I have to express my disquiet with the latest forensic reconstruction photo of “Delta Dawn”, the murdered toddler girl from 1982. They’ve given her longer hair and increased her femininity in general - including making her lips look fuller and more glossy and making her features look cuter/more adorable. The glossy look makes it look as though she’s wearing lipstick. She was a murder victim, not a contestant in an America’s Most Beautiful Baby pageant.
I admire the hell out of The Doe Network for their mission, but some of the reconstructions are not very good, and the re-reconstructions are suspect. What do they know about the body now that they didn’t know thirty years ago? And those four reconstructions all look different! Not just the faces, which will change after a couple of days in the water, but also the hair length.
Here’s another one: 31UFFL In this case she had only been in the water for about three hours. The old sketch looks very Florida, 1979. The new one may instead have been based on photos of the body but looks more modern, so also including those old photos might be of some help.
I’m not blaming the people from Doe. They are doing holy work and have only so much to work with. And they have to rely on help from the authorities, who may not be all that interested in dredging up ice-cold cases. There is one that I might look for again, but that’s a really depressing site. It was an older fellow whose body was found, IIRC, two or three decades after his death. The facial reconstruction was clay over bone and not top-notch work, so his own mother would not have been able to recognize him.
The interesting thing is that he was probably a local, the area was semi-rural with, at the time of his death, a small population, and inside his watch was a slip of paper from a local watch shop giving a receipt number and the date of its most recent cleaning. But by the time he was found the watch shop had closed and the owner was dead. Dead end, EXCEPT a quick Google showed that a fellow with the same unusual last name had a watch shop in a local strip mall. In my cursory look I could find nothing that showed if a cop had asked the owner if he still had any of his (I presume) father’s records, so, because I expect the worst from people, it was “obvious” to me that somebody didn’t want this guy identified. :rolleyes:
With “Delta Dawn” why the massive femininity upgrade in the latest forensic recon?
She wasn’t a pageant queen FFS
shrug Ask the artist.
ETA: That is to say, some “forensic reconstructors” are just people from the local junior college’s Art department and can’t resist adding more to a reconstruction than the evidence alone shows.