you’re carrying in with you. “Already on the Calendar: Where ISHI Is Headed Through 2030” looks past this year to San Diego, Nashville, Seattle, and New Orleans. And “Three Perspectives on NGS in Forensic Science” covers three sequencing-focused webinars from QIAGEN, on sexual assault evidence workflows, Y-screening, and ethical Indigenous human remains identification.
Two hundred and forty-six years is a long wait for a name. Eight years is a long wait for a database to catch up to what it was supposed to be doing all along. Whatever the length of the gap, closing it is still a village’s work.
The August 2026 ISHI Report is available now.