So sad, and strange...

[Flicitytricity]

This is so sad. I don't have all that many many close relatives, but have a number of friends and meighbours. I'd like to think someone would 'claim' me.

Man whose body was found at Clocaenog Forest had 'unique' teeth and 'back pain' - BBC News https://share.google/aw3sYMkunL3jYsb70

That’s a huge amount of time between his possible death and his actual discovery. Neighbours move, relatives and friends lose touch or die, some people keep themselves to themselves. It’s possible the dentist that did the dental work would even have died by now too and, without digital records, it may be pretty impossible to find the victims identity, even if by some miracle a dentist did recognise their own work.
Very sad 😞

Why don't they do a DNA test see if they can find relatives.Aren't they allowed to do that?

@Tigercrane it could be there is no usable dna after all that time exposed, or it’s too expensive to run the specialist testing techniques needed for bones degraded after being in the elements so long. Also, it would only work if they had someone to compare DNA to, a known criminal in their database for example. They generally need a warrant or court order to access the commercial sites, such as ancestryDNA. I guess a random person from so long ago, with no possible matching missing person reported, would make it a costly process.

So so many people like this. The fairly recent one of the wetsuit man too, plus cases from the 70s when you would reasonably expect people to still be alive who knew the person then.

Some people lead insular lives, but they still go shopping, they still walk out of their front door while neighbours are out the front gardening or whatever, it is very hard to be in a position where no one knows you even if it’s just ‘I’ve seen him in the corner shop buying milk but I don’t know where he lives’.

You'd think bills not being paid would be noticed, but everyone has direct debits, and if you’ve got money or benefits going in then the bills still get paid. That’s what happened to the woman in the flat in London, her benefits carried on for a few years.

Or maybe he was a criminal, and people do know who he is/they are (thinking of other cases) but they have no interest in it. The police do say ‘allegiances change’ so people sometimes come forward decades later.

I remember some witnesses came forward for something a few years after a crime, they didn’t realise they had witnessed anything relevant and were on holiday, and the publicity had not reached their corner of the UK.

Also there is a case of a Bulgarian woman (?) who was dead in her flat for decades, no one missed her ☹️.

Sometimes people just think they haven’t seen someone for a while and they must have moved away.