Forensic artist Betty Pat Gatliff dies at 89
Betty Pat Gatliff, a forensic sculptor who helped law enforcement identify scores of people who went missing or had been murdered by deftly reconstructing their faces, died Jan. 5 in a hospital in Oklahoma City. She was 89.
Her nephew James Gatliff said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Gatliff’s artistic skills and intimate understanding of facial architecture led many police departments, coroners and medical examiners to send her the skulls of people whose faces — their visual identities — had decomposed or been rendered unrecognizable by acts of violence.
Gatliff advanced the niche field of facial reconstructions well before the advent of modern forensics and television shows like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Over more than 40 years, first as a government employee and then as a freelancer, she sculpted about 300 faces and produced an estimated 70% rate of identification, according to her records.
“Betty Pat’s influence was broad and far-reaching,” Steve Johnson, a past president of the International Association for Identification, a forensic sciences organization, said by email. “I’m not sure I could say she was the best, but she was at the top of the discipline as far as knowledge and experience are concerned.”
Most of her facial reconstruction took place at her home studio in Norman, Oklahoma, which she called the SKULLpture Laboratory.
“I’m more amazed by the human skull every time I work with one,” she told People magazine in 1980, dismissing the notion that her work was grisly. “What the Creator has given us just can’t be improved on.”
She brought that fascination to each victim’s skull, starting with her first reconstruction, of a Native American man who had been killed in 1967 while hitchhiking. Her work led to a positive identification, and to confidence in her technique.
She also sculpted facial re-creations of nine of the 33 known victims of the 1970s serial killer John Wayne Gacy, although none has led to identifications. Two of the victims were identified in recent years through DNA.
“She often said they were her most frustrating challenge,” Karen T. Taylor, a forensic artist and protégé of Gatliff’s, said by phone.
Each facial reconstruction began with information, gleaned by forensic anthropologists or provided by detectives, about the gender, race, age, body type and other characteristics of the remains.
Gatliff created a type of infrastructure by gluing small plastic markers of varying sizes to the skull to match the depths of tissue at critical points around the face. Using the road map created by the markers, she covered the face in clay, smoothing it at first and then sandpapering it to mimic skin texture.
In 1987, when she demonstrated her technique to police officers and artists at a workshop, The Wall Street Journal reported that she told the group, “I guarantee after these four days you won’t look at a person’s face the same way again.”
If hair was found with the skeletal remains, she had more certainty about choosing a wig. She sometimes made informed anatomical guesses about a nose’s shape. She used prosthetic eyeballs and tried to produce a realistic gaze.
But, she admitted, she knew she could not be perfect.
“They never look exactly like the person,” she told The Oklahoman in 2002. “A skull will just tell you so much.”