by Val McDermid
Developments in medical technology have generated important developments in the field of facial reconstruction. X-rays and CT scans of living people have been remarkable sources of data. Until the 1980s all measurements had been taken from cadavers, which led inevitably to some inaccuracies. The walls of our cells start to break down immediately after we die, which causes fluid to drain to the back of our heads and our faces to lose their plumpness. Also, as American facial reconstructionist Betty Gatliff noted, ‘When people die, they don’t die sitting up, they die lying down. The soft tissue shifts.’ Three-dimensional models of living faces and their skulls were always the holy grail for reconstructionists and CT scanning has provided more widely accepted thickness measurements. As a result, facial reconstruction is now more accurate – and consequently more trusted – than ever before.
Investigators call forensic artists when they’ve found a skull that can’t be identified after crime scene clues, missing person files and forensic evidence such as DNA and dental records have led them nowhere. If investigators don’t know who they are looking at, the last best hope is that a member of the public might. So it was with Rowena Rikkers and Adnan Al-Sane. A reconstructed face is a recognition tool, a memory jogger. It’s not strictly ‘forensic’ because the reconstruction itself has no weight in a courtroom. It’s only after families have contacted the police that the forensic procedure of identification begins.
But why does a face look like it does? How did it develop into this means of identification? We tend to think of the face as a social tool, which is why when we want to dismiss people disrespectfully, we tell them to ‘Talk to the hand ’cos the face ain’t listening’ or turn our head away. In fact, our faces evolved as they did primarily for utility. Having a pair of eyes at the front of our head gives us overlapping fields of vision and thus depth perception. Our lips and jaws are perfectly evolved to chew, swallow, breathe and talk. Having one ear on either side of our head helps us to pinpoint the origin of a sound. But there are other elements, too. Familial resemblances reinforced tribal loyalties in early communities, as well as in later dynasties such as the Hapsburgs, famous for their hereditary malformation of the lower jaw.
The shape of the face depends on the twenty-two bones of the skull. The complex shape of these bones, and to a lesser extent the muscles that are attached to them, explains the variation between individual faces. Understanding the myriad variations these bones and muscles can produce is the starting point of facial reconstruction.
To deduce the shape and prominence of somebody’s eyes, forensic artists look at the depth of the eye orbit and the shape of the brow. The shape of the lips and how they meet is taken from the size and position of the teeth. Ears and noses present a challenge, because cartilage decomposes after death. All we can know about the ears is where they were and whether they had earlobes; although, in life, every pair of ears is as unique as a fingerprint. It’s hard to know if a nose was a button, Roman or tipped up like a pig’s. But the ‘bony nose’ can tell anatomists a surprising amount about the ‘soft nose’ which sits on top of it. For example, the pointed piece of bone – the nasal spine – at the bottom of the bony nose usually has one point to it. If it has two points that makes the nose split slightly at its tip.
Facial reconstructions based on skulls have to work without the important differentiators of hair and eye colour, at least for now. Geneticists have recently learnt how to pin down nineteen different eye colours from DNA. But this information is expensive to extract – far beyond the budget allocation for reconstruction, even in a murder inquiry. DNA can also reveal hair colour but, even if that had a negligible cost, it would be of limited value to artists. Caroline Wilkinson explains: ‘I took photographs of all my students this year. Only two of them have their natural hair colour. I’m forty-eight and I reckon most of my friends have no idea what my real hair colour is. I’m not sure even I know anymore.’ So most artists sidestep the problem. They subtly blur out the hair (and the unpredictable ears) of their models. And yet the overall results can still be uncanny, often because of the accuracy of the soft tissue thicknesses that CT scanning has provided. The closer a model resembles a real face, the greater the chance of someone recognising their loved one. The effectiveness of an acute resemblance was proved in an extraordinary case in Edinburgh in 2013.
On 24 April Philomena Dunleavy arrived in Edinburgh from her home in Dublin. A slightly built, shy woman of sixty-six, she had come to visit her eldest son, Seamus. At his flat in Balgreen Road, they started to catch up. Seamus talked about his recent work labouring on Edinburgh’s tram network. In return, Philomena tried to fill him in on the news of his four siblings. But Seamus was behaving oddly, first distracted and then agitated.
Philomena was alarmed. She told her son she was going to have a look around Edinburgh, but instead she went to Portobello Police Station. She asked an officer there where she could get a cheap room. She said, ‘I don’t want to spend the night with my son whilst he’s having an episode.’ A few days later, Seamus called his father in Dublin to say his mother was on her way home. She never arrived.
On 6 June a 24-year-old ski instructor went for a bike ride in Edinburgh’s Corstorphine Hill nature reserve. The weather was hot and he decided to stop riding and find a place to sit in the sun for a while. He was pushing his bike along a narrow path when he saw a set of brilliant white teeth gleaming at him from the dirt. The teeth were set in the remains of a severed head. Most of the flesh had rotted away, but the carrion-loving flies were still there.
In the shallow grave that the shining teeth had revealed, forensic anthropologist Jennifer Miller unearthed two severed legs and a human trunk, which she ascribed to a woman of about sixty. She noted that the brilliant teeth were the result of expensive cosmetic dentistry. One of the rings she removed from the cadaver was a traditional Irish Claddagh ring. Equipped with this limited information, the police spent weeks searching missing persons lists.
Finally they asked Caroline Wilkinson to make a facial reconstruction, which she did using 3D scans of the skull, then filling in the soft tissue digitally. The resulting image was circulated to police forces throughout Europe, and shown on BBC Crimewatch. The presenter of Crimewatch also mentioned the Claddagh ring, which made a family member in Dublin feel doubly sure that she was looking at Philomena. The likeness of Wilkinson’s image was uncannily accurate. The identity of the body was put beyond doubt by dental records.
A few days later Seamus was arrested and charged with his mother’s murder, which he denied.
The jury didn’t believe him. Instead, they accepted the prosecution’s case that Philomena had gone back to Seamus’s flat sometime after she’d spoken to the police. There, she had died. The pathologist noted damage to the small bones in her neck (which often signifies strangulation), injuries to her head and smashed ribs. Seamus had cut off her head and legs with a saw. But it was impossible to tell whether these injuries had been sustained before or after death. A journalist for Herald Scotland reported on the more disturbing possibility: ‘Philomena Dunleavy may still have been alive, but unconscious, when her son began to hack off her legs.’ The exact circumstances of her death will never be known.
What we do know is that Seamus then put his dismembered mother’s remains in a suitcase, and took her up Corstorphine Hill. He hacked out a shallow grave with a spade, and dumped his mother in it. As forensic experts often tell us, murder is easy compared with the difficulty of disposing of a body effectively. It was only two months later when her body resurfaced and, with it, the vital clues that would lead to his conviction. The prosecutor called it ‘a case in which pieces of evidence came together like strands in a cable’. In January 2014, Seamus Dunleavy was convicted of murder, in no small part because of Caroline Wilkinson’s work.
Such a swift identification of a victim is not guaranteed. On 18 November 1987, a cigarette butt ignited some rubbish under a wooden escalator at London’s busiest train station, King’s C
ross. The fire grew in intensity until the escalator vented a fireball burning at 600°C, which hurtled up the escalator and into the underground ticket hall above it.
Hundreds of people were trapped in the complex of tunnels connecting King’s Cross’s six Tube lines. Some took the escalator up to escape the black smoke underground, and were burned alive. Others thumped on doors to try and get on trains that didn’t stop. When firefighters finally fought back the blaze, they discovered thirty-one dead bodies.
Over the following days and weeks the police managed to identify thirty of the dead. But one middle-aged man eluded them. Richard Neave was asked to reconstruct the man’s face, which had been terribly burnt by the fireball. He found some pieces of tissue around the nose and mouth which helped him predict the shape of that part of the face. And he was given an extensive dossier outlining the victim’s height, age and state of health.
Interpol were approached for help and enquiries were made as far away as China and Australia. Richard Neave’s reconstruction was shown in all the major newspapers in the UK and hundreds of people phoned up, believing it to be someone missing from their circle. But no definite matches were possible. Meanwhile the body was buried in a grave in north London marked ‘AN UNKNOWN MAN’.
In 1997 Mary Leishman, a middle-aged Scot, made enquiries about her missing father, Alexander Fallon. When his wife had died in 1974, Fallon’s life had fallen apart. He had been unable to cope with everyday life. He had sold his house and ended up sleeping rough on the streets of London, among thousands of other virtually anonymous homeless people. Mary and her sister had begun to wonder whether the unknown victim of the King’s Cross fire might be her father, but she wasn’t hopeful. At the time of the fire her father had been seventy-three years old and five foot six, whereas the post mortem had put the dead man at between forty and sixty years old and five foot two. Yet the corpse had smoked heavily, as had Alexander Fallon and, like him, it had a metal clip inside the skull as a consequence of brain surgery. At the time of Mary Leishman’s enquiry the police thought they had a match with another missing man, Hubert Rose, so they didn’t follow up her query. Then, in 2002, a service commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the victims of the fire was held in north London. This nudged Mary Leishman to raise her concerns with the police again.
In 2004 Richard Neave was shown photographs of Mary Leishman’s father. He rifled back through his records to find photographs of the mystery victim’s skull, and his own clay model. He compared frontal and profile photos and saw the similarities immediately – both had prominent cheek bones, thin lips, similar spacing between the eyes, the same laughter lines running from the corner of the mouth to the chin, although the man in the photograph had a much more bulbous nose than his model. With the further corroboration of dental records and of the neurosurgeon who had inserted the metal clip, the final victim of the King’s Cross disaster was finally identified as Alexander Fallon – sixteen years after his death.
A photograph of Alexander Fallon, a victim of the King’s Cross fire, compared with the facial reconstruction created using his remains
Richard Neave’s model of Alexander Fallon prompted his daughter Mary’s enquiries. That was all it was designed to do. A string of other factors, including documentary evidence, supported the identification and made a traumatic exhumation unnecessary. And, as Mary Leishman said: ‘One thing that makes us feel certain now that my father was a victim of the fire is that we have, with the help of the police, established that no benefits were uplifted in his name after the date of the fire. If my father was alive, he would have been first in the queue whenever there was money to be had.’
If the King’s Cross fire happened today, Alexander Fallon’s face would be rebuilt by computer. Digital modelling has not replaced clay modelling – which Caroline Wilkinson still teaches to her students in Dundee – but nowadays 80 per cent of forensic facial reconstruction is computer-based.
First, Caroline will scan the skull in three dimensions, usually with a CT scanner, and then import the resulting model to an image-editing program. Then she chooses one of a number of basic muscle templates and overlays it on to the skull. Now Caroline tweaks the muscles manually – click, drag, click, drag – based on the same standard thicknesses that she uses when working in clay. Computer modelling is quicker than clay modelling because having the templates means Caroline doesn’t have to start from scratch every time. But not by much. It takes a long time to add skin, eyes and hair, and to texture them properly.
But there are advantages to the computer method other than speed. Caroline can vary elements such as skin tone and hair colour, then print out a dozen possible images for investigators to look at. Three-dimensional scanning allows the reconstructor to see injuries to the skull, such as a hammer mark, more clearly than plaster casting. With precise modelling of the wound and the weapon it’s possible to make a model of the event as well as the face, which can be shown in a courtroom further down the line. If someone recognises a reconstruction and sends in a photo of their missing loved one, artists can scan it and superimpose it on to the skull. This is the digital version of the technique that was used for the first time to incriminate Doctor Buck Ruxton in the Jigsaw Murders of 1935 (see pp.48–51).
Craniofacial modellers don’t only use computers to create a face as it once was, but also as it might now be, especially in the case of missing persons. The process of ‘age progression’ can be automated to a significant degree. Our ears grow longer as we grow older, at a more or less predictable rate, and algorithms exist to plot the basic sagging and puffing of an aging face. But age-progressed images are largely down to the instincts and experience of the artist, who looks at sequences of photographs of people as they get older and identifies general trends. The artist uses photos of older siblings for guidance, adapts the image to reflect the kind of life a subject may have led, and adds distinctive clothing or facial hair. Fine details like liver spots can be added manually, too. For Caroline Wilkinson, ‘The most difficult things to work out are skin colour, eye colour, how fat or thin they are, and whether they have wrinkles.’
The ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. From left: former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić in 1994; as he appeared while evading capture after his indictment for war crimes; and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague in July 2008. He was charged with 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity
The hunt for missing people can also be hampered by changes to their appearance that have nothing to do with aging, and which can be effected by techniques as simple as growing facial hair. Radovan Karadžić is a former Bosnian Serb politician who was indicted for war crimes in 1995 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Among other atrocities, Karadžić was charged with ordering the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre in which 8,000 Bosnians were murdered. After his indictment, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ disappeared, shaved his hair, grew a beard, donned a priest’s robe and lived an itinerant life, wandering from monastery to monastery.
Caroline Wilkinson was asked to make an age-progressed image of Karadžić. She got the shape of his face spot on, but underestimated his beard. He had moved to Belgrade and started wearing his long hair in a ponytail, donning large square glasses and hiding behind an enormous white beard. Calling himself ‘Dabić the Spiritual Explorer’, he masqueraded as an expert in human quantum energy, worked in an alternative medicine clinic and gave public lectures. But the age-progressed images gave a new impetus to the hunt for Karadžić. In 2008, a year after Caroline had sent them her image, he was arrested by Serbian security forces, and extradited to The Hague to stand trial. The trial is still going on.
Computers often help forensic artists identify less heinous criminals, too. They analyse CCTV footage and compare the images to a suspect. When offenders do not simply break down and confess at the sight of their blurred selves on video – which they often do – it is difficult to prove conclusively tha
t it was them. Even when footage is high quality, identifying an unfamiliar face by sight is not the most reliable of procedures. Computerised facial image comparison can offer a more reliable alternative. One method is to superimpose a still from the video on to a photo of the suspect, although that can be awkward when criminals haven’t been looking straight at the camera, which they tend not to do. Another technique, which has been used in UK courts for the last fifteen years, is called photoanthropometry. This involves comparing the proportional distances and angles between landmarks on two facial images. But the technique is not perfect. Even when the suspect is asked to pose for their photo in the same alignment as the person in the video, there is a complex bundle of variables to accommodate, such as distance from the camera, camera angle and head orientation.
We have seen how forensic artists identify the dead from their skulls, missing people from photographs, and wanted people from video footage. One other significant aspect of their work is to depict wanted people based on eyewitness accounts. Historically, this was the job of a sketch artist who would translate an often shaky witness recollection into a drawing of a suspect. But in the 1980s researchers at the University of Kent helped develop an alternative method known as E-FIT (Electronic Facial Identification Technique). Police forces around the world now use E-FIT and it makes regular appearances in the media. To make an E-FIT, an eyewitness looks at a swatch of computer-generated faces and clicks on the one that looks most like the person they saw. They are then presented with another, more narrowly defined set of faces. In this way the image is refined, until it is a relatively close representation of the person the witness remembers.
Facial reconstruction began as a way of bringing us face to face with our history – and we are still using it for that purpose. In 2012, a set of bones was found underneath a car park in Leicester. They were suspected to belong to Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, who died at the nearby Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and had been buried in a local church.
