[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15638-15639]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                STRENGTHENING MISSING PERSONS DATABASES

  Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am here on the floor this afternoon to 
talk about a young man named Billy Smolinski and a law that Senator 
Hoeven and I are introducing on behalf of him, his family, and, quite 
literally, the millions of other families throughout the United States 
who have had to deal with the trauma, angst, and grief of a loved one 
gone missing.
  I will begin by telling everyone a little bit about Billy Smolinski. 
Billy's parents don't think that he is alive any longer, but they 
aren't sure because on August 24, 2004, at the age of 31 Billy went 
missing.
  Billy was a vibrant young man who lived in Waterbury, CT, along with 
his treasured dog. When he didn't respond to calls and communications 
from his family over the course of a number of days, his parents--and I 
will speak about his mother in particular, Jan Smolinski, who has been 
the driving force behind Billy's Law--contacted the Waterbury Police 
Department. The Waterbury Police Department is a great police 
department, and I have a lot of friends there, but even they will admit 
they really screwed up this case from the beginning. They told his 
parents that he probably didn't go missing, that he was just running 
away from his personal problems. One officer stated that Billy was 
probably ``drinking a beer somewhere in Europe.''
  The Smolinskis pressed their case over and over, day after day, and 
after 2 weeks of asking for help from the police department, the 
Smolinskis were finally able get an investigation started, but it went 
slowly. DNA samples were submitted and lost. It took 4 years before the 
police department ever actually searched his car to see if there was 
any information about what happened to Billy.
  Billy's case made a lot of news in Connecticut and Waterbury, and 
over the course of the last few years, it has taken twists and turns, 
but he has never been found. His parents suspect he has been killed, 
but law enforcement hasn't made progress on that potential case either.
  Over the course of the last 11 years, Billy's parents encountered 
obstacle after obstacle when they tried to be helpful and participate 
in the investigation and search for Billy Smolinski. They came to me at 
that time, as their Member of Congress representing Waterbury, CT, to 
discuss ways in which we here in Washington could take down some of the 
barriers they faced. What they reluctantly found, as they became a part 
of this big national network of families who have had loved ones go 
missing, was that their story was not unique.
  Their story of finding obstacles at the local police department and 
nationally was not unique and unfortunately all too common, as they 
tried to figure out what happened to Billy. What they were connected 
into was a national network of tens of thousands of individuals who 
were searching for a missing loved one--a missing father, mother, 
brother or sister.
  Nationwide there are as many as 90,000 active missing persons cases 
at any given time, and there are some really simple things we can do to 
help families who are trying to find their missing loved one. Much of 
the attention, rightly, goes to missing children.
  Missing children have an entire set of laws built up around them, and 
for good reason, our priority lies in finding them. Law enforcement, 
within a matter of hours, has to post information about missing 
children onto national databases. There are specific campaigns waged on 
billboards and media outlets to immediately find missing children. But 
our focus on finding missing children shouldn't absolve us from the 
responsibility to help families such as the Smolinskis to find missing 
adults as well.
  Senator Hoeven and I have gotten together on a fairly simple piece of 
legislation, and I wish to talk about it today. A companion piece of 
legislation is being introduced in the House by my colleague in 
Connecticut, Representative Elizabeth Esty, and Congressman Ted Poe of 
Texas.
  I will explain what this piece of legislation does. At its 
foundation, it strengthens the database system that families access to 
try to find their missing loved one. Currently, there are two 
databases. One is a law enforcement database, which is called NCIC, and 
the other one is a public-facing database called NamUs. These two 
databases very often aren't talking to each other, and therein lies the 
primary problem this bill tries to solve.
  Law enforcement uploads all sorts of information onto NCIC, but the 
net data often doesn't get transferred over to the database that the 
families can access, which is called the NamUs database.
  Why is that important?
  It is important because families are the supersleuths in cases of 
missing persons. Families are the ones who know all of the detailed and 
intricate information about the circumstances of a disappearance and 
the identification of their loved one.
  I don't mean to get too gruesome, but think about this statistic. 
There are 40,000 sets of unidentified remains in the country today. 
Think about that. There are 40,000 sets of unidentified remains in the 
country, but because not all of that information--the detailed 
descriptions of those remains--is uploaded onto a database that the 
public can see, Billy's body may be out there somewhere, but his 
parents can't find him because they don't have access to the 
information. Unfortunately, that is the reality and the problem that we 
are trying to solve. If you get more information that law enforcement 
has onto a public database, the supersleuths--the parents, brothers, 
and sisters--will have more access to it. What about information that 
law enforcement has about an individual who has gone missing--a report 
of someone who has gone missing in California and whose information is 
not uploaded onto a database that a family who is looking for that 
information in New York may want?
  This legislation authorizes NamUs permanently in law and then 
requires that the two databases be connected. Law enforcement, rightly, 
has a concern that any information that is sensitive to an open case 
should remain private, and this legislation allows for the FBI to 
determine what information has to remain private as part of NCIC and 
what information goes onto the public database. But connecting those 
databases will give more information to families such as the Smolinskis 
to try and crack these 90,000 cases that are out there today.
  The legislation also opens up a relatively modest but important 
training program for police, coroners, and medical examiners to make 
sure they are using these databases and putting this information 
online. The databases don't work if the information is not getting 
uploaded. If the data from the coroner's office isn't up on the 
database, there is no way a family from across the country can access 
it to try to find the final resting place of their loved ones. So this 
legislation authorizes a small new program that would provide training 
to those medical examiners, coroners, and police departments to try to 
make sure that information is getting up on the law enforcement 
database, the NCIC. Remember, they put up all the information about 
missing kids right away, but as we heard in the case of Billy 
Smolinski, they often don't put that information up about missing 
adults.
  Some of these police departments are tiny. They don't have the 
resources to train their personnel on how to do that, and this program 
would allow them to get that. In the end, we can crack a lot of these 
cases--thousands of these cases--if we are able to simply give tools to 
these families so they could participate in the search and tools to law 
enforcement so they can talk with each other.
  The Smolinskis have not given up. Jan has come down to Congress to 
testify on behalf of Billy's Law. She has changed the practices of the 
Waterbury Police Department and has even gotten laws passed in Hartford 
to make sure that other police departments don't make the same 
mistakes.
  She wants to make sure those mistakes aren't repeated across the 
country. She thinks about what would have

[[Page 15639]]

happened if that information about Billy had been uploaded onto NCIC 
immediately, the day she reported it. Maybe Billy was taken to some 
other State. Maybe the lack of that information being transmitted that 
day meant that a break in the case didn't happen in those early days. 
She always thinks about what would have happened if she had access to 
more information--if the database that she looks at virtually every 
day, the NamUs database, had more information about missing persons and 
unidentified remains. She thinks about her ability to solve this case 
and how it could have helped the police solve this case if those 
databases were better or more up to date.
  We hope we are eventually going to solve the case of Billy 
Smolinski's disappearance in Connecticut, but we also hope that we can 
pass legislation here in both Houses--bipartisan, noncontroversial, 
measured, commonsense--that will assure that there are less Jan 
Smolinskis in the world going forward.
  We passed this in the House, when I was there, with a broad, big 
bipartisan vote. This is the first time we introduced it on a 
bipartisan basis here in the Senate, and I am hopeful--speaking on 
behalf of not just the Smolinski family, but the 90,000 other families 
who are grieving for a missing person--we can get this done and get it 
done shortly so we can get families and law enforcement the tools they 
need to crack more of these cases.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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