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FBI reconstructs face from skull
Wednesday, August 02, 2000 By Molly Ball, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Have you seen this woman?
Thanks to the FBI, police have a face to go with her bones. Now they need a name to go with the face.
The woman's skeletonized remains were found more than a year ago in the cellar of an abandoned house in Wilkinsburg. Based on her skull and some braided black hair, FBI scientists in Washington, D.C., constructed a graphic approximation of her face.
The remains led the Allegheny County coroner's office to conclude that the woman was black and 5 feet 7 inches or 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighed a slender 120 pounds and wore a size 7 1/2 shoe. Her age could have been anywhere from 18 to late 20s, Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht said at a news conference yesterday.
The skeleton's head was detached from the body, and duct tape was wrapped methodically around the neck. The cause of death was ruled homicide by strangulation.
But the homicide investigation can't proceed until the woman's name is known, said James Morton, assistant superintendent of Allegheny County Police.
"The first step in any investigation is identifying the victim," he said. "That's where it all starts."
Based on the remains, the coroner's office determined that the woman was killed six months to a year before her body was found. Christopher Neiser discovered the body on June 28, 1999, after he had purchased the house at 604 North Ave. and begun to renovate it. The house had been uninhabited for about a year.
The body was at the bottom of the cellar steps behind the house, covered with plywood and debris. Some soft tissue and bits of clothing remained on the bones. There was no evidence of bone injury or of penetration wounds, Wecht said.
Some of the fingers were intact, enabling police to check local fingerprint records, but that search yielded no leads. The FBI is now checking fingerprints nationwide.
County and Wilkinsburg police followed several leads and checked 25 to 30 local missing persons reports to no avail, Wecht said. In three cases, dental records were checked, but none matched up.
That's when the skull was sent to Washington, D.C., where physical anthropologists and ana-tomists in the FBI laboratory used pegs, clay and computer imaging to reconstruct the woman's face based on her bone structure.
"How accurate [the picture] is remains to be seen, if and when this young woman is identified," Wecht said.
"The identity of this woman is going to enable the police to get closer to finding out who might have [killed her]. Until then, we don't know whose door to knock on, we don't know who to round up."
Wecht said police have considered the possibility that this woman's death is related to the unsolved deaths of several other young women over the past six years. The possibility hasn't been ruled out, but it seems unlikely, he said.
At least nine cases involving missing or dead women in their teens, 20s or 30s remain unsolved. In many cases, the women were prostitutes or illegal drug users. In several, the manner of death was strangulation or suffocation, but others were drowned or dismembered.
"Thus far we've been unable to establish the kind of even close to uniformity in modus operandi such as would suggest a serial killer," Wecht said. He noted that serial killers usually employ near-identical methods of killing in order to leave a personal "calling card."
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