`Bone lady' tries to give faces, names to the missing.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

BATON ROUGE, La. _ Mary Manhein can't stand knowing that people are missing and their loved ones can't find them.

That's why she spends her days with corpses and skeletons, hoping to learn the identities of murder victims whose bodies were dumped in the hope they'd never be found.

Manhein, a forensic anthropologist at Louisiana State University, hopes her latest project, creating a face for a murdered man whose skeleton was found in January, will conclude with his family members bringing their loved one home.

"I cannot bear the thought of these people not having names," she said. "The bones tell a story."

As director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Lab at LSU, Manhein and her team of experts use victims' bones to help law enforcement agencies solve the mysteries surrounding their deaths. If the victims are identified, these agencies can start looking for their killers.

Whether bodies are found in a shallow grave beneath a house or floating in the Gulf of Mexico, the sometimes faceless victims become nearly impossible to recognize in the years after their disappearances.

That's when Manhein is called in.