True crime: the forensic artist breathing life into the dead

At some point, she slipped her smart gold coloured watch on her wrist, drew her cosy cable knit sweater over her head, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and came face to face with her killer.

By the time she was found, her body had been bundled into a wheelie bin weighed down with bags of soap powder. Her hand was partly encased in concrete, the bin lid nailed down and chucked – like discarded trash - into the River Gaasp.

By all accounts, as off duty firefighter Jan Meijer dragged the bin he’d seen bobbing in the water to the shore, his stomach churned as he recognised the awful smell that oozed from it was the unmistakable stench of death.

Read More: The drowned Lanarkshire village and the people who simply refuse to say goodbye

Despite Dutch detectives’ efforts her identity has remained a perplexing mystery: no-one has claimed her, putting a face to her badly decomposed body never mind a name, eluded them.

From his desk at his home in Highland Perthshire, Dr Christopher Rynn, a freelance forensic artist, has now given her and the investigators determined to unpick her story, an incredible lifeline.

He has combined his medical artist’s skills and anatomical expertise in the human skull – how the soft tissues and muscles combine to create features, how the mouth shape changes depending on dental form – with scientific analysis and digital technology. Now, the woman in the bin finally has a face.

The soft black and white image of a young, partially Asian woman, dark hair framing delicate features, expressionless but deeply poignant, stares from a collection of images gathered by Interpol for a new campaign aimed at identifying 22 women.

All are believed murdered in Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands, none of them have ever been identified.

Most are cold cases; women who died ten, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Who they are, where they are from and why they died, is unknown.

In a new push to identify them, Interpol has published a ‘Black Notice’ for each woman, alerts for police eyes only. But details of each case, facial reconstruction images, pictures of clothes and grim details of where they found, their injuries, their jewellery and belongings, have been gathered into Operation Identify Me which hopes to trigger someone, somewhere to come forward.

The image of the ‘woman in the bin’ is particularly striking: published alongside rough sketches and cutting edge at the time but by today’s standards basic clay models of other victims’ faces, Dr Rynn’s lifelike digital image could be a photograph snapped yesterday.

Incredibly, after years of silence and just a fortnight after the campaign’s launch, police in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have received more than 200 tips, including potential names of victims in several cases.

At least 50 have been for the handful of Dutch cases gathered as part of the operation.

Creating the unknown woman’s face was a particularly personal experience for Dr Rynn, whose skill at reconstructing the skulls of the long dead spans harrowing police forensic cases to less traumatising work for museums and heritage sites keen to bring historic figures ‘back to life’.

For, as he sifted through graphic images of her remains and post mortem, he realised they had ‘met’ before.

“At first I didn’t know this case was part of a big Interpol campaign, just that it was a ‘cold case,” he recalls.

“I remember saying to them, ‘don’t tell me anything about it, just send me skull and postmortem photographs, a CT scan and photographs of the body after it had been pulled from the river.

“As I looked through them, I realised I recognised them from nearly 25 years ago when I was an anatomical sciences student in Manchester, and the case came to the department where I was studying.

“I remembered the department head showing me them, and asking if I had any thoughts about them.”

The images, as with every case he has worked on, including the most horrifying forensic work as he tried to identify perpetrators of dreadful child sex attacks that left him suffering from severe PTSD, were never forgotten.

“I was fresh out of my anatomy degree and doing medical art training and facial reconstruction,” he recalls. “We were trying to get more accurate and figure out where the gaps were so we could make better images.

“The fact that she had been found dumped in a wheelie bin stuck with me.”

Read More: Is the truth out there? The Scots who scan our skies for evidence of UFOs

His colleagues at the time created a clay model hoping it might help the investigation. He deliberately avoided looking at it, wary it might bias his fresh interpretation of the dead woman’s pitiful remains.

The photographs, understandably given the circumstances, offered few obvious clues to the woman’s facial features. Her skull, too, was badly damaged.

But using his specialist digital software and decades of knowledge, Dr Rynn gradually pieced her together, gradually layering muscle and soft tissue over bone, marrying indentions in the skull with where creases in the skin should be to create fine lines, and equations developed using tiny measurements to determine the shape of her nose, eyes and line of her mouth.

He explains that years of experience have given him an expert eye at identifying the tiniest of details on a skull that, when layered with tissue, flesh and muscle, create a face.

“There is very little artistic intervention,” he says.

“Birdwatchers can see a silhouette of a bird and instantly know what it is, because they are using the facial recognition bit of their brain,” he says. “I do the same with skulls. I’ve looked at hundreds of skulls and can tell what the person looked like and their race.”

“Her skull told me south east Asia, her body is found in Holland and I’m thinking she may have come from Indonesia,” he says. “Then the face started to appear.”

Eyebrows are determined by the shape of the brow, the lips dictated by the teeth and the nose the result of careful measurements of the nasal apertures.

The final image is not to be regarded as an exact of copy of how someone looked, he adds, instead as a portrait that would be at least recognisable to family and friends.

The woman in the bin is just one of many faces he has resurrected – in some cases adding software that makes it appear alive, with moving eyes and gentle smiles.

One was Lilias Adie, an 18th century ‘witch’ who died in prison before she could be burned for alleged crimes including having sex with the devil.

Her remains, buried under a large stone on the Fife coast, were exhumed in the 19th century, and images used by Dr Rynn to build her haunting image.

More recently, he has created incredibly realistic images of characters linked to Whithorn Abbey, including the graceful features of a medieval woman found buried in the grounds and larger-than-life 13th century Bishop Walter.

His current caseload is a mix of police work and further museum work, including the visualisation of an Ancient Egyptian Priestess, a Pictish Scot and four medieval skulls held by Perth Museum.

In a cemetery in central Amsterdam, meanwhile, a grave is marked by a simple plaque that reads “unidentified deceased".

The ‘woman in the bin’, is one of nine cases from the Netherlands in the new Operation Identify Me campaign,  further seven cases are from Belgium, and six from Germany.

Interpol says the new campaign has received a remarkable response.

Martin de Wit of the Dutch Police said: “We have heard from experts from all over the world spontaneously offering their help. It is heart- warming to see how people are massively sharing the call online and continue to do so.

“Every tip can make a difference for the next of kin of the victims,” he added.

“The women in the campaign deserve to get their names back, and the information we are receiving now gives us hope for several cases.”