He had also determined that this woman was African American, based on the color of her very dark skin. Of course, skin color can undergo rapid and dramatic changes after death, but this woman had other Negroid features as well. The pathologist had mentioned her black, coarse, and extremely curly body hair. And despite the fact that her face was no longer visible-the flesh had literally been cut away from the bone-the anthropologic analysis of her skull told us that she had once had wide-set eyes; a well-rounded or “bossed” forehead; and a wide flat nose. Until I finished applying the clay, I would have said “African American,” too.
But when my sculpture was done, something in the facial contours caught my eye. Somehow, the extreme flatness of the mid-face and the almost vertical shape of her front teeth and jaws made hers look different from the other African-American skulls I'd seen. Certainly, this woman wasn't White. But I couldn't quite believe she was a Black American, either.
What other choices were there? I e-mailed my concerns to Dr. Leslie Eisenberg, a consultant to the pathologist who had done the autopsy and one of the foremost anthropologists in the country. For a time, Leslie considered my speculation that the woman might be one of the native Hmong tribespeople from the mountains of Vietnam who had relocated to Wisconsin as a result of the Vietnam War. The Hmong have dark skin, too, and relatively flat facial features, but unlike this woman's, their hair is usually straight.
Maybe Indonesian, I suggested, and Leslie politely considered that possibility, too. Eventually, we both concluded that this woman was Black-but the unusual combination of features continued to bother me.
At least my reconstruction was done. I took another look at her innocent young face and wondered if we would ever find out who she was-and who had killed her. But my work wasn't done yet. I wanted my finished product to look as much like a person as possible. A forensic sculpture will never be as accurate as a sculptured portrait or “bust” that has been made from a photograph or taken from life. Because I have only the shape of the skull to guide me, any reconstruction I create will be an approximation at best, a caricature at worst: an artificial face with enough similarities to the victim that it might trigger recognition in someone, but far from a perfect portrait. So I wanted to give all possible help to the man or woman who might see my work, to increase the chance that he or she would recognize our victim.
I placed a long black wig on the sculpture and combed it carefully into place. Later, I'd try out two or three other wigs, taking photographs of each version. Meanwhile, I “dressed” my statue in a pink striped T-shirt, and for an extra touch of realism I dabbed fresh lipstick over the lips, just enough to add a little color and shine.
I'd created the sculpture at home, but I arranged to meet Joe and Liz at my office before work that Tuesday morning, exhausted but excited after my three-day working weekend. Liz, I knew, had been skeptical from the beginning about Joe bringing in an outsider-a Kentucky artist to solve a Wisconsin case. Like most law enforcement investigators, she was a bit territorial, especially about such a high-profile case-and I later learned that she'd worked several other cases in which facial reconstructions had proved futile. Though she had little faith in this effort, Joe was eager but reserved, his eyes continually wandering to Liz to check out her reactions.
“Come on back to my lab,” I said after the introductions were made. I pointed to my sculpture, sitting on the counter in the center of the room, and waited.
When they saw it, the expression on their faces didn't change and neither of them said a word. Each of them glanced quickly at me and then back at the model. Joe reached out to touch the hair, and Liz gently placed her hand on his wrist to stop him.
I was sure they hated it. Nervously, I broke the silence with a lengthy description of the digital photographs I had taken of my work, assuring them that the computer printouts minimized the little flaws and surface irregularities that showed up so glaringly in the clay. “You can see here-” I began, pointing to the pictures lined up on the counter beside the model. Liz shook her head and I fell silent again.
“And I've got these other wigs-” I began once more, reaching for them. This time Liz held up one palm for silence.
I searched desperately for my well-worn explanations of the limits of forensic sculpture. How it could never be portrait-quality-we just don't have the data for that. How, nevertheless, many people seem able to leap over the crude quality of a forensic image and jump to a flash of recognition, particularly when a loved one is involved. How often I had seen forensic images succeed-and, to be honest, how often I had seen them fail.
But to my utter surprise, the two of them began to smile and then to laugh.
“This is amazing,” Joe said softly.
“More than amazing,” Liz agreed. She turned to me. “I thought you'd do some kind of Gumby-like thing-I don't know, something that looked weird and unnatural. But this really looks like a human being. We might really find her with this.”
Three months later, nurse-practitioner Shari Goss saw the four photos of my facial reconstruction posted on the bulletin board of her neighborhood grocery store and burst into tears. “I know her,” she told the astonished grocer. She had recognized Mwivano Mwambashi Kupaza, a young exchange student from Tanzania who had been living in Madison, Wisconsin, for the past three years. Kupaza was the twenty-five-year-old cousin of forty-year-old Peter Kupaza, Goss's ex-husband. After seeing the poster, Goss called the police in her rural Wisconsin hometown of Wesby to give them the young woman's name.
Joe and Liz were then able to find a photograph of Mwivano, which resembled my reconstruction almost exactly. They went on to match the prints lifted from the remains they had found with fingerprints lifted from medical records that Mwivano had touched when she signed them. Finally, we had our positive ID.
The story that Joe and Liz eventually put together was heartbreaking. They believed that Peter had raped Mwivano, who became pregnant and then had an abortion. About two years later, he allegedly killed her and dismembered her body in his home, packing it in plastic bags and carrying it to the river.
Ironically, no one had ever filed a missing persons report on Mwivano Kupaza. Her friends and relatives in Tanzania believed she was still in the United States. Her U.S. community of friends and fellow students thought she had returned to Tanzania.
Peter Kupaza's trial was a dramatic event. Mwivano's and Peter's relatives flew in from Tanzania, sitting in the front row for every day of the trial. When Shari Goss testified against her ex-husband, she nearly broke into tears as the D.A. showed her several knives that the couple had once had in their kitchen. Prosecutors suggested that these were the very knives that had been used to dismember Mwivano's remains. On another day, prosecutors showed a slow-motion video superimposition comparing my clay reconstruction to Mwivano's photograph. There were audible gasps from the jury, and two of Mwivano's relatives began to cry.
Peter maintained his innocence throughout. A June 21, 2000, article by Jason Shepard in the Capital Times reported his testimony: