What does it feel like for a forensic anthropologist when a positive identification is made? Having spent so much time in mute communication with the dead, what is it like to share a moment with a living person who has had their worst fears confirmed? Mary Manheim knows. ‘Positive identification causes family members pain, but that resolution helps them go on with their lives,’ she says. Hours spent continually agonising over what their relative may be going through can begin to be spent on living their own lives.
For Sue Black, there is one identification she still yearns to make. Sue was born in Inverness, in the north of Scotland, and that’s the location of a disappearance that haunts her to this day. In 1976 Renee MacRae drove away from her home in the city with her two young sons in the backseat. She dropped off the elder boy at her estranged husband’s house and continued on with 3-year-old Andrew towards Kilmarnock, where she planned to visit her sister.
Neither Renee nor Andrew has ever been seen again. Later that night her empty blue BMW was spotted on fire in a lay-by on the main road south, the A9. Nothing was recovered from the burnt-out car except a rug stained with Renee’s blood. Her ex-husband was interviewed and the identity of her secret lover was unveiled. An intensive search, including of more than 500 houses, garages and outbuildings in the city, revealed not a clue. Nothing seemed to take the police any closer to discovering the fate of Renee and her son.
In 2004 a television documentary aired in Scotland called Unsolved. It sparked a new wave of interest in the mysterious disappearance. A retired police officer came forward claiming that there had been a suggestion that the bodies of Renee and Andrew might have been dumped in a quarry close to the A9. Sue Black was involved in the operation to excavate the quarry in a painstaking search for Renee and Andrew’s remains. It took three weeks to remove 20,000 tons of earth from the quarry, and cut down 2,000 trees. The operation cost more than £100,000. All that was found were rabbit bones, two crisp packets and some men’s clothing.
In spite of the failure of the cold case review, Sue Black received a letter from Renee’s sister, which she will always keep. ‘I just want my sister home,’ it read. ‘I know she’s dead now. I accept she’s dead. Every time somebody goes looking for her my hopes are raised, and every time they don’t find her, I sink deeper.’ In Sue’s experience, when people cannot find a family member – whether in Kosovo, Argentina, Thailand or the UK – they can never get beyond it. It’s that knowledge that continues to drive her forward in her mission of bringing home the dead.
‘When we come with news,’ says Sue, ‘it’s always bad news. “It’s your son”; “it’s your wife”; “it’s your daughter”. But the bad news is tinged with a kindness that says, “Now at least you know, and you can put the body in the ground and start to grieve. And you’ll never forget but you can start to move on.”’
NINE
FACIAL
RECONSTRUCTION
‘I marvel how Nature could ever find space
For so many strange contrasts in one human face.’
William Wordsworth, ‘A Character’ (1800)
Never mind fingerprints or DNA. What make us recognisably individual to each other are, of course, our faces. Nature, nurture and circumstances combine uniquely in each of us to create a set of features that is the key to identification for everyone who knows us. At one time or another, we’ve all been misled by the similar body shape or gait or hair of a stranger; but when they turn or come close enough for us to see their face, we know our error at once. But death steals our faces from us. Our flesh decomposes, nature strips us back to the bone and the skull beneath the skin means nothing to the people who knew and loved us.
Thankfully, there is a small band of scientists whose work is dedicated to giving the dead their faces back. In the UK, Richard Neave established the technique of facial reconstruction from skeletal remains at Manchester University. He was part of a team put together in 1970 to investigate the Egyptian mummies housed at the Manchester Museum and in 1973, using plaster and clay, he rebuilt the faces of two 4,000-year-old Egyptians, Khnum-Nakht and Nekht-Ankh, known as ‘The Two Brothers’. ‘Right from the beginning,’ wrote Neave, ‘I endeavoured not to rely merely upon intuition – what was irritatingly referred to as “artistic licence”.’ Instead he determined the shape of the faces using average tissue thickness measurements taken from a collection of cadavers in 1898 by the Swiss anatomist Julius Kollmann.
Neave developed great skill in modelling the muscles of the face and skull, which provided a latticework for the rest of the flesh and skin to sit on. Having refined his skills in the archaeological sphere, he turned to forensic work and was involved in more than twenty cases of unidentified remains, with a 75 per cent identification success rate.
One of his most challenging cases began, paradoxically, with a headless corpse. The body of a man wearing nothing but a pair of underpants was discovered in 1993 under the railway arches of Manchester’s Piccadilly Station. In spite of the best efforts of the police, his identity remained a mystery.
Three months later, a man was walking his dog across a playing field in Cannock, Staffordshire, seventy-five miles from Manchester. Suddenly the dog started digging and continued frantically until he uncovered a severed head. It had been smashed into more than a hundred pieces; later, it emerged it had been mangled by a machete. DNA tests connected it to the headless torso in Manchester, but that still didn’t take the police any closer to an ID. And at first it seemed unlikely that the face could be rebuilt. A significant amount of bone was missing, especially from the crucial middle section of the skull. Police presumed the murderer had intended to make it impossible for anyone to recognise the victim of this vicious attack. But painstakingly Richard Neave glued together what remained of the skull and cast it in plaster, filling the gaps to the best of his ability and with the benefit of his extensive knowledge and experience. When the Independent newspaper published a photo of Neave’s clay head, seventy-six families came forward thinking that they recognised the face.
The police collected photographs and details from those families and began comparing the faces of their missing relatives to the skull. As they worked their way down the list without success, it began to look as if the murderer had succeeded. Finally, they reached the last name. Adnan Al-Sane had been given such a low priority because there had been nothing about the body or skull to suggest that the victim wasn’t Caucasian. But the details matched. At last, the police knew who the victim was.
Adnan Al-Sane was a 46-year-old Kuwaiti businessman who had been living in Maida Vale, west London. He came from a wealthy family and had made a fortune running a bank in his native country, before retiring at only thirty-eight. He had last been sighted, the day before the decapitated body was found, having dinner at the Britannia Hotel in Grosvenor Square, central London. Dental records and fingerprints from Al-Sane’s flat confirmed his identity. The post mortem showed that he had swallowed a tooth during the attack that killed him, but his head had been hacked off after he was dead. To this day, his murder remains unsolved, the motive a mystery. But at least his family knows his fate.
Richard Neave helped to demonstrate the scientific basis for facial reconstruction, shaking off the notion that it was more an art than a rigorous scientific discipline. He spent his career working and lecturing at Manchester University, where he passed on his knowledge to the next generation, among them Caroline Wilkinson, now Professor of Craniofacial Reconstruction at the University of Dundee.
One of Caroline’s own landmark cases started almost as improbably as the Al-Sane case. One August day in 2001 a sunbather came across part of a girl’s body on a beach at Lake Nulde in the Netherlands. Over the next few days other body parts were found at different locations along the Dutch coast. Then a fisherman discovered a skull near a wharf, eighty miles from Nulde. The face had been mutilated beyond recognition. Investigators were baffled. They contacted Caroline, hopeful that she would agree to remake the face.
/> But when Dutch police told her they estimated the victim was aged between five and seven years old, she found herself uneasy about taking the case. Part of her reluctance stemmed from the fact that her own daughter was also only five at the time. But much more significant than her own emotional response was professional caution.
Back then, anatomists doubted whether it was possible to reconstruct children’s faces with anything like the same accuracy as those of adults, because juvenile faces are undeveloped and lack clarity. But Wilkinson had specialised in juvenile facial reconstruction while working towards her PhD. She believed she could bring something useful to the investigation. She locked away her qualms and examined the damaged skull the Dutch police had sent over. As she studied the bones, Caroline realised the dead child had some unusual features: a large, wide nose – unlike the little upturned noses that most 5-year-olds have – and a big gap between her front teeth. Already she could see that this was a distinctive face.
In general, it’s more uncommon for missing children to be recognised from photos than adults, despite the greater media coverage that they get, because their unformed faces are more similar to each other. Only one in six missing children is found because someone calls the authorities after seeing that child’s picture, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who release thousands of images of missing children every week in the US.
But Caroline was hopeful that this girl would be one of the identified ones. She applied all her skill to making a clay model of the Nulde girl’s face. Photographs of the result were widely displayed in newspapers and on television around Europe. Within a week the girl had been identified as Rowena Rikkers from Dordrecht, aged five and a half.
In the wake of the identification, a horrific story emerged. During the last five months of her short and tragic life Rowena had been physically abused by her mother’s boyfriend, with her mother’s knowledge. She had spent the last two months of her life locked up in a dog cage. After her death, her body had been cut up and scattered throughout the Netherlands by the two people above all who should have cared for and protected her. They were eventually tracked down to Spain and convicted of their crimes. It was the first time a facial reconstruction had been used to solve a crime in the Netherlands – and without Caroline’s work, Rowena’s death may never have been acknowledged or avenged.
The idea of rebuilding faces is not new, and nor is it always about murder. It sprung from a desire to connect with lost people by visualising them, and people have been doing it for a very long time. In 1953 archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered skulls in Jericho from around 7000 BC which had clay carefully worked on to them, with shells set into their sockets to imitate eyes. She was struck by their beauty: ‘Each head has a most individual character, and one cannot escape the impression that one is looking at real portraits.’ The ancient Middle Eastern artists had used clay to model the physical distillation of their ancestors’ identities – their faces – so that they might conquer death.
The face has always been imbued with significance. The eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth called the face ‘the index of the mind’. And there’s no denying that faces betray our emotions and responses – they laugh, cry, scare, soothe, entertain. The tiniest movement of our facial muscles can reveal aggression, or affection: you only have to think of the subtle difference between a confused frown and an angry frown to realise this. Our brains are highly skilled in recognising minute differences in other people’s faces and we can identify hundreds of them as a result. At only five weeks old, babies can distinguish their mothers’ faces. And 2.5 per cent of people grow up to be ‘super recognisers’, capable of identifying nearly every face they have ever seen. We can read in a face certain key elements of our humanity – gender, age, general health, for example. But just because you can see someone’s face, it doesn’t make you a mind-reader; as Shakespeare pointed out, ‘there’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face’. One thing we definitely can’t tell from a face is whether someone is ‘constructed’ like a criminal.
A collection of ‘criminal faces’ compiled by Cesare Lombroso: this plate shows murderers. Lombroso believed criminality could be predicted by the physiology of an individual
The nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso thought he knew better, however. Lombroso measured the faces of 383 lawbreakers and published a book, L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man), in 1878 which ascribed to criminals ‘enormous jaws, high cheekbones, prominent brow ridges, solitary lines in palms, extreme size of eye sockets and handle-shaped ears’. Later studies of Lombroso’s own measurements have shown his conclusions to be nonsense. The evidence didn’t back up the theory; it was based only on Lombroso’s own prejudices and unfounded opinions.
But ‘Lombrosia’, as it came to be called, was a seductive concept, and its creator was often asked to testify at trials, with mixed success. He was outraged when one jury ignored his recommendation to convict a man of murder despite the absence of hard evidence. Although Lombroso had identified ‘a physiognomy approaching the criminal type in every way’, including ‘outstanding ears, premature wrinkles and [a] sinister look’, all of which should have been enough to convict him ‘in a country less tender towards criminals’, the jury was not convinced. He was also criticised by some contemporary scientists, but, despite these setbacks, his ideas were nevertheless influential. People listened to him because they instinctively seek meaning in faces.
Lombroso went about it in completely the wrong way. But, in a way, he was on the right track. In order to solve crimes and unearth the secrets of the past, scientists and investigators do need to pay very careful attention to human physiology. In Caroline Wilkinson’s view, ‘Any facial reconstruction produced without an understanding of facial anatomy and anthropology would be at best naive and at worst grossly inaccurate.’ Painters and sculptors have long known that understanding how the facial muscles attach and move can improve the accuracy of their work, leading to a profound interest in dissection and anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci dissected thirty unrefrigerated cadavers in his lifetime, overcoming ‘the fear of living in the company of these dead men, dismembered and flayed and terrible to behold’. His dissections gave rise to a series of astonishing anatomical drawings, including of a skull in cross-section, that gave Leonardo’s later painterly depictions of human faces a deeper realism.
The brilliant seventeenth-century Sicilian sculptor Giulio Zumbo never saw Leonardo’s unpublished skull drawings, but managed to improve the understanding of how individual faces relate to their skulls in a different way. Together with a French surgeon, he worked wax on to a real skull, leaving the ‘skin’ peeled back to reveal the facial muscles. The resulting full-colour model of a half-decomposed face, replete with maggots coming out of nostrils, looked uncannily like a real person.
In the nineteenth century, as we came to a greater understanding of the workings of the human body, facial reconstruction became more rigorously scientific. Early practitioners had lacked established anatomical principles to work within, so they began to generate them. German and Swiss anatomists and sculptors collaborated to interpret the relationship between the face and the skull.
In 1894 in Leipzig, archaeologists exhumed a skeleton that they thought belonged to Johann Sebastian Bach. They asked the anatomist Wilhelm His to prove it. He went about it in an original way, by taking possession of twenty-four male and four female cadavers, and laying patches of rubber at landmark points on their faces. He pushed an oiled needle through each rubber – which represented the level of the skin – and down through the face until it hit bone. Then he pulled the needle back out and measured the distance from the needle tip to the rubber. These were the world’s first soft tissue thickness measurements. He averaged out these measurements and then, with the help of a sculptor, began building up clay over the skull to match them. The resulting model looked remarkably similar to contemporary representations of Bach.
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p; Despite the scientific value of the Bach reconstruction being compromised by Wilhelm His’s familiarity with contemporary portraits of the composer, his needle and rubber technique was of lasting value; the measurements he took have remained remarkably consistent, and are still used today, although facial reconstructionists think that in recent years faces in the Western world have become fatter. In 1899 Kollmann and the sculptor Büchy used the technique to rebuild the face of a Neolithic woman who had lived by a lake in Auvernier, Switzerland. The woman is regarded as the first properly scientific facial reconstruction, because Kollmann had based his model on so many soft tissue measurements, taken from forty-six male and ninety-nine female cadavers from the local area – the same tissue measurements Richard Neave would use in the 1970s to reconstruct the faces of the Two Brothers.
As the twentieth century moved forward, so did the techniques of facial reconstruction. Anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov developed what is now known as the ‘Russian Method’, which pays great attention to muscle structure and less to tissue thickness measurements. He modelled muscles on to the skull one by one, and then covered them with a thin layer of clay to represent skin. He reconstructed over 200 archaeological faces – including that of Ivan the Terrible – and was involved in 150 forensic cases. In 1950 he founded the Laboratory for Plastic Reconstruction at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It still exists, and makes an important contribution to the field.