A taskforce expects to identify almost all the 179 unknown people whose bodies have been found in Victoria since 1960, many of them buried in paupers' graves.

Senior police yesterday admitted serious deficiencies in the past meant an unknown number of unidentified bodies had not been matched with missing persons reports as they should have been.

The exhumations, which could cost Victoria Police up to $1 million, will bring relief to families who have lived for decades without knowing the fate of lost loved ones.

Det-Supt Paul Hollowood saidit was too early to know howmany of the 179 bodies should have been identified at the time as missing persons.

But police have been blamed for six missing persons being wrongly buried in unmarked graves.

The bodies of Matthew Bibby, Chris Papas and Peter Wilson have already been exhumed. Police have apologised to their families for bungling the investigations.

Det-Supt Hollowood expects the taskforce will find more cases have been mishandled.

"If we have made a mistake we will make that apology, always will," he said.

"And we do it personally. We don't slot a letter in the mail and say we are sorry."

The discovery of the bungled cases by Victoria Police in 2005 prompted it to set up a taskforce within the cold case squad.

Police have spent the past 10 months sifting through more than 80,000 records on every missing person and unidentified body case in Victoria since 1960.

Police compiled a database that allows easy comparison between features of unidentified bodies and missing persons.

Since January the taskforce has also found 40 long-term missing persons alive.

It is confident most of the 179 unidentified bodies and body parts in Victoria will be matched with some of the 523 identified missing persons on the database.

Police are about to start the job of tracking down and interviewing relatives of the 523 missing persons.

They will be asking relatives to provide a DNA sample.

The body police believe is likely to match one missing person will be exhumed and its DNA and other identifiers compared with samples obtained from that missing person's relatives.

It will take an estimated two years to cover all 179 cases.

Paupers' graves often contain several bodies, meaning police may have to exhume three bodies to get to the one they want.

The Herald Sun last year revealed that at least five missing persons had been wrongly buried in unmarked graves as a result of blunders by Victoria Police.

For decades, police in suburban and country stations were not routinely checking details of missing persons against details of unidentified bodies.

Nor did police routinely get DNA or dental and X-ray records of missing people.

And an audit during the introduction of Victoria Police's major crime management model in 2005 found some police had recorded insufficient and incorrect identifying details of missing persons.

There was also no central registry, which meant details of a missing person in Moe might never be compared with those of a body later found in St Kilda.

All this meant that opportunities to identify bodies as missing persons were lost, leading them to be buried in paupers' graves.

The Victoria Police cold case squad taskforce, Operation Belier, was ordered to assess the scale of the problem and fix it.

Det-Supt Hollowood yesterday acknowledged some missing person cases had not been treated with the importance they deserved, but the force had identified the decades-old problem itself and had immediately put enormous resources into fixing it and ensuring it could never recur.

"I am very certain now that what has occurred in the past can't happen in the future," Det-Supt Hollowood said.

"Missing person cases are now getting the attention they deserve."

Operation Belier has spent the past 10 months examining every missing person and unidentified body case since 1960.

That review came up with the 179 unidentified bodies and body parts now expected to be identified from within the 523 long-term missing person cases.

Det-Supt Hollowood said it was impossible to say until after the exhumations how many of the 179 bodies had been buried as unidentified when police should have identified them.

He said there would certainly be some, but he didn't expect them to be in the majority.

Det-Supt Hollowood said it was unlikely any of the 179 bodies had been murder victims, as each had been the subject of an inquest that almost certainly would have identified any suspicious circumstances.

"I think the thing we really have to emphasise here is that our success rate in missing person cases is quite extraordinary," he said.

"We have about 6700 missing persons a year and the find rate on missing persons is 99 per cent.

"The 179 unidentified bodies we are talking about here is that accumulated 1 per cent going back to 1960."

Keith Moor, Insight Editor
    Herald Sun