Baffled NSW police have turned to an expert in facial technology to identify remains found in Belanglo in 2010.
She could be the girl you occasionally see at the corner shop buying milk, or a regular patron at your local pub. She might be a friend of a friend's sister, or someone who catches the same bus as you. Her hair is shoulder-length, with a side-swept fringe, and her eyes are large and wide-spaced. Hair and eye colour are indeterminate. She has a straight nose and mouth, broad cheeks. You've probably never paid much attention, but in this image (see Page 4), she's staring straight at you. Maybe she's trying to tell you something.
At least, it might seem that way if you didn't already know that the woman in the photo is, at this stage, nothing more than a facial approximation, created after extensive examination of a female skull found along with other human remains in Belanglo State Forest more than twoyears ago.
NSW detectives are at their wits' end, and, looking at the image, it's not hard to see why. Since finding the skeleton in Belanglo in August 2010, they have tried every avenue at their disposal to establish the victim's identity. All they have to go on is the frustrating age range based on dental x-rays - a female between 13 and 25years - and the even more frustrating length of time the body may have been in the area - anywhere between six months and 10years. The bones were found with a size10 girl's T-shirt, short-sleeved with the word ''Angelic'' printed across the front in pink text, along with a rose and a heart with angel wings; the girl-woman has since been dubbed ''Angel''.
Police are treating the death as suspicious, although they're not saying how she died, and have combed the country's missing persons database to eliminate the possibility that she might tie in with other records.
There are no matches for her DNA, and while an examination of her teeth indicates that, like most people in Australia, she has had some ''Western-style'' dental work done, there have been no matches to any dental records, here or overseas.
She's a Jane Doe - an unidentified female body of the type familiar to lovers of crime fiction, but relatively rare in Australia. But she's also, police reason, somebody's daughter, or sister, or girlfriend, friend or acquaintance. Someone, somewhere must know who she is.
And so, for the first time in the history of NSW forensics, detectives have decided to try facial approximation technology to determine what she looked like.
Last year, one year after the bones were discovered by trail bike riders in Belanglo, Dr Susan Hayes arrived at the Department of Forensic Medicine at Glebe Morgue in Sydney. A facial anthropologist based in Perth, she had been in Canberra teaching a workshop on facial approximation at the National Portrait Gallery as part of Science Week, when she got the call. After an extensive examination of the skull and hair, she produced a 12-page report and an image - an approximation - of what the female may have looked like.
Sitting in the Portrait Gallery cafe several months after completing the process, she's at pains to explain that the work of facial anthropologists is often a last resort for detective teams trying to identify human remains. After all, NSW homicide detectives had worked for a year with Angel before deciding to try another method.
''Facial approximation has a history of being 'last resort', which is possibly, I would say, one of the reasons why it's difficult for the field to advance,'' she says.
Hayes runs masterclasses and courses in the art and anatomy of facial approximation, both as a way of telling the public about her work, and keeping her hand in.
She began her career working with forensic sculptor Ronn Taylor at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.
''I started out doing clay, and Ronn had me working on the same individual for at least 12 months, which, in hindsight, I would do that to someone as well, because there's so much to learn from one skull,'' she says.
It was Taylor who recommended she move from clay modelling into two-dimensional imaging, which is what she was working with when she had the opportunity to recreate the face of a Maori woman who lived on New Zealand's South Island 600years ago.
''At that point, I wasn't very happy with 2D stuff - it still wasn't as accurate as I wanted it to be,'' she says. At the time, though, having left the New Zealand site, she only had access to CT-scan data, and discovered how much more information it contained than just a photograph or drawing.
But scans alone are not enough, she says. ''I decided to make the leap to being fully digital. I was dealing with a virtual skull, then I was going to be dealing with virtual anatomical build-up and virtual surface appearance. That was three or four years ago.
''With the Belanglo remains, it was a very close-to-perfect situation, because there was me, the remains, the photography, and everything happening.''
Approximating Angel's face took about six weeks and involved painstaking examination of the skull, and matching it with anthropometric measurements of a human body. She then applied the measurements to the image, attached virtual soft tissues and, finally, the surface of the face. ''It is taxing,'' she says. ''It's like any kind of research project - you can't just sit there and start at the beginning and finish at the end. It's applied research. I was applying the research to her remains. And the reason why it's called facial approximation is because that research involves verified averages of human facial variation. So studies have been done using CT scans where they have a large number of end scans, but, on average, this is the relationship. For example, nose width and soft tissues to hard tissues.''
In a recent lecture, she talked about the difference between her work and the type of anthropological reconstructions commonly seen in museums in relation to early primates and homo-sapiens. Faces are often contorted in what we perceive to be primitive, base emotions. She prefers to recreate faces with no expression, sticking to physical evidence, rather than looking for a narrative.
But, whether it is the pathos of the story attached to Angel, or a willingness of the viewer to read something into the image, there is undeniable emotion in those wide eyes and in the set of the mouth.
''You want to get as close to what her face appeared as when it was living, and therefore you want a living face, for sure,'' she says.
''We're adding averages of human facial variation onto a unique skull, and she has a unique shape to her skull, as unique as her face is, as unique as her living face. So, I'm aware as I'm applying these averages I am blurring, averaging her, so her uniqueness is getting a little lost. But I can't really do anything else. I can't invent something.''
With her archaeological images, such as the Adult European Male she uses as the prototype skull in her workshops, she tends to let the underlying anatomy shine through, to more clearly demonstrate that this is an anatomical illustration. This, she says, doesn't work for a forensic case like Angel's, where the idea is to jog people's memories with something realistic.
And, although little research has been done in Australia, where unidentified remains are a rarity, past experience would suggest that it's usually casual acquaintances - shopkeepers, friends of friends - or people who haven't seen the person for some time, such as schoolteachers, who are more likely to find a memory being nudged, than family or close friends.
Detectives Mark Newham and Tim Attwood, from the NSW homicide squad, suggested that the length of time the remains had been in Belanglo was likely to be on the lower end of the scale.
''We are making sure we cover a wider rather than narrower span, because we don't want to have anyone excluded ... we probably think more towards the lower end of that, the more recent years ... Based on the fact that the T-shirt was manufactured in the mid-2000s, it points to that more recent end of the spectrum, the date range that we're looking at.''
Hayes also preferred to err on the side of youth when approximating Angel's face, as she has found that people tend to remember friends and acquaintances as younger than they are.
''People also age in their faces differently, according to their lifestyle choices and the ageing process itself,'' she says. ''It depends on how the photographer takes the picture. And also an animated face tends to look younger than a still face.''
Hayes even consulted a hairdresser, one who had more than 30 years' experience, as to what kind of hairstyle a teenager or young woman with shoulder-length hair (found with the remains) was likely to have had during the time range.
And so, Angel - technically an illustrated version of a 12-page report, but to all intents and purposes the face of someone who was once alive and is now dead - is out there, waiting, while her remains are stored in a city morgue.
Detectives Newham is adamant that even the faintest glimmer of recognition could help set them on the right track.
''We've put a lot of work into it, and it is frustrating that we can't identify her,'' he says.
Anyone with any information can call Crimestoppers on 1800333000. All calls will be treated anonymously.
.gif)
