Using forensic anthropology as a tool to help bring closure to families

Bob Davis:

Patchwork is a podcast from the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. Patchwork offers a glimpse behind the scenes of the legal movement called the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. VAWA provides federal grants to help women at local, state, and national levels. Patchwork explains how VAWA awards are made, shows what happens after funds arrive in communities, and shares stories of help and hope. Patchwork brings you the voices of people on the front lines combating domestic and sexual violence. Our efforts to serve victims and hold offenders accountable create stories that knit us together and propel us forward. Welcome to Patchwork. Before we get started, we want you to know that in this episode we discuss gender-based violence. The content might not be suitable for all ages, and it might be upsetting for some listeners. If you or someone in your life is struggling with these issues, please know that there are caring and helpful people available right now to support you and help guide you to safety. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is (800) 799-7233. They can be found at thehotline.org. And the National Sexual Assault Hotline is (800) 656-HOPE or 800 656-4673. You can visit them at rainn.org, that’s R-A-I-N-N dot ORG.

David Hunt:

It's terrible in the sense that the work that I do often leads to the family finding out that their child has passed. It also gives the family some closure rather than always wondering what happened. It is something that I can do that I can return back my training to society and the public good. So people who are interested as archaeologists or as crime scene investigators, the training of archaeology is very necessary.

Bob Davis:

David Hunt is a physical and forensic anthropologist and archaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He specializes in mortuary analysis and the curation of skeletal remains and he's known for his expertise and cranial-metric analysis, which is the study of skull measurements. For more than 20 years, Dr. Hunt has voluntarily shared his skills, experience, and enthusiasm for teaching to support the work of one of DOJs most vital grantee organizations, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. You may have never heard of NCMEC, but it is the 24-hour nerve center near Washington, D.C., that works with law enforcement to try to bring home missing children. The center uses Amber alerts, state-of-the-art cyber investigative techniques, and synchronized efforts across all levels of law enforcement to rescue children. When a child is not rescued before it's too late, NCMEC helps bring closure to families and offenders to justice when a child has been murdered. Thousands of family members are searching for missing children today so I want to pause right here and ask that you go to the NCMEC website as soon as you can, to look at the photos of the missing because you can make a difference. Facial recognition by strangers is one of the primary tools that brings missing children home. At the Office on Violence Against Women, we are very proud to support NCMEC by raising awareness of their work. Today, I want to share with you a story about Dr. Hunt's work. He is a volunteer from a world renowned museum and his efforts help families across the country. One of the most challenging aspects of identifying the remains of a child is piecing together their forensic clues to identify the victim. Putting a face on skeletal remains is essential to identification. With limited resources, NCMEC relies on Dr. Hunt's voluntary efforts to perform advanced forensic analysis. He applies the science of anthropology to guide artists who then in turn, use their vision to put a face on the missing child. In this teamwork, Hunt has collaborated with NCMEC forensic artists on over 200 cases involving facial reconstruction and photographic superimposition. Dr. Hunt's expertise and dedication was instrumental when he assisted in providing an assessment on a child who had never been identified in Las Vegas. For two years, it was a mystery and in June, 1999, the child's facial reconstruction was finally created with Dr. Hunt's help. It was shown on the TV show "America's Most Wanted", and almost immediately someone called the show and explained that the sketch look like a picture of a child on a missing poster they had seen across the community. The tip moved the Las Vegas Metro Police to check the dental records and confirm the child's identity.

David Hunt:

That was the case of Michael Rainey was his name, the boy, the 10-year old child in Las Vegas. He had been misidentified earlier by the police because of the clothing, et cetera, as being a female. And so they had done a two-dimensional facial reconstruction, there in Las Vegas that made it as a female and so there was never a hit. So when I looked at the skull, I said the teeth just look too large and I measured a few of them and they fell out more into the male range than the female range. So we did it as a male, and I think it was within hours that it went up on the TV in the local area that he was identified. I've worked with the unit there since that time, helping them.

Bob Davis:

Well, let me ask you this. When you start one of these cases, there are some assumptions that have been made in the investigation and it sounds like you go in with a fresh eye and really just see what the bones tell you, is that right?

David Hunt:

I have always had a deal don't tell me anything when I come, let me, you know, hand it to me and say, “okay, what do you think?” Sometimes I'm asked to come in because they've already gotten some information so they asked me to come in to help guide them in positioning of the nose, or is it what asymmetry might be there, or if there's some other individualizing trait that can be seen in the bone that they can then add to that facial reconstruction to bring about a more individualized visage of what that person looks like. I should just say that I'm really one cog in the wheel of in that whole system, because they use age progressions using facial photographs of other children. They do morphing from the parents, photographs when they were of the age of that child. And then with that child's face then, you know, then, remake the photograph to age them so that what they'd look like later, their work is fascinating and also amazing in the sense that you have to be an artist to be able to make these faces look like human beings.

Bob Davis:

In another case, known as the South Gate Jane Doe, Dr. Hunt provided an assessment that included a range, ancestry, and facial features for an unidentified victim. Understanding the complexities of the case, he knew that additional information would help local law enforcement so he used the CT scanner at the Smithsonian to help identify the victim. Dr. Hunt, most people would not know there's a CT scanner in the Smithsonian.

David Hunt:

No, generally not. There are a few little signs, there's like a signage down there in the osteology section that shows Doug Owsley and Doug Ubelaker, who are both also forensic anthropologists and there is just a picture that's up next to some of the bones as you enter into the osteology hall. So there's a little segment there about forensic work but not really all that much more. And then in the there's a little suggestion of forensic work that's in the exhibit for the, for the Egyptian, for Egypt and the Egyptian mummies and the mummies, you know, have, show how you can tell age and sex from the skeleton and then the CT scanner. So they do get to see some of what's going on, but you're right. Two floors down walking around, you know, they also probably don't know that there's like 4.5 million dead mosquitoes on pins, up in the, you know, in the entomology section either, you know, you don't, you never really grasp the extent of what the collections are there at the museum. I don't know what the figure is, I think the Smithsonian says that it's, I'd have to look at, something like 24.6 million objects, or catalog records that are in the Smithsonian.

Bob Davis:

Some complex investigations are solved in part by forensic information about where the people lived before they died. Dr. Hunt can sometimes determine, through examination of human remains, where the person lived. One of the most high profile cases like this was the quadruple-murder in Bear Brook State Park, in Allenstown, New Hampshire. Dr. Hunt, how do bones tell you where somebody lived?

David Hunt:

Well, the biochemical materials that are in the bone give you evidence of minerals that were absorbed by the body. Any of the biomaterial, that biological material that might still be present in bone from the isotopic information there, you can get an idea of what things they were eating and the evidence that would show there are no more now in, in the ground waters and you know, how much limestone and granite and things like that were in the system that they were, they were ingesting. You can possibly get like some DNA information from, and that DNA information may give us evidence for well, certainly now, you know, you can get the sex chromosomes. So now telling the sex of an individual is more accurate by using, but in there are, but there are limitations to that in that we sometimes have to not be able to take samples due to either religious or cultural constraints. And so some of the old methods are still more often done first, and then the more advanced types, depending on whether we can get permissions to do so are then done or evaluated.

Bob Davis:

Families of missing children have obtained a sense of closure and killers have been brought to justice thanks to the voluntary efforts of Dr. Hunt. Since he started volunteering in 1997, he has given countless hours to help the team at NCMEC and they call him an invaluable asset. Share a little bit about what it's been like for you to volunteer your efforts in this way.

David Hunt:

Well, I, it is something that I can do that I can return back my training to the society and the public good. I don't want to say it's satisfaction because that sounds kind of egocentric. It's the fact that I know that I'm helping and that I know that I can contribute. But that's yeah, so I've been very happy with helping them. I've always looked forward to helping them. I can't, I can barely do stick figures. And so, you know, I know what I see, and I know what I want them to say, but they're the ones who make it, you know, until they're really though, you know, the heroes there. Now, it's terrible in the sense that the work that I do often leads to the family finding out that their child is, has passed away, you know, from, you know, a lot of times from traumatic experience. But it also gives the family some closure rather than always wondering what happened.

Bob Davis:

What would you like young people who are entering the science field to know as they learn more and become the future leaders in forensics?

David Hunt:

Well, I do believe that we are evolving very much into much more of the biochemistry-based analyses. Our methods that we used for the last century of looking at morphological characteristics, that's still important, that's still very important, but because you need to know the bones, you need to know what you're working with before you then add on the chemical analysis of that. And then the two of them can work hand-in-hand in your interpretations. But I think for a lot of students who are interested in forensics need to have a good chemistry background. Now, chemistry, no matter what, other than doing some soil analysis, can't tell you where somebody's buried and can't excavate them out. So people who are interested as archaeologists or as crime scene investigators, the training of archaeology is very necessary. So if you're going to be doing something like a, you know, a burial where you want to excavate the burial, a clandestine burial, you need to, as an archaeologist, you do it where once you've moved something, you never can put it back. So you've got to record everything that you do and everything that you come across before you go removing it. And that is really no different than a scene investigator, who, if you move something and you don't document where something is, it's no longer useful in court. So archaeologists needs to have those trainings. And if you want to do a medical or legal type of work like that, and you want to do it as a field investigator, then that is something that you should have training in. And we have tried for years and years and years to do more scientific-level layering of the tissues and locations of the bony material, a bony material as the basis for putting tissue back on and doing these in a scientific manner so that you have a quantitative, as well as a qualitative level. And it's never, nobody who does facial reconstructions ever thinks that you are going to get the face of the person that's going to look exactly like a picture of that person. If they do that's, you know, that's wonderful, but you never fully expect that to be what you're going to get. What you're really wanting to do is to make a visage of the face that may show some of those individualized traits that are there, you know, a rotated tooth, asymmetry where the nose is curved a little bit more, or it's got a hook in it, you know, so that it has a large bump on the, on it, or the forehead from evidence that there's been some injury that took place so they probably have a scar that's across their forehead or something like that, that you're looking for. Those are gonna be the triggers that if somebody is out there looking like Mr. Rainey, if somebody is out there looking for a person, our hope is that what those features that we show there will trigger a person to see that and go, and then ask somebody to investigate it. That's what we're hoping.

Bob Davis:

All right. Dr. Hunt, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us. This has been wonderful to talk to you and so grateful for all the work that you've been doing.

David Hunt:

Well thank you too.

Bob Davis:

Thank you for listening to patchwork. Please let us know what you would like to hear on a future episode, by sharing your questions with us. You can tweet us at @OVWjustice, send an email to patchwork@usdoj.gov, or give us a call at (202) 307-6026. If you like this podcast, please help us expand the conversation by sending this episode to someone you think may enjoy hearing what we shared. And if you would like to help us reach even more people, please take a minute to review this episode. Patchwork is made possible by help from everyone here at OVW, but Minh Ha and Portia Obeng work tirelessly to pull all of these pieces together here and on our website. Thanks for joining us. Thread by thread we offer insights through Patchwork.