Forensic sculptor put a face to John Does
Work gave investigators a powerful tool
The bones usually arrived by mail, a stream of anonymous packages bearing unknown remains. Sent from police departments, coroners and medical examiners across the country, they landed on the Oklahoma doorstep of Betty Pat Gatliff, a forensic sculptor who pioneered a new method for reconstructing faces, turning an avocation into her life’s work.
Using little more than modelling clay and a set of soft, eraser-like dowels, Gatliff transformed unknown skulls into eerily lifelike busts. Her work helped identify murder victims, catch killers and give solace to grieving families. “She was kind of the grand doyenne of forensic facial reconstruction,” said her former student and collaborator Karen Taylor, a leading forensic artist.
“I think everybody deserves to be identified,” she told the Oklahoman newspaper in 2002.
Gatliff worked to give criminal investigators a powerful new tool in identifying victims. Her work emerged out of a partnership with Clyde Snow, an eminent forensic anthropologist and colleague at the Federal Aviation Administration’s office in Oklahoma City.
Gatliff was 89 when she died Jan. 5 at a hospital in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The cause was complications from a stroke, said her nephew John Gatliff. She never married and leaves no immediate survivors.
Betty Patricia Gatliff was born in El Reno, Oklahoma, on Aug. 31, 1930. Her father was an architect and carpenter, and her mother was a homemaker and accomplished quilter.
Gatliff studied mathematics and art at the Oklahoma College for Women (now the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma) in Chickasha, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1951.
Her forensic sculpting grew out of a suggestion from Snow, who later helped identify Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and died in 2014.
Her forensic work effectively remained a side project until 1979, when Gatliff retired to found the Skullpture Lab out of her home in Norman, Oklahoma. She taught at schools including the University of Oklahoma, and was a technical consultant for the NBC medical mystery show “Quincy, M.E.” as well as the 1983 movie “Gorky Park.”
Gatliff retired about five years ago.