Editorial Standards

The Archive covers two kinds of story. One is about the people who get written out of a crime once the person who committed it becomes famous. The other — The Unnamed — is about people who were never named at all: the unidentified dead, who are someone’s missing person, and whose families are still waiting.

Both kinds are about real people and real grief.

Sources

I work from the record. That means the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, the investigating agency, the medical examiner or coroner’s office, court filings and opinions, inquest records, death certificates, and contemporaneous reporting from the period.

I open every source I cite. A search result is not a source. Where I quote a document, I say which document. Where the record is silent, the work says the record is silent rather than filling the gap.

I do not build stories from other people’s videos, from message-board speculation, or from the summaries that circulate between true-crime channels until nobody remembers where a claim came from.

Families

I approach families through official channels only — the investigating agency, a designated family spokesperson, or an advocacy organization already working with them. I do not contact grieving relatives directly or without warning.

A request not to be covered is permanent. If a family has asked not to be covered, publicly or privately, that case is closed to me. There is no version of that request I will work around, and I will not revisit it later in the hope the answer has changed.

If you are a family member and you want something here changed, corrected, or taken down, write to me and I will act on it.

What is verified and what is not

Verified and unverified information are distinguished on screen and in the text, every time. A fact from a document is presented as a fact from a document. An unresolved question is presented as an unresolved question.

I do not speculate about who committed a crime. I do not name anyone who has not been charged, and I do not describe anyone in a way that would let a viewer identify them as a suspect. Where investigators have publicly named a person of interest, I report that they did and leave it there.

Imagery

No recovery-scene photographs. No postmortem or autopsy imagery. No description of the condition of remains. No footage of people grieving.

Nothing invented, nothing composited. I do not generate AI images of real people, and I do not generate, alter, or enhance forensic facial reconstructions. An invented face of an unidentified person does active harm: it puts a wrong image into the public’s head and makes recognition less likely, not more. Reconstructions shown here are the work of the forensic artists who made them, used under the terms their holders set, and credited.

AI narration

Narration is read by an authorized AI clone of my own voice, trained on my own recordings. This is disclosed in every video — spoken aloud, written in the description, and declared through YouTube’s synthetic-content setting.

The research, the writing, and the editorial judgment are mine.

Every entry carries an action

Awareness that cannot be acted on is decoration. Every entry in The Unnamed ends with the investigating agency’s name, its current case number, its contact details, and a link to the public case record.

Corrections

Corrections are published, dated, and pinned — in the video description, in a pinned comment, and on the written version of the entry. I do not quietly re-edit. If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it in public.

Affiliation

The Archive is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for NamUs, the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice, or any law enforcement or medical examiner’s office. Case material drawn from NamUs is used under its public reuse policy and credited in each entry.