“Unidentified death”. The label is upsetting, but it is the lot of many Canadians whose unrecognizable human remains are found, sometimes long after their death or far from home. Using their skulls, a state-of-the-art 3D scanner, several clay books, and skilled art students, 15 men were given faces long after they had died. With this extraordinary project, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) hopes that one day, someone will recognize them and that they will be able to “come home”.
Behind the scenes of this forensic identification project is Corporal Charity Sampson, an RCMP victim identification specialist.
This technique – worthy of a television series of scientific police investigations – was already used in the United States. When she heard that New York Academy of Arts Forensic Sculpture Studio professor Joe Mullins needed human skulls for his teaching, she offered the RCMP’s cooperation — a first.
Of the more than 700 unidentified human remains in the Federal Police’s National Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Database, 15 male skulls were chosen because they were in good condition. They had all been found in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
The oldest was discovered 50 years ago, in 1972, and the most recent in 2019.
According to the corporal, this type of facial reconstruction is “the last hope”, used when other techniques, such as DNA analysis, comparisons of dental charts and fingerprints, have failed.
Being able to put a face in the database is preferable to the mention “no photo on file” that we can currently see.
The face, even in a “reconstructed” version, can lead to new leads, explains the corporal, since there are so many unanswered questions: who are they? Where do they come from ? How did they die?
For her, all the efforts are worth it: if we do not know their identity, it is “impossible to bring them home”.
Mme Sampson thus traveled to New York in 2020, with the 15 skulls. They had been printed in three dimensions using laser-fused nylon powder by specialists from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa.
According to Tom Kay, a surface modeling technologist at the NRC, state-of-the-art technologies were used to produce models identical to the skulls provided by the police. The technicians paid particular attention to the complex elements, including the eye sockets and the jaw.
Marriage of art and science
The New York students then used their anatomical knowledge and artistic talents to reshape each of the faces with clay, under the guidance of Professor Mullins, who has more than 20 years of experience in the field. of judicial reconstruction and who works at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
He showed them how to take into account factors like age and ethnicity in an attempt to render the subject’s appearance based on the natural shape of his skull. They were also made aware of the approximate height, weight and age of the deceased, when this information was available. “There’s a lot of information in the bones,” says Corporal Sampson. In some cases, hair could also provide valuable clues.
The RCMP officer watched as the students gradually recreated the faces, applying layers of clay directly to the skulls, to form lips, brow bones and noses. “It almost made it possible to detect their personality. It was fascinating to watch. »
And long: they spent about 40 hours on each of the faces.
“For the students, it was an honor to participate in this project,” she says.
And at the end of the workshop, 15 new faces were revealed.
A special scanner was then used to preserve the heads in digital format, because the clay can crumble over time: a new and even “revolutionary” technique, according to the corporal. This step was carried out in international partnership with the American company Faro. The RCMP is now certain to have the faces forever, in three dimensions.
They were later digitally painted to highlight facial features like hair, irises, and certain textures to achieve a black-and-white photo-like portrait of these people.
Generate interest
Of the list of 15 faces, two have since been identified, but they were identified by their DNA profile, and not because someone recognized them, explains the corporal.
One was a man who was found dead on the beach at Sandy Cove in Nova Scotia. The RCMP in that province, knowing that he had been selected for the project, re-released a photo of his clothing. A woman recognized a boot, found by the RCMP, as possibly belonging to a man she knew. DNA confirmed it all. The man, who died at the age of 43, lived in the neighboring province of New Brunswick and his family was finally able to know his fate.
For the other man, who had been in the database for 50 years, it was the efforts of the Upper Mainland Detachment in British Columbia that led to his identification, again using DNA, RCMP said.
Charity Sampson believes that the forensic identification project nonetheless played a role in their identification, given the amount of publicity that surrounded the art studio and renewed interest in identifying these 15 dead anonymously.
In the United States, since 2015, a similar program has resulted in at least four visual identifications of missing persons, reports the RCMP. In the past, students have used their talents to recreate the faces of recent dead, selected by the New York medical examiner, but also for historical cases of deaths at the US-Mexico border and soldiers killed during the civil war.
Did the RCMP expect more people in the group of 15 to be identified?
The stars have to be aligned and the right person has to see the face and recognize it. “We knew it could be a long process,” the corporal said.
But the project is a success, she says: visits to the site of missing persons and unidentified remains of the RCMP increased “significantly” when the art workshop was held, and interest continued by the following. Surely there were people who had never been to this site, she notes. And maybe they’ll recognize another person there, who wasn’t part of the project, in five or ten years, who knows?
“The whole point of this was to generate interest and reach as many people as possible. And that, we did. »
But today, she says, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in the facial reconstruction project, the science of forensic identification has taken a big step forward. The RCMP would like to try the experiment again, when sanitary conditions allow it.