an adolescent or young man, is compelling. The face, Miller says, is a re-creation of a skull found by a dog.
“The family dog . . . brought home the mandible [and] femur bones. [Police] put a GPS on the dog but never found where the dog was collecting the bones,” Miller says.
A forensic anthropologist analyzed the recovered bones and determined the individual both suffered from a severe deformity and used a wheelchair. Because the skull was thicker in one area and other conditions were present, the forensic anthropologist also believed the person was mentally retarded. The bust was created using the recovered mandible.
“Years later, a woman looking for a missing loved one went to the Garden of Missing Children [a now defunct Web site] and saw a photo of a missing boy,” Miller says. Because the boy’s photo reminded her of her own sister, who was retarded, it stuck in her mind.
At the NCMEC Web site she saw the bust of the boy created from the bones the dog had recovered. The woman thought the bust resembled the boy’s photo. She was right.
“It was a match. [The boy] was blind, and his father had burned to death in a house fire,” Miller says. Authorities now believe the boy’s death was the result of a “mercy killing.”
Instead of busts, which take much longer to craft, Miller now uses Photoshop to re-create human faces in NCMEC’s quest to match names to as many recovered remains as possible. And Miller is also able to turn a corpse into someone recognizable.
In the case of a young African American woman found murdered, Miller took a photograph of the dead woman’s face and erased the trauma, then added a spark of life to her face, computer-enhancing her eyes and expression. When the photo circulated, her sister stepped forward to identify her. The likeness Miller achieved is remarkable when viewed side by side with the woman’s driver’s license.
“What I love about doing this is we can be the link that solved it,” Miller says. “The family searching for its loved one will at last know what happened. Now they can stop living in a time capsule.”
Miller leans back in his chair and thinks for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is soft and low. “I show as best I can what that person looked like on the day he or she died. I re-create that face,” he says.
In addition to bringing the dead “back to life” in his art, Miller also moves time forward, as if thumbing the pages of a book ahead to another chapter, revealing the story midplot.
Age progression is where art meets science. By taking an individual and approximating what that person might look like two or ten or twenty years after last being photographed, forensic artists can arm both police and the public with a tool that has worked to bring victims back home and put on-the-run suspects behind bars. It is an art form that requires time, patience, and a particular set of tools.
When looking at a photo that has been age progressed, particularly of a child, it is often assumed that the artist “makes the person look older.” It is not quite that easy.
Good age progression relies on an artist having knowledge of how the human face changes as it grows older: what sags, what expands, and what differences are common in the course of human development. Between the ages two and seven, children experience rapid growth in the bottom two-thirds of their faces. Adult teeth grow in. Baby fat fades away, their noses lengthen, and their necks fill out. But some types of change depend on heredity. That’s why family photos prove essential.
“You have to get reference pictures of biological parents to age progress a missing child,” Miller says.
In one well-known case, Miller age progressed young Madeleine
McCann, the British four-year-old who was abducted on May 7, 2007, during a family holiday in Portugal. The progression, like all progressions, relied on photographs of the child’s parents.
Miller says, “I had a great picture
“The family dog . . . brought home the mandible [and] femur bones. [Police] put a GPS on the dog but never found where the dog was collecting the bones,” Miller says.
A forensic anthropologist analyzed the recovered bones and determined the individual both suffered from a severe deformity and used a wheelchair. Because the skull was thicker in one area and other conditions were present, the forensic anthropologist also believed the person was mentally retarded. The bust was created using the recovered mandible.
“Years later, a woman looking for a missing loved one went to the Garden of Missing Children [a now defunct Web site] and saw a photo of a missing boy,” Miller says. Because the boy’s photo reminded her of her own sister, who was retarded, it stuck in her mind.
At the NCMEC Web site she saw the bust of the boy created from the bones the dog had recovered. The woman thought the bust resembled the boy’s photo. She was right.
“It was a match. [The boy] was blind, and his father had burned to death in a house fire,” Miller says. Authorities now believe the boy’s death was the result of a “mercy killing.”
Instead of busts, which take much longer to craft, Miller now uses Photoshop to re-create human faces in NCMEC’s quest to match names to as many recovered remains as possible. And Miller is also able to turn a corpse into someone recognizable.
In the case of a young African American woman found murdered, Miller took a photograph of the dead woman’s face and erased the trauma, then added a spark of life to her face, computer-enhancing her eyes and expression. When the photo circulated, her sister stepped forward to identify her. The likeness Miller achieved is remarkable when viewed side by side with the woman’s driver’s license.
“What I love about doing this is we can be the link that solved it,” Miller says. “The family searching for its loved one will at last know what happened. Now they can stop living in a time capsule.”
Miller leans back in his chair and thinks for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is soft and low. “I show as best I can what that person looked like on the day he or she died. I re-create that face,” he says.
In addition to bringing the dead “back to life” in his art, Miller also moves time forward, as if thumbing the pages of a book ahead to another chapter, revealing the story midplot.
Age progression is where art meets science. By taking an individual and approximating what that person might look like two or ten or twenty years after last being photographed, forensic artists can arm both police and the public with a tool that has worked to bring victims back home and put on-the-run suspects behind bars. It is an art form that requires time, patience, and a particular set of tools.
When looking at a photo that has been age progressed, particularly of a child, it is often assumed that the artist “makes the person look older.” It is not quite that easy.
Good age progression relies on an artist having knowledge of how the human face changes as it grows older: what sags, what expands, and what differences are common in the course of human development. Between the ages two and seven, children experience rapid growth in the bottom two-thirds of their faces. Adult teeth grow in. Baby fat fades away, their noses lengthen, and their necks fill out. But some types of change depend on heredity. That’s why family photos prove essential.
“You have to get reference pictures of biological parents to age progress a missing child,” Miller says.
In one well-known case, Miller age progressed young Madeleine
McCann, the British four-year-old who was abducted on May 7, 2007, during a family holiday in Portugal. The progression, like all progressions, relied on photographs of the child’s parents.
Miller says, “I had a great picture
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