The Windsor Star from Windsor, Ontario, Canada • 96

someone didn't want him recognized." Someone did one helluva job. Before being shot, the victim had been badly burned, perhaps with a blowtorch. Local pathologists guessed he'd been in his early to middle 20s. A dentist surmised his teeth were in lousy shape and that what dental work he'd had was probably Canadian. It wasn't much to work with.

The classic Unidentified Human Remains case: young male, probably working class he'd been wearing a blue work shirt and jeans and probably not a local. "At least, not a local that anyone knew," says Graham. "Otherwise there'd be lots of hollering over whatever happened to soand-so." If it'd been a young girl, there'd have been more local clamor over the killing. But it looked very much like another falling out among thieves in a part of the province where criminals are known to hide out. After the initial burst of publicity, during which dozens of missing-persons leads were tracked down, the excitement abated.

Which is where Jamie Graham came in. At 32, he's slim, boyish, sweet-natured and exhaustingly persistent. "The chance of solving this one isn't all that good," he readily admits. "But I don't want the person who did this ever to relax. Let him know that someone's still working to put him away." Every now and then, Graham cajoled the local Alberta press into doing yet another feature on the nameless body in an unmarked grave.

In would come another flood of queries on missing young men roughly similar to the victim's description. Altogether the Mounties have considered 450 possibilities. Nothing. "We thought we were awful close a couple of times," Graham recalls. "But something always ruled against it.

The dental records didn't tally. Or maybe someone was just trying to get someone else in trouble. We even had a few confessions that didn't hold together." By late last year, even Graham had to admit he wasn't going anywhere. Then a Calgary cop told him about an article he'd read in a police gazette about a couple who could put together a reasonable facsimile of the face merely by studying the skull. Graham phoned Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist working for the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma.

"Bring the bones and come on down," said Snow. "I've never met a real Mountie. Let's give this a try." Graham had the remains dug up, cleaned up the skeleton and took it down, by commercial plane, in a neatly wrapped box under his arm. He found Snow in a laboratory in Stovall Museum at the University of Oklahoma. Snow, a droll, pear-shaped man of 52, is one of a small group of anthropologists who study human remains mainly from a historical viewpoint; they're not particularly interested in who killed whom.

But it wasn't long after he joined the Federal Aviation Administration in 1960, hired to conduct biomedical research into aviation safety, that a local cop came to him for some help with a skeleton he'd found. "Hey, you know about bones." said the cop. "Tell me who this belongs to?" Anthropologists don't take formal training in these kinds of things. But Snow took a stab at establishing age, sex, race, stature and physique. "And decided," he recalls, "that this sure was more fun than conducting stress tests in airplanes." It's lucky he was enthusiastic.

One cop told another, and before long they were bringing him their unsolved Unidentified Human Remains cases from all across the United States. In 1967 he decided to go one step better than just they could do with pension anytime after age 50, and now work full-time making somebodies out of nobodies. "At the moment," says Snow, pointing to a clutter of sealed boxes in his garage, "we're nine bodies behind." For any case, Snow likes all the skeletal bones he can get. At the minimum, he wants a skull and, preferably, a hipbone known as the pubic symphysis. That's the bone that changes in surface texture with advancing age.

Examining it, Snow can usually peg the victim's age within three to five years. He age, sex, race and such and teamed up guessed the Tofield skeleton at 35, with Betty Gatliff, a medical illustrator considerably older than Edmonton pawho also worked for the Federal Avia- thologists imagined it, but to be on the Employing careful calculations, pins were placed on the Tofield skull to indicate the thickness of flesh. Then clay was applied, glass eyes inserted, and the features formed according to the proportions of teeth, nose and eye sockets tion Administration. Together they start- ed producing facial reconstructions. The technique isn't precisely new.

It first popped up in Europe during the late 19th century. One of its first uses was in the 1880s, to track down the body of the composer J.S. Bach, who'd been buried in 1750 somewhere in a section of a Leipzig graveyard, though no one was sure exactly where in that section. So scholars exhumed several bodies before they found a skull that, when reconstructed with a face, resembled portraits of the old composer. Only then was he able to get a grave befitting a musical genius.

For much of the time since, the art has been in decline. But there's always been some call for it, however small, and when the call goes out nowadays it's usually to Snow and Gatliff. They both recently retired from their federal jobs, something right-handed (the bones of the dominant area are usually a few millimetres longer). Then he passes the skull and his basic profile over to Betty Gatliff. She goes to work with her clay.

As a medical illustrator, she knows the average thickness of the skin tissue in certain places at certain ages on the male and female face. A little more clay here, maybe a little less there. The mouth is about the width of the six top front teeth. The nose projects out about three times the length of the nasal spine. The ears are about the same length as the nose, even longer in older people.

The shape of the eyes follows certain predefined formulas, as do most of Gatliff's estimates. Rarely does she try anything too creative. "I might take a chance on the protrusion of the eyeballs." she says. "It's slightly more in younger people, slightly less in older. But mostly, if I don't know something for sure, I'll work with averages." So anything that can't be defined by the shape of the skull eyelids, hair, eyebrows, wrinkles gets a cautious rendering.

As a result, the finished clay model seems strangely without character. But that doesn't mean the finished product isn't strikingly close to the original. Considering that the law comes to Snow and Gatliff only as a last resort, after all other avenues of identification have been explored, they've got a respectable batting average. More than two thirds of the 60 skulls they've reconstructed have been identified, and to of those cases have been solved as a direct result of the reconstruction. They've been off the mark on a few after all, it's as much an art as it is a science, depending heavily on the experience of the reconstructionists but generally the team has been improving with every case.

"You learn something new every time out." says Gatliff, a tall, gangly woman who outfits herself in cowboy gear. "It's nothing you can pick up in books. It's just something you pick up as you go along." "We've had a few bull's-eyes," says Snow proudly. "Had one woman so bang on that her brother at first wouldn't believe a picture of the clay model wasn't an actual picture of his sister. It sure made us feel good." Ordinarily Gatliff charges $500 for her services, Snow $350 or more for his.

But for the Mounties, this time, it was gratis. "Nice young fella, that Jamie," says Snow. "I hope he scores on this one. He's certainly put in the time." Graharn brought back pictures of the reconstruction, determined to get as much publicity as possible for it outside of Alberta. "It's possible he's from out of the province," says Graham.

"Maybe he got whacked out in a drug deal or, considering the way he was tortured, a crime of passion. I don't know. But what I do know is that someone out there knows what happened. I want that someone to live in fear that someone else will pick up this picture and say, 'Hey! That looks like I wondered what became of "Till then, we don't close file 77-001-38, Unidentified Human safe side put it in a 26 to 40 age range. If you're too narrow in your estimates, says Snow, investigators tend to dismiss possibilities that should be checked out.

For the same reason, he says the unfortunate one is probably a native Indian. He says probably because of the shovel-shaped teeth. Although of Mongoloids have those teeth, the trait also pops' up in about of whites in North America. "I'm damn sure he's a native," says Snow, "but there's always that 1-in-20 chance he could be Caucasoid." Snow takes about 50 measurements on the skull, another 75 or so on the rest of the skeleton, then runs his statistics through his Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. It comes up with a list of probables on sex, age, race, height and weight, even whether the person was left-handed or i.