The Last Place You'd Look

by Carole Moore

  It isn’t really a modern science, though. Forensic dentistry has roots based in Roman legend. Proving that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Nero’s murderous mother, Agrippina, reportedly ordered the slaying of another woman. When the head was brought to Agrippina as proof of her demise, the emperor’s mother didn’t at first recognize her, but by looking in the dead woman’s mouth, she found a bad tooth she knew belonged to the unlucky victim.

  To identify bodies, forensic dentists have worked on mass disasters such as tsunamis, airplane crashes, fires, and acts of terrorism. Of course, the dead victims must have dental records on file somewhere in order to make comparisons. Like DNA, there must be something with which to compare the evidence for the evidence to have value. Most of the Indian Ocean tsunami victims in 2004 were identified through DNA extracted through the molars.

  Historically, forensic dentists or odontologists have not only identified crime victims, but also villains: Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, were matched to their dental records following their 1945 deaths in a German bunker. Forensic dentists can also use teeth to determine the gender of a victim, and since teeth are one of the hardest and most indestructible substances in the human body, they are likely to survive trauma that destroys flesh and blood. And, as mentioned before, they are also a good source of DNA.

  “The purpose of the teeth is to locate STR or nuclear DNA, usually in the molars if there [have] been no dental fillings, root canals, etcetera. If the collection method is done carefully there is a chance that STR can be found in the pulp of the tooth,” says Gerald Nance, a case manager with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and retired criminal investigator.

  For small children, like the Boy in the Bag, forensic dentistry can provide clues about age and level of dental care. He had a chipped front tooth, but the damage could have come from the beating that killed him. The other Philadelphia child, the Boy in the Box, was bucktoothed and had a full set of baby teeth, but in the 1950s dental care for young children was not as common as it is today. Many never saw a dentist, and for kids raised in poverty, the odds were even greater that there were no dentists in their lives. Sadly, the same holds true today.

  Still, for one unfortunate missing woman, frequent and extensive dental care eventually paid off in reuniting her—albeit postmortem—with her family. Eliopulos, who spent fifteen years working as an investigator for the Florida Medical Examiner’s office, says it took a quarter of a century before the girl he knew as “Angel” was reunited with her family.

  The seventeen-year-old derived her nickname from an angel tattoo she wore. Struck and killed by a van on a major highway, Angel’s extensive dental work made her unique. Although investigators were able to track the girl to a waitressing job in a nearby state, Angel had worked under an alias and the lead grew cold. The medical examiner’s office considered her a runaway, but despite their efforts she remained a Jane Doe.

  Six months after Eliopulos left the medical examiner’s office and began work with NCIS, the mystery was solved. Angel’s sister started looking for her again and, although investigators had checked all available databases in the United States at that time, she wasn’t on any of them. The reason? Angel was from Canada. A forensic odontologist matched the remains to her dental records.

  Another case where dental records helped bring home a missing loved one involved a young sailor not seen alive in twenty-three years. In the military, when someone disappears, he is declared absent without leave, or AWOL. After thirty days, he is labeled a deserter. Because of this classification, many who fall victim to foul play are never considered missing persons in the legal sense—only absconders. It is a problem that often leads to a lack of information when identifying found bodies.

  “They may very well escape any type of inquiry from medical examiners or coroners looking for a missing person who’s in the military,” says Eliopulos. “We need to change that.”

  When his sister reinstituted a search for the missing sailor, investigators found an unidentified body that matched his basic description at the time of his disappearance.

  “The body was long gone and buried,” Eliopulos says. But the medical examiner’s office had pulled the jaw and saved it, just in case. It was a match.

  “The fortunate thing is his sister still obviously cared, but his parents had died without knowing their son wasn’t a deserter,” he says.

  The sailor was exhumed and reburied with his mother.

  While that case did not have a textbook happy ending, it was at least resolved so the family could claim and bury their relative. However, not everyone gets that chance.

  Many thousands of bodies remain unclaimed, identified only by a medical examiner’s case number. The public’s expectations are often skewed by the media, and television in particular, which make it seem remarkably simple to track down identities using science. These expectations result from a phenomenon known as the “CSI effect,” an imaginary knowledge of scientific techniques gained from watching fictional television shows including CSI and NCIS. It imbues families of the missing with false hope and drives investigators crazy.

  Here is a real case that demonstrates how strong an impact the CSI effect has had on the American criminal justice system. The victim in this case was a tiny woman who managed a small store. A robber entered the empty store as another man left. Once inside, he viciously beat the woman and left her for dead, took the store’s cash, and fled the scene.

  The robber was identified in several ways: the man he passed on the way out of the store was a friend of the perpetrator’s family and had known the robber since he was a child. The victim looked at more than two hundred mug shots and picked the same perpetrator named by the witness as her assailant. And when police attempted to arrest the robber, he fled the city, returning months later when he thought things had cooled off. It should have been an open-and-shut case, but it wasn’t. In fact, the case ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.

  After court adjourned, police spoke with the jury’s foreman, a construction supervisor who wanted to be a police detective, and, as it turned out, someone who was clearly in the grips of the CSI effect. He said that if the suspect had been in the store, he would have left fingerprints. Since the crime scene technicians didn’t find his fingerprints, he must not have been there.

  He learned this from watching cop shows on television and convinced the other jurors he knew best. That jury turned loose a criminal based on an erroneous premise.

  But inaccurate portrayals of evidence and how it’s collected make for colorful reading and viewing, so fiction prevails over fact most of the time. In one recent crime drama in which a body was exhumed, the coffin was dug up and opened right in the cemetery by the side of the opened grave. Even worse, a crime scene technician rummaged around inside—no medical examiner, no removal to the medical examiner’s office, no other witnesses, and probably no exhumation order.

  Although it’s great to see science get its due on television and many have been inspired to seek scientific careers based on the interest these shows kick up, they do tend to distort reality. For example, the real-life NCIS has more than one lab person, and real labs specialize. One person cannot testify as an expert in firearms and ballistics, chemical analysis, DNA, explosive devices, tool marks, computer forensics, and so on. But much of the public believes one person can do it all.

  So science, which now offers so many good and useful tools to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent, also presents valuable approaches to help trace missing persons and link a body to its identity. But there are a multitude of variables when it comes to what it is possible to do and what happens in the make-believe world of fiction, television, and movies.

  Because DNA matches take seconds on a television program, viewers confronted with real-life cases expect DNA verification to be instantaneous and always possible. It is not. In fact, even though great strides are made daily to refine and speed up the evidentiary proces
ses, it takes time to do them right. While the wait can be agonizing for families, making a positive identification is more important than making a speedy one.

  When an investigator on a television show hacks into a secure federal computer system to search for a missing person, the public gets the message this is not only doable, but accomplished with ease. It’s a shame because it stokes their hopes to an unrealistic level.

  But then, there is always this: for now it’s entertainment, but who back in 1957 would have thought something called DNA could prove a person innocent of murder, put a name to the Boy in the Bag, or lead to the identification of bones found in a forest as those of a long-missing young man? Even though the application of forensic science through the filter of entertainment often results in unrealistic expectations, those shows do give the hardworking and often underappreciated forensic experts a well-deserved tip of the hat. Because of these individuals and their relentless dedication to reuniting the missing with their families, many have been brought home.

  All made possible courtesy of real-life crime scene investigation professionals.

  R

  In a picture taken many years ago, a little boy is dressed in a pair of pants and a long-sleeved, white shirt. A dark vest covers the shirt, and his feet are clad in shoes and socks. He is propped up in a chair covered with white cloth, most likely a sheet, and photographed in both right and left profiles. Bruises are visible in both photos. In one, the boy looks like a young version of actor Macaulay Culkin, who starred in the Home Alone movies. But he’s not. The picture is of the Boy in the Box.

  In an effort to make the child appear more natural and lead to his identification, investigators dressed and photographed him as if he were alive. The photos generated leads, but nothing came of them. The child remains unidentified today.

  In the past, it has not been uncommon for police and medical examiners to release photos of the dead in the hopes someone might place a name to their faces. Often, though, damage or decay renders the person unrecognizable. In the case of skeletonized remains, skulls cannot be identified without dental records or recorded past trauma.

  Forensic artists were called in to bring the dead to life again by drawing a “living” version of the deceased or by creating a bust based on the skull and other recovered evidence, like hair. Now, science and art have met the computer and the outcome is faster and more lifelike.

  Glenn Miller’s cubicle at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in Alexandria, Virginia, is littered with computer screens bigger than most plasma televisions. Lining the windows in neat single file stand sculpted clay busts, much like the one made of the Boy in the Bag. That bust, created without charge by Philadelphia artist Frank Bender, was key in helping to identify the child. Those that line Miller’s windows today were also used to identify the dead in cases past.

  Miller is a retired cop, but he is also an artist. He teaches other forensic artists the delicate specialties of facial reconstruction and age progression—the first critical to identifying recovered remains, the second a vital tool for investigators seeking a missing person.

  Miller “draws” not with a pen or pencil or paint. Instead, the secret to his skillful, lifelike images can be found in computer software: Adobe Photoshop, to be precise. “Photoshop is the Holy Grail, a universal language,” Miller says.

  In the beginning, Miller used a program designed to age progress a child. When the ability to digitize photos became possible, the process was revolutionized by Adobe’s software. Unlike a word processing program, not everyone can be successfully trained to use it. Miller says departments that send officers who are not artists to the classes he gives are disappointed because success in his discipline rests with a knowledge and background in art. But, in Miller’s words, “you don’t have to be a Rembrandt to get a good likeness.”

  The results of Miller’s labors surround him and the others who work in the NCMEC’s forensic art unit. One bust, depicting the face of an adolescent or young man, is compelling. The face, Miller says, is a re-creation of a skull found by a dog.

  “The family dog . . . brought home the mandible [and] femur bones. [Police] put a GPS on the dog but never found where the dog was collecting the bones,” Miller says.

  A forensic anthropologist analyzed the recovered bones and determined the individual both suffered from a severe deformity and used a wheelchair. Because the skull was thicker in one area and other conditions were present, the forensic anthropologist also believed the person was mentally retarded. The bust was created using the recovered mandible.

  “Years later, a woman looking for a missing loved one went to the Garden of Missing Children [a now defunct Web site] and saw a photo of a missing boy,” Miller says. Because the boy’s photo reminded her of her own sister, who was retarded, it stuck in her mind.

  At the NCMEC Web site she saw the bust of the boy created from the bones the dog had recovered. The woman thought the bust resembled the boy’s photo. She was right.

  “It was a match. [The boy] was blind, and his father had burned to death in a house fire,” Miller says. Authorities now believe the boy’s death was the result of a “mercy killing.”

  Instead of busts, which take much longer to craft, Miller now uses Photoshop to re-create human faces in NCMEC’s quest to match names to as many recovered remains as possible. And Miller is also able to turn a corpse into someone recognizable.

  In the case of a young African American woman found murdered, Miller took a photograph of the dead woman’s face and erased the trauma, then added a spark of life to her face, computer-enhancing her eyes and expression. When the photo circulated, her sister stepped forward to identify her. The likeness Miller achieved is remarkable when viewed side by side with the woman’s driver’s license.

  “What I love about doing this is we can be the link that solved it,” Miller says. “The family searching for its loved one will at last know what happened. Now they can stop living in a time capsule.”

  Miller leans back in his chair and thinks for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is soft and low. “I show as best I can what that person looked like on the day he or she died. I re-create that face,” he says.

  In addition to bringing the dead “back to life” in his art, Miller also moves time forward, as if thumbing the pages of a book ahead to another chapter, revealing the story midplot.

  Age progression is where art meets science. By taking an individual and approximating what that person might look like two or ten or twenty years after last being photographed, forensic artists can arm both police and the public with a tool that has worked to bring victims back home and put on-the-run suspects behind bars. It is an art form that requires time, patience, and a particular set of tools.

  When looking at a photo that has been age progressed, particularly of a child, it is often assumed that the artist “makes the person look older.” It is not quite that easy.

  Good age progression relies on an artist having knowledge of how the human face changes as it grows older: what sags, what expands, and what differences are common in the course of human development. Between the ages two and seven, children experience rapid growth in the bottom two-thirds of their faces. Adult teeth grow in. Baby fat fades away, their noses lengthen, and their necks fill out. But some types of change depend on heredity. That’s why family photos prove essential.

  “You have to get reference pictures of biological parents to age progress a missing child,” Miller says.

  In one well-known case, Miller age progressed young Madeleine

  McCann, the British four-year-old who was abducted on May 7, 2007, during a family holiday in Portugal. The progression, like all progressions, relied on photographs of the child’s parents.

  Miller says, “I had a great picture of [mother] Kate and a great picture of [father] Gerry, and I could see Kate’s mouth and Gerry’s nose in [Madeleine]. In my opinion, [the age progression] is in the ballpark.”

&nb
sp; His images of little Madeleine McCann were released on the Oprah Winfrey Show but haven’t yet resulted in her recovery. The British child, believed abducted from the hotel where her family was staying, has been the subject of an international search effort.

  Miller uses his altered photographs to predict how children will change as they age. If the father has a long, thin nose that widened as he grew older and the son has the same nose, then Miller will approximate that nose in the progression. He doesn’t guess what the child could look like; he bases his estimates on the child’s genetics.

  It is almost impossible to age progress an infant, although it has been done in a few instances. Under normal circumstances, a child must be one to eighteen months old and missing for at least two years before he or she can be progressed. As a child ages, Miller requires photos of the parents when they were close to the same age as the missing child. He says the ears are important because they are “as individual as a fingerprint.”

  Many times when kids are identified from age-progressed photos, the public looks at the picture that led to the child’s recovery and thinks, “That doesn’t look at all like that kid.” They are both right and wrong.

  “The progression is going to have subtle differences,” Miller says. The actual person may have a different hair color or length, eyebrows can be bushier or grow in a different pattern or be plucked and shaped, and the nose could be somewhat thinner or thicker. But Miller knows the trick is finding that certain special something that will trigger a spark of recognition in someone who knows or has seen the child. Perhaps it’s the shape of the eyes or ears that stick out; maybe it’s the smile or shape of the jaw. What may not resemble the actual person to a stranger will, it is hoped, be as unique and identifiable as a fingerprint to an acquaintance or friend.