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Your article captioned "Dead Head" (TIME, Aug. 31), describing the reconstruction of the probable appearance of a murdered man from his mutilated head, recalled to my mind a case in which an almost identical technique was employed successfully to bring about the identification of a homicidal victim whose face had been burned with acid and fire beyond all recognition. This case happened in Vienna, and the victim was a young woman. Viennese police had a sculptor reconstruct the face of the woman as it probably looked in life. From a photograph of this reconstruction, the woman was identified as Katherina Fellner, an actress, and the crime was subsequently solved. A more complete description of this case is to be found in Henry Morton Robinson's Science Versus Crime, p. 224-225.
RAYMOND BLAIR Sioux Falls, S. Dak.
Sirs:
May an arthritic and otherwise broken-down writer of detective tales take issue with the statement under the heading of Art (TIME, Aug. 31, p. 22), that "as far as police authorities could remember, it was the first time that an attempt had been made to solve a murder by reconstructing the probable appearance of a victim with the aid of a sculptured bust"?
In April 1922, acting Captain Grant Williams of the New York City police department was imported to Rockland County, handed a skull and other bones found on Cheesecock Mountain and asked to solve the mystery of its presence there. Sterilizing the skull, he placed it on an artificial neck made out of a curtain pole shaved down to fit the opening of the spinal column. Inside the skull on either side of the pole, he wedged two radio tubes to hold the head steady. The other end of the pole he fitted in a stand made of a soap box.
Greasing his fingers, Williams then coated the skull with modeling clay. He spread it thinly, following the contour of the bone evenly. Gradually he applied other layers, feeling his own jowls & forehead for guidance. The length of the nose he determined by measuring the distance between the bridge and the roots of the upper teeth: its contour by following the curve of the nasal bone. To get the fullness of the cheeks he held a pencil from the cheekbone down to the jawbone and allowed a little for normal rounding. He used the same instrument to determine the set of the eyes, holding it slantwise from the eye socket to the cheekbone. (If you do this to yourself, you will find it leaves just enough room for the eyelashes to brush against the pencil.)
The brows he determined by beginning at the inside corner of the eyesocket and following around the upper edge of the bone; the fullness of the lips by the protrusions and recessions of the upper and lower teeth. And so on. . . .
Until, 56 hours later, when he had dipped the flesh-colored clay in wax, inserted glass eyes and dressed the victim's original hair, which providentially had been recovered near the skull, he had before him the snub-nosed, sullen face of a temperamental Irish girl.
The rebuilt corpse was subsequently identified as Lillian White, an inmate of Letchworth. The identification was upheld by Justice Arthur S. Tompkins of the New York Supreme Court; and her murderer, Joseph Blunt, was subsequently caught in Maine.