Two Identifications This Week

I spoke this week with Dr. Kathy Taylor, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office forensic anthropologist . She told me two cases I’d drawn for them resulted in identifications recently.

The first case was one I’d drawn back in 2001. I think it was the first reconstruction I did for KCME. The skeletal remains had been found in Jefferson County in 1975, but KCME did not get the case for many years. A Jefferson County cold case detective had recently revisited this case, and released the drawing I did to the media. They received a call from a woman in Alaska with a possible ID, which was confirmed through DNA. This set of images is the original sketch, and then a digital sketch I did some years later when my skills had evolved.

The second case was another cold case from 1989 in Seattle. The detective there had compared the sketch I did in 2005 to several booking photos and found it to be similar. All the booking photos showed the same female, but she had been arrested under different names each time. The detective searched nationwide for other arrests with these different names, and found the first one had been in California. The case was released to the media in that state with my sketch and the booking photos, and they received a call that culminated with another DNA match. This set of images shows three of the Seattle booking photos and my original sketch. Now that the victim is identified, Seattle PD can proceed with a homicide investigation.