Forensic sculptor pioneered new way to put a face to unidentified crime victims
The stream bones of usually anonymous arrived packages by mail, a 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 a hobby 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.
Gatliff developed a new method for facial reconstruction in the late 1960s, then spent nearly five decades refining her technique and teaching it to hundreds of students, including those at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. She worked on at least 300 cases, with an estimated 70 per cent ‘‘hit rate’’ of positive identification, as police used photographs of her work to generate leads and give a name to John or Jane Doe. ‘‘Skullpture serial Working killer John out Lab’’, of Wayne she a home put Gacy, a studio face sculpted to dubbed victims a the bust of of President John F Kennedy for a congressional committee investigating his assassination, and reconstructed the faces of Tutankhamen and Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador.
Gatliff was 89 when she died in hospital in Oklahoma City after a stroke. She never married and leaves no immediate survivors.
Decades before television’s creation of high-tech crime procedurals such as CSI and Bones, and years before the widespread use of DNA profiling, Gatliff worked to give criminal investigators a powerful – if not always effective – 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.
Previously, the results of different forensic artists varied widely. ‘‘There are some people out there, what they turn out doesn’t even look human,’’ Snow told the Wall Street Journal in 1987. ‘‘When Betty Pat does it, we know the end result will look like the person.’’
Photos of Gatliff’s busts were used to generate leads, and identifications were confirmed using scientific evidence such as dental X-rays. One of her subjects, an unknown man who had hanged himself, was identified by police after comparing photos of Gatliff’s sculpture with 327 mug shots.
Her work was not always successful. In 1980 she reconstructed the faces of nine unidentified victims of Gacy, the Chicago serial killer convicted of 33 murders; one of the victims was later identified with help from dental records, and two more were confirmed using DNA evidence.
Much to her surprise, she was also enlisted to help a living subject, a young salesman who had nearly died after being impaled during a car crash in 1990. Surgeons asked her to help them rebuild his skull, by creating a model of what it was like before the accident. ‘‘That was beyond my expertise,’’ she later recalled.
But after meeting the man, she used a CT scan to reconstruct his undamaged skull in clay, enabling technicians to fashion a metal implant that returned many of his normal features after a 13-hour procedure. It was ‘‘the most excited I ever saw Betty’’, Karen Taylor said.
Betty Patricia Gatliff was born in El Reno, Oklahoma. She studied mathematics and art at the Oklahoma College for Women, and joined the civil service as an illustrator for the US Navy and then the Federal Aviation Authority.
Her forensic sculpting grew out of a suggestion from Snow, who later helped identify Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. He encouraged her to look at a recent textbook by anthropologist Wilton Krogman, who had ‘‘a little thread of an idea’’ about ‘‘putting a face on a skull’’. Her forensic work effectively remained a side project until 1979, when Gatliff retired to found the Skullpture Lab out of her home.
She taught at schools including the University of Oklahoma, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Scottsdale Artists’ School in Arizona, and was a technical consultant for the NBC medical mystery show Quincy, M.E., as well as the 1983 movie Gorky Park. She retired about five years ago.
While her work was literally a matter of life and death, she was far from dour. Her home was filled with playful skull-shaped cookie jars and knick-knacks; a collection of at least 400 large belt buckles (many adorned with skulls as well); and a trove of cowboy hats, some of which she stored on bronze busts of her reconstructed skulls.
‘‘I’m more amazed by the human skull every time I work with one,’’ she told People magazine in 1980. ‘‘What the Creator has given us just can’t be improved on.’’