ON THE FAR side of the bone lab—opposite the single steel door, which is locked whenever the lab is unoccupied (by the living)—sits a small wooden table that looks as if it’s been teleported from a studio in the Art Department, complete with art supplies: clay, palette knives, even a striking bust or two, sculpted in soft, lustrous gray clay. The sculptures are the handiwork of Joanna Hughes, a talented artist who is, as far as I know, the only person in the United States with a degree in forensic art. She earned it at UT, creating the program herself by combining traditional art and sculpture classes with extensive study of anatomy and anthropology. Joanna’s rare but valuable talent—her career and her calling—is to restore the faces of the unknown dead, working only from bare skulls, raw clay, extensive knowledge, artist’s intuition, and tenacious faith in long-shot, late-in-the-game breakthroughs. Joanna puts faces on the dead in hopes of coaxing a fading memory of a long-gone visage up to the surface of someone’s consciousness.
In most cases, by the time an artist like Joanna starts layering clay on bone, years have passed since the final smile or tear or moan or plea. Not surprisingly, the odds are slim that an identification will ever result from an artist’s educated guess at the face that a skull once wore, years before. Those long odds made Joanna’s track record rather remarkable: Of the nine reconstructions she had done in the prior five years, three led people who saw photographs of the sculptures to come forward and say, “I know who that is.” Or rather, “I know who that was.”
The DNA report from GenQuest, which concluded that the DNA from the bones and teeth in Leoma Patterson’s grave did not match the DNA from two of Leoma’s daughters, had opened a can of worms that was frustrating but also fascinating. Instead of an old, closed case, we now had two baffling, open cases, and two maddening questions: Where was the real Leoma Patterson? And whose bones had we removed from that long mismarked grave? With luck and a skillful reconstruction—plus wide distribution of the reconstruction’s photograph in newspapers and on the TV news—Joanna might help us answer the second question.
For some people, forensic work is just a job. Joanna’s work arose from a mysterious calling—one that later came to look like destiny. Her story is astonishing, heartrending, and ultimately inspiring. She grew up in a small town in south Alabama, Monroeville, population 6,690. Monroeville’s main claim to fame thus far is that it’s the hometown of novelist Harper Lee, as well as the fictionalized setting of her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroeville was also the boyhood home of Lee’s friend Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood. With its tree-lined streets, columned antebellum houses, elegant 1903 courthouse, and quaint general store (“O.B. Finklea Store No. 2, Dealing in What You Want—Dry Goods, Shoes, Groceries, School Supplies, Drugs, Hardware, Fertilizer”), Monroeville could, at least in places, easily pass for the 1930s town that Harper Lee described in her novel: “an old town . . . a tired old town when I first knew it.” By the time Joanna came along, it was even older and more tired.
Joanna never knew her biological parents; as a baby, she was adopted by Tim and Nancy Jones. Tim was the quintessential small-town doctor. He worked long hours, treated wealthy and poor patients alike (well, not exactly alike, because he didn’t charge the poor ones as much), and held a place of both respect and affection in the community. His wife, Nancy, was a one-woman civic institution. She made home-cooked meals for new residents, delivered toys to their children, and baked bread for old folks. A deeply religious woman, she trusted in the transforming power of faith.
At age twelve, Joanna startled her parents by announcing, “Someday I want to put faces on skulls.” Looking back, she has no idea where she got such a notion; she only recalls that the vision was quite specific and crystal clear. What was less clear was how to turn it into reality, and into a paying job. So when it came time for college, she opted for something a bit (though perhaps only a bit) more practical: a degree in film. At age nineteen, after her first year of film school at Florida State, she landed a job as a production assistant on a Steven Segal film, Under Siege. It was her first taste of Hollywood, and it soured her on the idea. She was the only young woman on the set, surrounded by “a bunch of horny guys,” in her words. She completed her degree in film anyhow, but after graduating, she took a job as a secretary to earn a living and then began to do what she’d wanted to do in the first place. She enrolled in art and anthropology classes at UT, and she persuaded university officials to let her design a program custom-tailored to give her a bachelor’s degree in forensic art.
In the fall of 2000, Joanna began doing facial reconstructions for homicide investigators on a volunteer basis. She was finally pursuing her dream, but not for the money, because so far it was strictly pro bono. The following year, in a National Geographic documentary about the Body Farm, she was challenged to put her art to the acid test, before an audience of millions. The documentary producer—none other than Jon Jefferson—handed Joanna the bare skull of a man she had never seen and said, in effect, “Let’s see how good you are.” Jon knew what the dead man had looked like—he and his crew had spent two months filming the corpse’s decomposition—but Joanna didn’t. All she knew was that the man was elderly and of Greek ancestry.
Joanna labored for two weeks to reconstruct the dead man’s face. When she finally finished, Jon handed her a sealed envelope containing a large photo. Nervously she opened the envelope and slowly slid it out. Upon seeing the face in the picture—a face that looked remarkably like the clay reconstruction on the table in front of her—Joanna beamed and said just two words: “It’s him!”
It was impressive, yes, but it was only a demonstration. In the fall of 2002, Joanna got her first paying commissions to do reconstructions in forensic cases: the skulls of two murdered African American women, their decomposed bodies found together in the woods near Petersburg, Virginia, earlier that year. Two years after police and the Doe Network published the photos of Joanna’s reconstructions, the first of the two women was identified; in 2006, so was the second.
Joanna found putting faces on the dead to be intellectually and artistically satisfying, but not financially rewarding; each reconstruction took two weeks of concentrated effort, and she wasn’t being paid. She considered going back to film production. Then one morning her life took a shattering turn.
Joanna wasn’t the only child who had been adopted by Tim and Nancy Jones. When she was a toddler, her parents had adopted another baby, a boy they named Timothy Jason. Joanna took an instant dislike to Jason, her new brother. “I told them there was something wrong with him,” she recalls. “I told them to take him back and get a different one.” At some level, she had sensed something frightening in Jason, and over the next two decades her intuition would be borne out time and time again. Jason was an angry child, prone to violent outbursts—a source of bewilderment and sadness to parents who were kindhearted and gentle by nature. By his teens, Jason was using drugs and failing high school. He dropped out, though he later passed the GED (General Equivalency Diploma) test. He spent years drifting between short-lived jobs, drug-rehab clinics, and occasional stints in jail. Joanna was a frequent caller to the Monroeville police; her calls tended to go something like this: “Hey, this is Joanna; could you come to my parents’ house? Jason stole something again.” But Tim and Nancy Jones refused to give up on him, and kept trying to help him turn his life around.
They kept trying until January 29, 2004. Early that morning, as Dr. Jones was in his driveway, about to leave for his clinic, Jason bludgeoned his adoptive father to death with a steel pipe. Then he went inside and killed his mother as she lay in bed. Nancy Jones was bludgeoned so savagely, according to the Mobile Press-Register, that “parts of her jaw and teeth were found scattered across the room.” After the murders, Jason took money from Nancy’s purse, went out and bought crack cocaine, and returned to the house to smoke it. Then he set out in Nancy’
s car for a girlfriend’s house in north Alabama. The car and the trip were apparently the motive for Jason’s murderous rage: His parents had recently taken back an SUV they had loaned him, and they refused to let him borrow it for the trip north, because the trip would have violated the terms of his probation. So he retaliated by slaughtering them.
At his murder trial in Birmingham, Joanna testified for the prosecution about her brother’s chronic drug use and violent temper. She felt relief when he was convicted, and felt a grim sense of justice when he received the death sentence. She even felt icy satisfaction in September 2006 when Jason—on death row at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama—slashed his own neck with a makeshift blade and bled to death in his cell. In a final twist of fate, Joanna—Jason’s next of kin—was asked by the prison authorities what they should do with his body. Her answer stemmed partly from a desire to contribute to science and partly from an impulse for posthumous revenge. “Send him to the Body Farm,” she said, and they did.
The tragedy in her own family cemented Joanna’s commitment to a forensic career. Although she can’t bring back her parents, she can potentially help bring killers to justice, by restoring faces and identities to unknown murder victims—victims like 05-01, Not-Leoma, whose body was dumped in the woods by Norris Lake more than twenty-five years before.
JOANNA BEGAN THE reconstruction by simply looking at the skull, noticing its general shape and unique features. Two characteristics caught her trained eye right away, much as they had caught mine when I had first lifted the skull from the coffin: the high, wide bridge of the nose, and the broad, strong chin. Most women have sharp chins, but not this one.
Then came a time-consuming tedious step in the process: cutting tissue-depth markers and gluing them onto the skull, to guide her as she applied the clay and began to shape its contours. To understand the importance of this step, take a moment to do a simple experiment: Press the center of your forehead with a fingertip; there’s not much tissue between your finger and the frontal bone, is there? Now feel your cheekbones: There’s more flesh atop those, but still not a lot. Now drop down between your cheekbones and lower jaw: There’s a lot of flesh and muscle there, including the muscles you use to smile, and those you use to chew. The variations in soft-tissue thickness complicate the work of facial reconstruction artists. Fortunately, they have a large body of research—or perhaps I should say “many bodies of research”—to guide them.
Starting in the late 1800s, a series of German anatomists took careful measurements, from thousands of cadavers, of the thickness of tissue at numerous points on the head, especially the face. Their technique was simple but ingenious: They inserted a needle through a small cork, until the tip of the needle was just starting to emerge through the other side of the cork. Then they rested the cork on the skin of a cadaver’s face and pushed the needle farther, through the skin, until the needle hit bone at each of dozens of landmarks on the cadaver’s skull—landmarks with catchy names like “nasion” (where the nasal bone joins the skull), “pogonion” (the most anterior, or forward, point at the center of the chin), “bregma” (the top of the skull, where the frontal bone joins the two parietal bones), “ectomolare” (the point in the upper jaw where the second molar meets the bone), and “glabella” (the most forward point in the forehead, between the ridges above the eyes). After each insertion, they carefully withdrew the needle and measured how far the tip extended beyond the cork, which had stopped at the surface of the skin. Being Germans, the needle-wielding anatomists were meticulous and thorough, gathering data on men, women, and children of various ages and races. Their simple, ingenious measurement technique did have one built-in flaw: The slight bit of friction between the needle and the cork caused the cork to depress the skin slightly as the needle was inserted, so their measurements consistently understated the thickness of the tissue. Still, it was pioneering research, and its one shortcoming can now be avoided by measuring tissue thickness with magnetic resonance imaging, by scanning cadavers in MRI machines.
For 05-01, Joanna would use the tissue-depth data for adult women of European descent. Her first step would be to measure and cut tissue-depth markers from long, cylindrical pencil erasers, the type used in Click-It mechanical erasers by artists and architects. The markers ranged from a mere 2.75 millimeters long (just over a tenth of an inch)—for the thin tissue at the end of the nasal bone—to seventeen mm (two-thirds of an inch), for the occlusal line, the fleshy region where the upper and lower teeth meet. Next, she would glue these markers to seventeen landmarks on the skull. The process of cutting and gluing the markers would take hours, but without the markers, she’d be working blindly, with no way to tell how thick the clay was getting as she molded and shaped it atop the bone.
The traditional way of doing a forensic facial reconstruction—the clay way; Joanna’s way—is a tedious, exacting process. It’s the sort of task that seems like a prime candidate for computerizing. You might think it would be a simple matter to program a computer to add a face to the image of a skull; after all, isn’t it just a matter of adding so many millimeters of padding here, so many millimeters there, smoothing the transitions, tinting the surface—oh, and plugging in eyes, lips, and a nose? Well, it might be straightforward to program a computer to do those things, but apparently it’s devilishly difficult to program the computer to do it well—to breathe life into the image. Over the years, I had heard about, read about, and seen the results of various attempts to computerize facial reconstruction, and the images resulting from these attempts always looked to me like Claymation figures or lifeless masks. Science can provide the foundation for a good facial reconstruction, but—at least from what I’d seen so far—it takes art to bring it to life.
But I was willing to be persuaded otherwise. I’d heard about an ambitious new attempt to computerize facial reconstruction—this one by the FBI—and it seemed worth a shot. One of the Anthropology Department’s graduate students, Diana Moyers, was working as a visiting scientist at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. Diana’s project there was to test and help refine an experimental computer program called “ReFace”—facial-reconstruction software whose full name is Reality Enhanced Facial Approximation by Computational Estimation. (You can see why they shortened that to ReFace!) Developed for the FBI by GE Global Research, ReFace starts with skulls—three-dimensional CT scans of skulls, to be precise—and uses tissue-depth data and algorithms (fancy mathematical formulas) to do virtually, on a computer screen, what an artist like Joanna does with clay on a skull. Being a computer program, ReFace could work more objectively than Joanna; it could also work far faster, completing a 3-D rendering in a matter of hours rather than weeks. Such blazing speed gives ReFace great potential for helping identify victims found in mass graves, as in Iraq. If it had been available at the time, it also could have helped enormously in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when forensic teams struggled for months to identify hundreds of badly decomposed bodies. If computerized facial reconstructions of those storm victims could have been easily produced and widely distributed, the task of restoring names to Katrina’s dead might have moved forward far faster.
Jon and I contacted Diana and her FBI supervisor, Phil Williams, to ask for help. To our delight, they agreed to put ReFace to the challenge, even though the software was still in the experimental stage. All they needed was a CT scan of the skull. That was easy to arrange, since one of the anthropology graduate students, Megan Moore, had recently scanned every skeleton—more than six hundred—in the donated skeletal collection; one more skull was just a final drop in the bucket. Megan and Todd Malone, a CT technician in the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, ran skull 05-01 through the scanner, faceup, in a box that was packed with foam peanuts to hold it steady. Megan FedExed the scans to Quantico, where Diana and Phil Williams ran them through the experimental software.
It was wit
h high hopes, shortly after the scan, that I studied the computer screen showing the features ReFace had overlaid, with mathematical precision, atop the CT scan of Maybe-Leoma’s skull. Surely this image, I thought—the fruit of several years of collaboration by computer scientists, forensic artists, and anthropologists—would clearly settle the question of 05-01’s identity: Was she Leoma or was she Not-Leoma? Instead, the image merely amplified the question. The flesh-toned image on the screen—eyes closed, the features impassive—could have been a department-store mannequin, or a sphinx. There was nothing in the image, no matter how I rotated it in three dimensions, that said, “I am Leoma.” Nor was there anything that said, “I am not Leoma.” To borrow Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia, the masklike face on the screen was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Between the scan, the software, and the tissue-depth data that the software merged with the scan, it was all very sophisticated and high-tech. But it was still a damn puzzle, and the identity of the dead woman remained as elusive as ever.
I HAD TAKEN the skull to Joanna in December 2006, shortly before Christmas. An eternity later—in mid-January, actually, only three weeks later—she was ready to show me what she had done. It wasn’t quite finished, she said, but it was getting close.
When I walked into the bone lab and saw her handiwork, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Joanna’s reconstruction—based solely on the shape of the skull, the scientific data on tissue depth, and the information I had given her about the age and race of 05-01—bore an uncanny resemblance to Leoma’s daughter Barbara. It also looked strikingly like a photo I’d been given of Leoma Patterson herself, taken when Leoma was in her twenties—before her face puffed and sagged, as other, later photos showed it had. The more I compared the clay reconstruction with the photo of Leoma, the more remarkable the resemblance seemed—and the more troubling. What were the odds that two women, both in their fifties, would go missing in the same area of East Tennessee . . . and that they would look enough alike to be able to pass for sisters?