My colleagues and I knew far too little about the woman whose face I was attempting to re-create, but what we did know was chilling. About three months before, her remains had been discovered at Peck's Landing, a recreational spot on the Wisconsin River, near the tiny town of Baraboo. A teenager swimming in the river had found a black duffel bag on a sandbar. Thinking it contained camping equipment, he had pulled it over to the trail along the shore. When he opened it, he discovered a plastic trash bag that had come open just enough to disclose the foul-smelling bloody remains of what he assumed was a dead animal. Disgusted, he dumped the plastic-wrapped remains out onto the trail, hung the duffel bag on a nearby tree, and took off. Investigators would have to track him down later to get his story.
That same afternoon, two young brothers were out on their usual Sunday hike along the trail with their mother. They'd gone ahead of her and run into the bloody trash bag. Typical kids, they poked at it with sticks until the plastic tore away and exposed the rotting flesh. They, too, assumed the remains must be from an animal, and they eagerly called their mother over to see what they'd found. She swiftly pulled her kids away and called 911.
When the Sauk County Sheriff's Department determined that the bag contained a human torso, a full-scale search began for additional evidence regarding what was obviously a brutal crime. Over the next few days, searchers found seven more plastic bags full of body parts, each marked with the logo of a local grocery chain. The bags revealed the systematically butchered body parts of a young woman in her twenties-her shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles almost surgically cut apart, her legs literally deboned. She had been decapitated and her skull had been skinned. The face had been completely flayed from the bone.
Ironically, the very steps that the killer had taken to conceal his victim's identity helped preserve it. The plastic bags, neatly tied shut and thrown into the river, had protected their contents much better than had the remains simply been tossed into the woods. Not only had the plastic prevented maggots and other scavengers from eating the flesh, but the river had acted as a refrigerator, slowing the process of natural rot and decay. This young woman's remains still had a story to tell-if only we knew how to hear it.
When Sauk County Homicide Detective Joe Welsch first called me for help, he sounded more discouraged than any detective I'd ever talked to.
“Frankly,” Joe began, “this poor girl has been butchered in a way no one up here has ever seen before.”
I had the impression that he was young and maybe a little nervous.
“And then there are all those other cases-that woman they found out in New Hampshire, floating in the New Hampshire River, about ten days before ours. Her body was mutilated, too, just like our victim's.”
I had also heard about that woman, and I knew that Joe and I were thinking the same thing: serial killer. Such killers are extremely rare, and those of us in the law enforcement community know that they're usually the least likely explanation for any homicide. Still, the sheer brutality of this murder was out of the ordinary. Serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper seemed unsatisfied to merely kill their victims. The added insult of mutilation or even cannibalism took the act of homicide over the edge of predictable human behavior. This case fit that profile. If Joe had a serial killer in his jurisdiction, he was right to be worried.
“We've already put one serial killer behind bars up here,” he went on. “And the folks in Chicago have had twelve women dumped on the streets in the past few months. I've talked to the FBI profiler there, and the one in Madison. We're all trying real hard not to jump to any conclusions. But I'd feel a whole lot better if we could just figure out who this woman is.”
Yes, I thought, the clock was ticking. Every minute that we didn't know who this woman was gave the killer one more minute to cover his tracks-or to plan his next murder.
Joe read to me from the autopsy report. “Internal organs and brain, all present-but barely recognizable… Teeth all present, and in excellent condition… No identifying scars or tattoos… No evidence of previously broken bones…” This was the standard medical examiner's checklist, and now I understood just how serious Joe's problem was: Virtually nothing about this young woman's body could be used to tell us who she was.
“What about fingerprints?” I asked.
Joe sighed. “Well, we have them, and we don't have them. She had started to decompose by the time we got to her, and after all that time in the water, the skin on her hands was sloughing off.”
As a result, Joe told me, his fingerprint expert had had to harden the skin by soaking it in formalin. Then he had teased the epidermis away from the victim's fingertips so that the outer layer of skin could be lifted off in one piece, a maneuver known as de-gloving. The resulting epidermal glove offered a kind of ghostly outline of the victim's fingers, allowing Joe's expert to slip his own fingers, one at a time, into the victim's skin. By rolling each of her fingertips onto an inked pad and a white piece of paper, he had somehow managed to lift six readable prints-a remarkably high number.
“But that's great,” I said. It's so difficult to get fingerprints when remains are badly decomposed that I wondered for a moment why Joe sounded so discouraged. Then he reminded me how frustratingly limited fingerprint information can be.
“Yes,” Joe said, “but we haven't found any prints that match. You know, when we first got the prints, I thought that all I had to do was enter them into a database. The computer would generate a list of a few missing persons, and bingo! We'd have our woman.”
Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic formula for matching the fingerprints of unidentified victims to those of missing persons unless the missing person's fingerprints are already on file in a national or international database. The prints of convicted criminals are usually on file with the arresting agency, but if local police or sheriffs don't submit those prints to a national computerized database, investigators in other jurisdictions can't match them to prints from an unidentified person. Even the most specific biological profiles (age, race, sex, stature, weight, hair color, eye color) can match thousands of missing persons. If investigators haven't included dental records or fingerprints in the missing persons reports they file, then each John or Jane Doe who resembles the victim's biological profile must be examined by hand-and either included or excluded as a possible match.
Usually, you've got a huge stack of printouts, listing all the missing persons on file who might match your victim. The printout gives each person's name, date of birth, date and place of last contact, race, sex, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and hopefully some unique identifiers-clothing worn when last seen; tattoos; scars; birthmarks; missing limbs or digits; old surgeries or fractures; dentures. If fingerprints are available, you might see them in the form of a computerized code. With luck, you'll find a coded version of a dental chart if the original investigating agency has gone to the trouble to get one; if dental records or x-rays [1] are on file somewhere, the printouts may simply say that they're available. The last thing on the list is the name of the submitting agency. It's up to you to contact them if you want to match your unidentified remains with data from their missing person-dental records, fingerprints, DNA, and so forth.
Of course, sometimes the person you're trying to identify never even made it into the database. If she's a loner, perhaps no one missed her enough to call the police. Or maybe the killer is the only one who knows that a certain woman is missing, and
When I'm in Joe's position, I sit in my lab, looking at the huge stack of printouts, the heart-wrenching descriptions of missing children, spouses, friends, and lovers, and I sometimes have to face the fact that none of them matches the one man or woman whose bones lie there in front of me. Even after all these years, I get that familiar sinking feeling-and then, gradually, a growing sense of determination. Something about being up against an obstacle seems to fill me with a quiet resolve not to be defeated by even the most difficult case.
Still, it can get discouraging sometimes, and lots of investigators simply give up if they don't identify the victim after a few days or weeks. In fact, when I first started working as a forensic anthropologist, I was surprised by how easily some investigators would just move on, letting these cases go unsolved as they quickly grow cold. Over the years, though, I've learned that all you can do is your best during the short time that a case is active-but you never really give up the chase. Now I tease all the secrets I can from “my” unidentified remains, and I make sure that the information is circulated to the public and entered into the system. Then I file it away and hope that someday we'll have an answer as new cases start to demand my attention.
No matter what else I'm working on, though, none of my cold cases are ever really abandoned. Whenever I get any information on a possible match for a John or Jane Doe, I always follow up-I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Sometimes I think that with an ID system as random as this one, it's a wonder that
In the end, the Quixote-like nature of our quest may be exactly what keeps me and some of the detectives going. Joe Welsch, for example. Despite his frustration, he was clearly one of these unflagging investigators-he had refused to give up, even in the face of overwhelming odds. He'd joined forces with an equally determined colleague, Special Agent Elizabeth Feagles of the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation-“Liz” to her friends. Together, they'd gone through the usual routine, sorting through the hundreds of missing persons reports, moving from local to state to national cases, but nothing had checked out and they'd run into a wall with the fingerprints, too. They'd gone on to the usual media blitz, bombarding the local news with their best description of Jane Doe-but all they'd gotten for their trouble was a huge stack of false leads.
Three months had passed since the remains had been found, and the killer was still out there. As a last resort, Joe had suggested a facial reconstruction-a clay sculpture representing a forensic artist's rendition of what the victim had looked like. Photographs of the sculpture could then be circulated throughout the state and someone who knew the young woman might recognize her and come forward.
Clay facial reconstructions are always a last-ditch effort-a means of identification employed only when all others have failed. Contrary to popular belief, a facial reconstruction can never be a portrait of the victim, but only, at best, a skillfully rendered approximation. The success of this endeavor is dependent on three things. First, you need a complete and accurate biological profile of the victim. Second, the sculpture must resemble the victim in shape and proportion enough to enable recognition. Third, and most important, someone who knows the victim has to see the reconstruction or a photo made from it. However good the sculpture might be, it does no good at all unless the right person happens to see it.
Joe and Liz were well aware of the difficulties. But what choice did they have? They had to go forward. Then they encountered yet another roadblock.
Usually, a three-dimensional facial reconstruction is built on the skull itself. If some soft tissue still adheres, you actually have to boil the head in a slow cooker-like a Crock-Pot-until the flesh falls away from the bone and you can apply clay directly to the clean, dry contours.
In this case, though, the skull itself couldn't be used. The most critical evidence here was the cut marks, the traces left by the murderer's knife, particularly the marks embedded in the tissue that still clung to the young woman's skull. No one wanted to abandon the possibility that a murder weapon might yet be found to match those marks and the D.A. had insisted that the skull be preserved untouched. But how else could a facial reconstruction be done?
Joe and Liz turned eagerly to the FBI. Surely the forensic specialists at the Bureau, with all their experience, had encountered this problem before? They hadn't. So the investigators contacted Dr. Leslie Eisenberg, a forensic anthropologist and consultant to the medical examiner there in Wisconsin.
Leslie told Joe and Liz about a new technology known as rapid prototyping, a way of creating an exact replica of a human skull without disturbing the head. She also urged them to be cautious. The process was long and complicated, she warned them. It was far from foolproof. And it had never before been employed in the identification phase of a murder case.
Joe and Liz understood that they were breaking new forensic ground. But they'd run out of other options. So they took the now-frozen severed head to their local hospital, where they began the groundbreaking forensic procedure that Leslie had recommended.
First, technicians performed a CT scan on the head, which produced two-dimensional images of the head's structure. Unlike an x-ray, a CT scan can differentiate between skin, muscle, fat, cartilage, bone, and dental components, so it allows the contours of the skull to be clearly delineated.
Then the data identified as “hard tissue” was stored on an ordinary computer diskette, which Joe ferried over to the Milwaukee School of Engineering's Rapid Prototype Center. The engineers there mainly built prototypes of complicated machines and innovative inventions, so this job was something new for them, but they were perfectly capable of using their technology to make an exact scale-model replica of the bones and teeth in Jane Doe's head.
The prototype skull was an amazing piece of work. Made of hundreds of layers of paper that were then laminated with a grayish-brown polyurethane resin, the replica looked exactly like a real skull-until you looked at it up close. Then you could see the layered paper, and the skull resembled a three-dimensional topographical map, a little piece of human geography.
Elated with their success, Joe and Liz went back to the FBI to request a reconstruction using the model skull. But the guys at the Bureau are renowned for their caution, and they just weren't ready to get involved with this new procedure-particularly since neither the FBI's forensic artists nor its consulting anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution were familiar with the technology used to create the model.
