Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

by Emily Craig

  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 he certainly won't file a report! I could see why it was so hard for Joe to identify a body with no scars, defects, dental work, or dental records on file.

  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 any unknown skeletal remains ever get identified. That's why every single “hit” is such a thrill.

  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.

  Joe was devastated. But then the FBI agent offered one last suggestion-me.

  My name is Emily Craig. I'm the forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a job that usually keeps me plenty busy
with our own in-state cases-everything from mysterious bones found in the bed of a mountain creek to a backwoods homicide disguised by fire. My unique background as a medical illustrator and sculptor, along with my years of experience in forensic anthropology, means that special bone cases occasionally come to me from out of state, and, of course, I'm happy to help whenever I can. In fact, it was my earlier career in orthopedics that had made me familiar with the combination of medical and industrial technology used to create the model skull. And it was my forensic anthropology training that had spurred in me a newfound desire to give every victim a name. So when Joe told me the horrifying story of the young woman whose remains he'd found, I was glad that I might have the expertise to help identify her.

  I had first learned of this new computer technology a decade earlier when I'd encountered it as an illustrator at the Hughston Orthopaedic Clinic in Columbus, Georgia. We'd sometimes resorted to this very process of bone modeling to help surgeons plan their most demanding surgeries, repairing severe complex fractures. Then, when I first entered graduate school in forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee, I tapped back into this amazing computer technology and worked up a research proposal for incorporating medical CT-scan technology into the traditional forensic practice of three-dimensional clay reconstruction. I was hoping to come up with a computer program that could reliably regenerate a person's face from the skull, combining the best of art and science. This was one of many times that my background in art and orthopedics and my work in anthropology would turn out to dovetail in unprecedented ways.

  I went on to develop the process and to present my preliminary research findings at several international conferences, sparking the interest of the FBI. That's how they'd known to recommend me to Joe: They knew that I'd be on the cutting edge of any technique concerning computer-generated faces and CT scans.

  But Joe didn't know about any of that background. All he knew was that I was one more scientist who had the power either to take his investigation further or to shut it down once and for all. So he was a little cagey about bringing up the rapid prototyping issue at first. He just started by asking if I might be willing to produce a clay reconstruction of the victim's face.

  I wondered why this Wisconsin detective had reached out halfway across the country for a clay reconstruction that he should have been able to get someone to do right in his own home state. Then Joe explained that this job involved not only creating a standard forensic facial sculpture but also working with a computer-generated prototype skull-a job that even the FBI's experts weren't quite confident enough to take on. When I told him I'd do the job anyway, he was elated. As soon as I said I could do the work over the upcoming holiday weekend, he promised to get into his car the very next day so he could hand-deliver the skull replica to me that Friday evening.

  Usually, facial reconstruction projects require close collaboration between a forensic sculptor and a forensic anthropologist, but I'm one of the few people who happen to be both. So there I was, alone in my kitchen at two a.m., trying to make a young woman's face come alive with nothing to go on but a laminated paper skull and a set of mathematical formulas telling me the average tissue depths for the face of a young Black woman. I'd played it safe to that point, using tiny erasers to mark the tissue depths and then covering them with clay, arranging the eyes and nose according to standard scientific guidelines. But those hard, cold data weren't enough. My reconstruction didn't yet resemble an actual human being enough to prompt anyone to recognize her. I knew I would have to let my intuition take over in order to bring this sculpture alive.

  Slowly my hands took on a life of their own. Following some secret instructions, an intuitive sense of the subtleties of facial structure, my fingertips began exploring the contours of the victim's face. I shut my eyes, relying entirely on my sense of touch.

  For a moment, I thought I had something. Then my hands dropped to my sides and I opened my eyes. A headache started to press against my temples as I sat there, frustrated, my statue staring blankly back at me.

  Then, without having consciously planned to do so, I found myself reaching out to her left eyelid, tweaking its clay surface ever so slightly. Just that tiny adjustment made her finally begin to look alive. Suddenly, I knew exactly what to do next. Saturating a cotton ball with isopropyl alcohol, I rubbed it across the glass eyes I had inserted, trying to remove the greasy residue left by the clay. As the irises cleared and the corneas brightened, those eyes began to reflect the room light, as real human eyes do. Better. Much better.

  Moving more quickly then, I dripped more alcohol into the inside corner of each eye, until large pools formed in the depression where the woman's tear ducts would have been. Slowly, the drops welled up and spilled over, running down the edges of her nose and into the corners of her mouth. She appeared to be crying-which was just what I wanted.

  This macabre effect is one of my secret recipes, a way to test the accuracy of the topography of the mid-face area, between the eyebrows and the mouth. When tears fall from a real person's eyes, they follow a fairly predictable pattern down both sides of the face. If a reconstruction is even slightly off, its “tears” will flow erratically, curving back and forth in an odd snakelike effect, or following two irregular routes down each side of the nose. These tears flowed just as human ones do, and watching them flow down her cheeks, I felt my own tears slowly well up. As a scientist, I try hard to stay emotionally detached while I'm working on a case. I make an effort to “think like a murderer” rather than to identify with the victims. But that night I was exhausted, and when that last procedure made the face of that sculpture spring to life, I surprised myself. This woman had been butchered like an animal, and I hadn't yet even allowed myself to truly think of her as a person. She suddenly had a face-a young, innocent face-and the horror of what she had been through overcame me.

  As the forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, my job is to analyze bones, fragments of extremities, and charred human remains, helping to determine how people died, who they were, and sometimes even what they looked like. On any given day, you might find me beside the smoking wreckage of a plane crash, sifting the ashes of a burned-down backwoods cabin, or in my lab, carefully cataloguing a suspicious-looking pile of bones. I'm often the one to tell the pathologist whether we're looking at homicide or accident, and the evidence I collect might prove crucial in helping investigators decide upon their next step. Sometimes, I'm the detectives' last chance to find a killer or the family's final hope for closure in the loss of a missing loved one.

  It can be gruesome, but I love my job. I thrive on the challenge of solving a mystery, of working with complex puzzles that call upon every ounce of my wit and resourcefulness. I cherish the men and women with whom I work, and I feel honored to be accepted as one small part of the team of law enforcement and medical workers who strive so hard to bring justice into the world. That mission, above all, is what drives me, even when I'm working late into the night on a seemingly hopeless case.

  It's taken me half my life to find this work that I love so much. My first profession was as a medical illustrator, working with Dr. Jack Hughston as he developed pioneering surgical techniques in sports medicine. I was proud of the contributions I had made to the work of surgeons and researchers, but after two decades of creating sketches, models, and computer-generated animation, I started looking for a way to become a scientist in my own right. When a detective I happened to be dating started telling me about his cases, I became intrigued with the world of law enforcement. When his recommendation led to my creating a facial reconstruction of an unidentified homicide victim, I was hooked.

  Coping with the aftermath of violent human behavior has its rewards, but also its pitfalls. From the moment I entered the world of murder investigations, I had to learn that my life was no longer my own. I would be on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, through holiday weekends and times that had theoretically been set aside for vacation. />
  There were emotional demands as well. If I was truly to understand what had happened to the men and women whose remains I handled, I had to understand the depravity of human violence that had led to their deaths. I was sucked down into this vortex of murderous hate and malice each time I dealt with mutilated body parts and skeletal remains of murdered victims.

  Still, it's been an exhilarating journey, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I've crawled deep into Kentucky coal mines and clung to the rock faces of steep mountains. I've worked lonely murders out in the backwoods and mass disasters in the centers of major cities. I've met killers who turned themselves in to the authorities so they could get free medical care from prison doctors, and I've brought comfort to survivors who refused for decades to give up hope of finding out what happened to their missing loved ones. My cases have ranged from the tragic to the downright bizarre, from the awe-inspiring to the purely depressing, but my profession is now my passion: the ultimate challenge-and the ultimate reward.

  1. Death Comes Knocking

  Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the

  poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.

  – HORACE