How long would it realistically take homicide detectives to identify a body with no ID, and what's the first thing they'd check?

Let me tell you something about "realistic" timelines — the word doesn't mean what writers think it means. Realistic means it could be four hours or it could be four months, and the difference between those two outcomes has less to do with detective skill than it does with whether the victim had a dentist who kept good records and a family who actually reported them missing.

The first thing we check — before the ME has even finished complaining about being dragged out at 3am — is fingerprints. We run them through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. In the movies it takes forty-five seconds and returns a perfect match with a little ping sound. In reality it returns a ranked list of candidates someone has to actually compare. If there's a hit, you can have a name in hours. If there's no record, you've just lost your fastest card.

After prints, you're looking at the body itself like it's a biography written in a language you have to translate. Tattoos, scars, surgical hardware, healed fractures visible on X-ray — I have personally identified a body through a titanium knee replacement. Missing persons is running simultaneously — cross-referencing physical description against NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, expanding the radius outward if nothing local pops.

DNA is the one everyone asks about because television has made it seem like the answer to everything. It's a tremendous tool, but it is not a fast tool. "Wait" in this context means weeks to months in most jurisdictions, because crime labs are chronically understaffed.

The honest answer your fiction needs to understand is this: speed is almost entirely a function of the victim's visibility in systems that were built to track people who interact with systems. Documented people — people with jobs, criminal records, medical histories — get identified faster because they've left more footprints. The innocent and the clean are the hardest to find.

Here's what I want you to take away: the identification process is not a straight line, it's a simultaneous web of parallel tracks, and most of them go nowhere most of the time. The drama isn't in the breakthrough — it's in the hours before the breakthrough. Write the not-knowing.