An x-ray might lead to a positive ID, if it reveals a sufficiently unusual body part-an ankle with a healed fracture, say, or a uniquely curved pair of finger bones. Or maybe someone has a strange growth on her elbow-something she never even knew she had-but it shows up on an x-ray in her antemortem medical file somewhere, a perfect match for your remains. Some bones, too, are as unique as fingerprints, such as the frontal sinuses-the air pockets in the forehead bone at the area right between and above the eyes. So if I'm lucky enough to have an antemortem x-ray showing a frontal view of the sinus area, I can compare that to John Doe's skull and get a positive ID out of that.
Of course, the ultimate positive ID is matching DNA. It's almost foolproof and it tends to put all questions to rest. However, it's only used as an absolute last resort. It's not like you can plug your Jane Doe's DNA into some big database-most people's genetic material is not on file. If you have some idea who your victim might be, you can ask his or her family for a matching sample. But if all you've got is dry bones, you have to match mitochondrial DNA. This is an expensive and time-consuming method of identification. As of this writing, mitochondrial DNA extraction and comparison costs an average of five thousand dollars and usually takes weeks or even months.
Sometimes you don't even get to the stage of a positive ID-the best you can do is eliminate a bad choice. My office posts all our unidentified victims on a website, and every two weeks or so I get a call from an investigator somewhere in the country, hoping to match his missing persons report to my John or Jane Doe. We start checking through all the variables: Okay, we can match the height, the weight, the time since death. We might even find evidence of a striking tattoo or a broken arm that healed years ago.
Then he faxes me the dental records-and no dice. Our guy's teeth may be similar, but they're not the same. We cross each other's names off the list and go on to someone else.
For the process to work, of course, you need two kinds of reports on file: missing persons and unidentified remains. When the Luna case was over, I found myself wondering why the Memphis and Kentucky police had never put their reports together.
The answer was simple-though profoundly embarrassing. For some reason, although the Kentucky State Police had circulated details about the case to local news outlets and police posts across the state, they had never entered their information into the NCIC database. So in addition to all the other factors that might make victim identification difficult, we have to add simple human error.
The Luna case also raises an interesting question about where to look for a missing person. Before this case was solved, when you found a body in a river, you tended to look upstream for its source, especially if there was no evidence of foul play. But Luna's body had not been shot or stabbed or strangled-she had obviously died by drowning-and yet her body had come from downstream. Why?
The answer lies in the unique hydrology of the “duck ponds” created between two barges in a tow. The motion of the barges creates eddy currents in these open spaces, sucking up the water and anything else on or slightly below the surface, down to a depth of eighteen inches. Luna's body had somehow gotten caught in a duck-pond eddy and been pulled upstream with the barges. Now, my fellow investigators and I are all going back to other Jane and John Does that have been found in the Ohio River, looking downstream as well as upstream for missing persons reports they might match.
Of course, the toughest problem in identifying human remains is also the simplest: Where do you start? According to Kym Pasqualini, the founder and coordinator of the NMCO, the number of reported missing adults topped 43,000 in March 2003. When you add the number of missing children to the list, the total comes to a staggering 97,297.
Those numbers are daunting enough when you've got a victim with an unusual biological profile or a special piece of surgical hardware whose serial number might somehow be traced. But what about the thousands of victims who basically resemble thousands of others?
Such was the problem with the Jane Doe in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the one whose facial reconstruction I described in the prologue to this book. This was the young woman whose body parts had been butchered and flayed and carefully wrapped in grocery bags, which someone had then thrown into the Wisconsin River. Since months of searching for her by conventional means had failed, Sauk County Detective Joe Welsch and Wisconsin Special Agent Elizabeth Feagles had come to me, hoping I could do a facial reconstruction on her skull.
By the time I became involved with the case, forensic scientists in Wisconsin had already done a complete analysis of the remains, determining that the young woman so brutally butchered had been a young Black female, about twenty to twenty-five years old, probably about 5'2'' and weighing 120-130 pounds. Wisconsin fingerprint expert Mike Riddle had even managed to lift prints from her decomposed hand-an almost superhuman feat that left me awestruck.
But all this science hadn't gotten them very far. According to the NCIC database, more than 1,500 women who fit that profile had been reported missing since early that summer. Getting the prints was terrific-but where could they find a match? Most people who aren't criminals don't have their fingerprints on file. If Joe and Liz had had any idea where to look, they could have tried to lift prints from one of the young woman's possessions. But until they had some idea of who their victim was, they were stuck.
Like so many other unidentified victims, the Baraboo Jane Doe was so frustratingly ordinary. Her teeth were perfect, with no restorations. She had no tattoos or scars and no evidence of previously broken bones. The D.A. hoped that her skull would hold some critical forensic evidence-some cut marks that might someday be matched to a weapon. That was why we were using the rapid prototyping technology to create a perfect replica of her skull. But so far the skull itself had yielded far too little information about this woman's identity.
When Liz and Joe came to me, I was their last resort. They hoped desperately that my facial reconstruction would give them a visual image that they could circulate throughout the state. If all went as we intended-and we all knew that it might not-someone would see the image I created, recognize the victim, and come forward.
So as I began my facial reconstruction that Labor Day weekend, I knew the stakes were frighteningly high. Until the police knew who Jane Doe was, they would never find her killer. If a serial killer was out there somewhere, we had given him virtual license to try again. If the killer were someone more ordinary-a boyfriend, spouse, relative, or friend-he might literally get away with murder, and a particularly brutal murder at that. There was one last chance to keep that from happening-and it was all up to me.
I tried to keep the image of this woman's mutilated flesh out of my mind and concentrate on the skeletal details. Although it was unusual to be starting with a laminated paper skull rather than one made of human bone, everything else about this reconstruction was perfectly ordinary-just like the victim. As always, I began by cutting tissue markers-small sections of rubber that mark the depth of tissue in various parts of the victim's face. I make my markers from the standard pink erasers that go into mechanical pencils-long thin tubes of rubber that I buy at the office supply store and cut to size with an ordinary X-Acto knife.
The length and positioning of these markers is based on standard anthropological formulas that tell me how deep the flesh is likely to be on a person's cheeks, forehead, chin, and elsewhere, based on his or her sex, race, and estimated weight. Carefully following these formulas, I glue close to two dozen markers at specific points all over the skull, in the middle of forehead, the bridge of the nose, the point of the chin, and other key places. Then I connect them with clay, using the bone structure as my guide.
The most tedious part of the job comes right at the beginning. Cutting the markers to the right length and placing each one in its precise position is a painstaking task made all the more stressful by my awareness that the slightest mistake might compromise the accuracy of my final result. Some of those little rubber cylinders are no more than an eighth of an inch long, so as I worked on the Baraboo case that Labor Day weekend, I needed a sharp knife and a steady hand. Soon, however, I became absorbed in the soothing-if somewhat boring-mechanics of cutting the twenty-three markers, numbering each one of them with a sharp pencil, and laying them all out in numerical order. After about an hour, I was ready to go back to the skull.
I'd already mounted the laminated prototype on a converted camera tripod, which I'd fitted with a big eyebolt that fit up inside the spinal cord opening known as the foramen magnum. My tripod has a large ball joint at its base, which allows me to rotate and tilt the skull until it is perfectly level, a position known as the Frankfurt horizontal. In this position, the eye sockets appear to be aimed straight ahead and I can draw an imaginary level line from the bottom of the eye orbit to the ear hole known as the external auditory meatus. I grabbed the small carpenter's level that I use for this task and centered it over the bottom of the prototype's eye orbits.
Then I reached for the mandible, which the Milwaukee team had also made out of laminated paper, and fit it into sockets located just in front of the ears, the temporomandibular joint. I fiddled with the paper jaw until it fit perfectly, opening and closing in a smooth gliding motion so that the teeth of the upper and lower jaw fit together in normal occlusion. I didn't want my statue gritting her teeth-she'd be harder to recognize that way-so I put a small plastic strut betwen her upper and lower teeth for that tiny bit of separation that creates a more natural look. Then I adjusted the mandible until I had created a slight bit of distance between it and the skull, to mimic the normal separation created by the articular cartilage and a small fibrous disk called a meniscus. I knew that each tiny detail might make the difference between a face that someone might recognize and one that looked just slightly “off.”
If my Jane Doe had had unusual teeth, they might have helped someone recognize her, so I would have had her bare those striking teeth in a smile-a complicated procedure that would have required still more manipulation of the jaw, since when a person smiles, the jaw drops and pulls back a little. Then, when I added the clay, I'd have had to make the statue's nostrils flare a bit, crunch up the flesh under her eyes, and flatten the flesh across her upper teeth to almost nothing-subtle but crucial touches that could make a huge difference in the final product.
Luckily, I didn't have to do that here-this woman's mouth would be closed. The replica's teeth were perfectly shaped and placed, but they were coated with the same honey-brown resin that covered the rest of the skull, which would hardly give a natural look to the final result. Besides, there was nothing unusual about the woman's teeth, so once her mandible was seated correctly, I started gluing on the tissue markers.
Simply out of habit, I always start at the forehead, dipping the eraser into some all-purpose glue and holding it in place for a few minutes until the glue starts to set. It took me the rest of that afternoon to glue each marker onto the skull.
As the sun was beginning to set I started on the eyes. Each artist has his or her own method, but I tend to do the eyes as soon as possible, mainly because I don't like to see those empty sockets staring at me hour after hour after hour. It's also easier to adjust the eyes before I put on the clay.
Running my fingers lightly over the replica's eye sockets, I found the place where the palpable ligaments would be inserted-the tiny ligaments that anchor the corners of each eyelid. The insertion points are located by means of subtle bumps that I couldn't see, but that my fingertips found immediately. I marked each one with pen because that's where the corners of the eyelids would go, and I wanted to remain aware of that positioning through the rest of my work with the eyes.
If I'd been using an actual skull, I'd have put some cotton into the eye sockets to protect the fragile bones for further forensic analysis. On a replica, that wasn't an issue, but I did need to keep the eyes from falling backward into the sockets. Folded-up Kleenex worked quite nicely.
Then, using a small block of clay, I made a little pedestal for the first artificial eye, which I'd bought from a surgical supply house that makes eyes for people who need prosthetic implants. These false eyes look eerily realistic and come in all sorts of colors-for a Black woman, I had chosen the darkest brown available, with a slight yellow tinge to the surrounding “white” sclera. I stuck the eye onto its little clay pedestal and quickly mortared it into place with more strips of clay.
Soon both eyes were in and I began adjusting their position. I wanted my sculpture to have a perfect gaze-each eye centered precisely in its orbit, protruding just the right distance in relation to the surrounding bone. The eyes should be level, too, and they should look together in the same direction. One of my tricks is to shine a single bright desk lamp into the eyes and look at the reflection. In a perfect gaze, the light is reflected exactly the same way in both eyes, so I spent half an hour adjusting first one eye, then the other. My reward was a steady, earnest gaze resembling that of a living person.
I took a late dinner break and went back to apply the clay. Here was where my artistic intuition came into play. Although I am ultimately a scientist, I've learned over the years that simply following the mathematical formulas isn't enough. If my facial reconstruction is ever to come to life, I have to venture beyond the formula and allow my intuition to guide me to create all those individual little details that ultimately distinguish each face from every other. I have to make creative leaps-but leaps that are entirely supported by scientific data. It's this fusing of art and science that makes the difference between a scientifically correct but somehow vague face and a vivid, lively image that someone might actually recognize.
Luckily, my intuition had lots of data to work with. When Joe had brought me the skull, he'd also handed over several photographs taken at autopsy and a copy of the autopsy report. The pathologist had found that this young woman was basically healthy, with an average amount of well-distributed subcutaneous fat. Since her genitalia were still present, he'd known she was a female. He'd estimated her age based on the youthful condition of her internal organs-mature, but showing no age-related changes in the heart, reproductive organs, or arteries.
He had also determined that this woman was African American, based on the color of her very dark skin. Of course, skin color can undergo rapid and dramatic changes after death, but this woman had other Negroid features as well. The pathologist had mentioned her black, coarse, and extremely curly body hair. And despite the fact that her face was no longer visible-the flesh had literally been cut away from the bone-the anthropologic analysis of her skull told us that she had once had wide-set eyes; a well-rounded or “bossed” forehead; and a wide flat nose. Until I finished
