"Billy's Law," officially the Help Find the Missing Act, is named for William Smolinski Jr., who was 31 years old when he went missing from his Waterbury home on Aug. 24, 2004.

His parents, Janice and William Smolinski Sr., for years have pressured police to follow tips and combed thousands of acres of woods and fields themselves in an unwavering search for their son. Their determination inspired Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., to champion the legislation.

The law is designed in part to better coordinate missing persons databases and raise awareness among law enforcement and relatives of the missing about the availability of information and how families can update background and descriptions and track developments.

"I hope that other families get a chance to realize that there is hope," Janice Smolinski, formerly of Cheshire, said recently in an interview from her Florida home.

Billy Smolinski is among tens of thousands of Americans who remain missing for more than a year, what many agencies consider cold cases, according to the National Missing Persons and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

An estimated 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year and about 1,000 of those bodies remain unidentified after one year, according to the agency, part of the National Institute of Justice. Because of gaps in databases, however, missing persons and unidentified remains are not often matched.

In their frustrated attempts to find their son, Janice and William Smolinksi Sr. faced many systemic challenges, most significantly federal databases that were incomplete and uncoordinated, according to Murphy, who had tried for years to gain bipartisan support for the legislation.

-Casey