Jesse Goliath ’07 has cultivated a career at the intersection of science and public service. As a consulting forensic anthropologist for the state of Mississippi and an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Mississippi State University, he splits his time between the classroom and the crime lab. A former U.S. Department of Defense forensics researcher, Goliath once worked to identify and recover missing U.S. service members from wars including Vietnam and World War II. Now he has launched the Mississippi Repository for Missing and Unidentified Persons — the state’s first centralized database of its kind — to inform investigators and residents about cases in the state.
What drew you to forensic anthropology?
I tell people I was always interested in forensics. When I was growing up, I was reading Batman comics and Sherlock Holmes, so I’ve always liked the idea of using my mind to work on cases. I also like science, so putting science and those detective skills together — that’s where the forensic interest started.
Tell me about your job at Defense.
While I was in graduate school at Ohio State, I interned with the Department of Defense in Hawaii in 2013. I became a full-time government contractor with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency [charged with accounting for prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action] in 2017
after I got my doctorate.
Early on, I was traveling to Thailand and Vietnam on a couple of missions. In Vietnam, there was a single pilot bombardier crash crater, and we were trying to find the pilot’s remains in the region just north of Hanoi. Recovering missing service members from past conflicts, it’s a very complex process. We have historical data, and a survey team goes out and interviews people: Were you alive during that time? Did you see the plane? Did you see the person? What do you remember of that time or that day? From there, they build a case with a potential site for excavation and recovery and rank the cases based on the history and how much the eyewitnesses could tell us. Then they send out a full recovery team to the site, and we’d do basic archeology where we’d look at the land and see where the ruins or remnants of this plane were, then piece together
the scene.
What goes on in a week in your life?
In a typical week, I may be teaching a couple of classes on Monday and Wednesday. Monday night I’m called. “Hey, Dr. Goliath, we have a potential burial,” or “We found something. We’re not sure if it’s human or nonhuman. Can your team come out tomorrow morning?” So myself, my graduate students, maybe a couple of staff will drive up to the site, take photos, maybe help them recover what’s skeletally there. We either take those bones back ourselves or send them to the state crime lab. Sometime that week, I’ll go to the crime lab and look at the stuff we found in the field and write a report.
What led you to begin the missing persons repository?
When I first got to Mississippi State in the fall of 2021, we were called for a case. The dean said, “I have a former student who is a district attorney, and he has a case of a missing person that may have been found.” The missing person’s killer, who was being executed for killing his wife, had written in his execution letter that he also killed his sister-in-law and gave a crude map of her potential location. Her name was Felecia Cox. So with that map and with my team, we used ground-penetrating radars to find anything inconsistent with standard soil. In 2007, she went missing, and 14 years later, in December 2021, we found her, about five or six feet from her last known location.
So the Felecia Cox case made me think, who else is missing in the state, because I had no idea about her case. There wasn’t something that was stored at the university or even across the state that held missing-persons cases, so I was like, we need to create a database for the state.
Have you seen the impact your work has had?
Yes, I’ve had families contact me and say thank you. For example, Felecia Cox’s daughter, she’s very thankful. She said, “I was waiting 14 years to find my mother, and your team helped find her.” As for World War II remains, there are family members still alive. I had no idea. You would think this is 60, 70 years ago, but then the family reaches out and says thank you for identifying our loved one. It’s fulfilling, giving families resolution. I don’t say closure, because you’re always going to miss that person, but some resolution to their life, their story.
Interview by Adelyn Rabbitt, an Indiana University sophomore from South Bend studying journalism and psychology. She was this magazine’s summer intern. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.