SARASOTA, Fla. — A special workshop at Ringling College of Art and Design aims to help solve cold cases.
Several forensic artists created skull sculptures using profiles of missing people or unidentified remains in hopes someone might recognize the busts and help further the investigations.
"He's about 30 to 40 years old, he's a native American and he was found in 2011 in Cape Coral Florida," Autumn McHoul, a forensic art student, said.
The workshop attendees worked with replicas of real skulls from seven active cold cases to re-create the portrait sculptures.
"He was an Asian male between the ages of 18 to 45. A very vast age range. He was missing the bottom mandible so we had to construct that out of clay and just put it on there and he was found in Lee County, Florida in 2016," another student, Noah Shadowens, said.
The artists will eventually cover the bust with skin and hair. Their goal is to as closely as possible represent what the person at the center of the case looks or would have looked like.
"We built the basic muscle structure on top of the skull that everybody has and then we take average tissue markers and we average out the skin and muscle," Shadowens explained.
"Even through all of this, it's kind of an ambiguous face that we create. We usually have no information for skin tone, eye color, or hair color. There's no DNA involved in this workshop which is just bare bones and, no pun intended, working with the skull and building the face up," Joe Mullins, an instructor and forensic artist, said.
There are thousands of unidentified skulls currently in the custody of more than 2,000 medical examiners or coroner's offices in the U.S. Experts hope this is another tool they can use in their work if they record success with the project.
"As forensic artists, we are the last-ditch effort to help get these victims identified. So we're working through the parameters with the forensic anthropologist as they look at these remains, and give us the details," Mullins said.
"Coming into it doesn't feel like another assignment. It feels like a real-world thing that we're working on developing to help somebody else out," Shadowens added.
"How could somebody disappear like this without any trace? It's just my hope that this person will see the face and, you know, get some closure and find out where they went," McHoul said.
Once the workshop is concluded, the finished busts will be on display in the Goldstein Library at Ringling College of Art and Design.