I tried to keep the image of this woman's mutilated flesh out of my mind and concentrate on the skeletal details. Although it was unusual to be starting with a laminated paper skull rather than one made of human bone, everything else about this reconstruction was perfectly ordinary-just like the victim. As always, I began by cutting tissue markers-small sections of rubber that mark the depth of tissue in various parts of the victim's face. I make my markers from the standard pink erasers that go into mechanical pencils-long thin tubes of rubber that I buy at the office supply store and cut to size with an ordinary X-Acto knife.
The length and positioning of these markers is based on standard anthropological formulas that tell me how deep the flesh is likely to be on a person's cheeks, forehead, chin, and elsewhere, based on his or her sex, race, and estimated weight. Carefully following these formulas, I glue close to two dozen markers at specific points all over the skull, in the middle of forehead, the bridge of the nose, the point of the chin, and other key places. Then I connect them with clay, using the bone structure as my guide.
The most tedious part of the job comes right at the beginning. Cutting the markers to the right length and placing each one in its precise position is a painstaking task made all the more stressful by my awareness that the slightest mistake might compromise the accuracy of my final result. Some of those little rubber cylinders are no more than an eighth of an inch long, so as I worked on the Baraboo case that Labor Day weekend, I needed a sharp knife and a steady hand. Soon, however, I became absorbed in the soothing-if somewhat boring-mechanics of cutting the twenty-three markers, numbering each one of them with a sharp pencil, and laying them all out in numerical order. After about an hour, I was ready to go back to the skull.
I'd already mounted the laminated prototype on a converted camera tripod, which I'd fitted with a big eyebolt that fit up inside the spinal cord opening known as the foramen magnum. My tripod has a large ball joint at its base, which allows me to rotate and tilt the skull until it is perfectly level, a position known as the Frankfurt horizontal. In this position, the eye sockets appear to be aimed straight ahead and I can draw an imaginary level line from the bottom of the eye orbit to the ear hole known as the external auditory meatus. I grabbed the small carpenter's level that I use for this task and centered it over the bottom of the prototype's eye orbits.
Then I reached for the mandible, which the Milwaukee team had also made out of laminated paper, and fit it into sockets located just in front of the ears, the temporomandibular joint. I fiddled with the paper jaw until it fit perfectly, opening and closing in a smooth gliding motion so that the teeth of the upper and lower jaw fit together in normal occlusion. I didn't want my statue gritting her teeth-she'd be harder to recognize that way-so I put a small plastic strut betwen her upper and lower teeth for that tiny bit of separation that creates a more natural look. Then I adjusted the mandible until I had created a slight bit of distance between it and the skull, to mimic the normal separation created by the articular cartilage and a small fibrous disk called a meniscus. I knew that each tiny detail might make the difference between a face that someone might recognize and one that looked just slightly “off.”
If my Jane Doe had had unusual teeth, they might have helped someone recognize her, so I would have had her bare those striking teeth in a smile-a complicated procedure that would have required still more manipulation of the jaw, since when a person smiles, the jaw drops and pulls back a little. Then, when I added the clay, I'd have had to make the statue's nostrils flare a bit, crunch up the flesh under her eyes, and flatten the flesh across her upper teeth to almost nothing-subtle but crucial touches that could make a huge difference in the final product.
Luckily, I didn't have to do that here-this woman's mouth would be closed. The replica's teeth were perfectly shaped and placed, but they were coated with the same honey-brown resin that covered the rest of the skull, which would hardly give a natural look to the final result. Besides, there was nothing unusual about the woman's teeth, so once her mandible was seated correctly, I started gluing on the tissue markers.
Simply out of habit, I always start at the forehead, dipping the eraser into some all-purpose glue and holding it in place for a few minutes until the glue starts to set. It took me the rest of that afternoon to glue each marker onto the skull.
As the sun was beginning to set I started on the eyes. Each artist has his or her own method, but I tend to do the eyes as soon as possible, mainly because I don't like to see those empty sockets staring at me hour after hour after hour. It's also easier to adjust the eyes before I put on the clay.
Running my fingers lightly over the replica's eye sockets, I found the place where the palpable ligaments would be inserted-the tiny ligaments that anchor the corners of each eyelid. The insertion points are located by means of subtle bumps that I couldn't see, but that my fingertips found immediately. I marked each one with pen because that's where the corners of the eyelids would go, and I wanted to remain aware of that positioning through the rest of my work with the eyes.
If I'd been using an actual skull, I'd have put some cotton into the eye sockets to protect the fragile bones for further forensic analysis. On a replica, that wasn't an issue, but I did need to keep the eyes from falling backward into the sockets. Folded-up Kleenex worked quite nicely.
Then, using a small block of clay, I made a little pedestal for the first artificial eye, which I'd bought from a surgical supply house that makes eyes for people who need prosthetic implants. These false eyes look eerily realistic and come in all sorts of colors-for a Black woman, I had chosen the darkest brown available, with a slight yellow tinge to the surrounding “white” sclera. I stuck the eye onto its little clay pedestal and quickly mortared it into place with more strips of clay.
Soon both eyes were in and I began adjusting their position. I wanted my sculpture to have a perfect gaze-each eye centered precisely in its orbit, protruding just the right distance in relation to the surrounding bone. The eyes should be level, too, and they should look together in the same direction. One of my tricks is to shine a single bright desk lamp into the eyes and look at the reflection. In a perfect gaze, the light is reflected exactly the same way in both eyes, so I spent half an hour adjusting first one eye, then the other. My reward was a steady, earnest gaze resembling that of a living person.
I took a late dinner break and went back to apply the clay. Here was where my artistic intuition came into play. Although I am ultimately a scientist, I've learned over the years that simply following the mathematical formulas isn't enough. If my facial reconstruction is ever to come to life, I have to venture beyond the formula and allow my intuition to guide me to create all those individual little details that ultimately distinguish each face from every other. I have to make creative leaps-but leaps that are entirely supported by scientific data. It's this fusing of art and science that makes the difference between a scientifically correct but somehow vague face and a vivid, lively image that someone might actually recognize.
Luckily, my intuition had lots of data to work with. When Joe had brought me the skull, he'd also handed over several photographs taken at autopsy and a copy of the autopsy report. The pathologist had found that this young woman was basically healthy, with an average amount of well-distributed subcutaneous fat. Since her genitalia were still present, he'd known she was a female. He'd estimated her age based on the youthful condition of her internal organs-mature, but showing no age-related changes in the heart, reproductive organs, or arteries.