THE FACES OF COLD CASES
Art students answer coroner’s call
Fourteen skulls, almost all that is left of deceased people found in British Columbia whom we know next to nothing about, have had their faces reconstructed in hopes of eventually identifying them.
It’s part of an enterprise involving the B.C. Coroners Service, the RCMP, Nova Scotia Medical Examiner and students at the New York Academy of Art who did the facial reconstructions.
“The 14 skulls provided by the B.C. Coroners Service as reference material are part of the B.C. inventory of cold cases,” said Eric Petit, director of the special investigations unit with B.C. Coroners Service. “Specifically, these are investigations where we have reached an impasse in terms of identifying the deceased individuals.”
The skulls date back to 1972 and the police have never been able to match them with known missing persons. They were re-created using 3D printing and shipped to New York.
It’s hoped members of the public might recognize some or all of them. They can be seen on the Canada’s Missing website and tips concerning their identities can be submitted.
“This partnership is a unique opportunity to try to draw new breath into otherwise stalled investigations,” Petit said. “Our hope is that these reconstructions will trigger a memory that results in someone connecting with us or the RCMP, which will lead us to identifying these individuals.
“This collaborative project builds on other identification tools, including our unidentified human remains viewer, to help us close cold cases in our province.”
One additional skull, from Nova Scotia, was also part of the package sent to New York, after traditional methods — DNA, dental records, missing persons reports — failed to come up with identities.
The art students in New York are part of the academy’s forensic sculpture workshop and worked under the supervision of a senior forensic artist named Joe Mullins, who is with the U.S. National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The B.C. Coroners Service provided the academy with the sex, ethnicity and height of the unidentified human remains, and the students used that information in applying clay to the 3D-printed skulls.
“Every face tells a story and these are 15 individuals who deserve to have their stories told,” said the RCMP’s Marie-Claude Arsenault, chief superintendent and the officer in charge of the RCMP’s sensitive and specialized investigative services.
“Any detail, no matter how small it may seem, could be the missing piece of the puzzle.”
The New York Academy of Art has hosted its forensic sculpture workshop annually since 2015. Since then, four visual identifications have been directly attributed to facial reconstructions done by workshop students.
The reconstructed faces will go on public display in New York in April as part of the academy’s Open Studio exhibit.
In B.C., there are 179 unidentified human remains investigations open. Nationwide, meanwhile, there are more than 700 unidentified remains in the RCMP’s national database.