Review: "Lay Them to Rest" by Laurah Norton

Lay Them to Rest by Laurah Norton
Published October 2023 via Hachette
★★★★

At the risk of sounding like an absolute twenty-first-century cliché...it all started with a podcast. (loc. 68*)

Norton got involved in true crime by accident: a writer and professor by training and trade, she started a podcast as preparation for a course she was teaching...and it took on a life of its own. Into the world of true crime and cold cases Norton went. In Lay Them to Rest, she describes an effort between various true-crime nonprofessionals, police, and scientists to uncover the identity of "Ina Jane Doe", a woman whose partial remains were found in 1993 in Illinois and had never been identified.

This is not an episode of Bones. Not unless Dr. Temperance Brennan is willing to spend an entire episode taking tiny measurements in a quiet lab, with the cliffhanger coming just before she begins to fill out her paperwork. (loc. 1440)

We're used to 45-minute episodes wrapping things up easily—those hours and hours of measurements and tests and applying precisely sized eraser bits to skulls summed up in a montage—but this was a case that would take months and years. The advent of genealogical DNA research has made it possible to solve cases that might previously have been unsolvable, but it's not as easy as chucking all the unsolved cases into a database and letting the computer do its thing. Remains need to have usable DNA, and to have enough of it in good shape for the right kinds of tests, and for enough relatives of sufficient closeness to have put their own DNA into the right databases. And it takes money—money that most departments can't afford to spend on decades-old cold cases.

There are so many ways to tell [her story], and all of them are important. But each way paints a very different picture and leads down a different road. (loc. 4581)

I'd actually heard of Ina Jane Doe before (on a true crime YouTube channel), so I was somewhat familiar with the case. (The YouTube channel, perhaps predictably, gave the case a pretty cursory overview.) What is most fascinating to me here are the forensic sketches and reconstructions—if the book sounds interesting to you, hold off on Googling until you've read it—which are part science and part art and the sort of thing that...that can help or hinder a case, let's say. But Norton gives some really helpful context and perspective on those reconstructions, and I'm left wondering where the future of such forensic sketches might go.

This is one for true-crime aficionados, but it also reminds me a lot of Andrea Lankford's Trail of the Lost—while Lay Them to Rest is about non-professionals helping to solve a Jane Doe case, Trail of the Lost is about non-professionals trying to solve several known missing-persons cases. In both cases, slow—agonizingly so for the families—but sustained efforts to put the pieces together, to answer some of the many questions that remain.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotations are taken from an ARC and may not be final.