Three Oklahomans forensic pioneers

Oklahomans pioneered both the art and science of missing-persons investigations.

When human remains are found, investigators try to match the remains with the missing.

A forensic anthropologist drafts a physical biography of the deceased, trying to provide such characteristics as age, race, gender and height.

From there, a forensic artist attempts to put a face on the faceless. Using clay in place of muscle and skin, the artist reconstructs the dead.

And when missing-persons cases turn cold and weeks stretch into years, a forensic artist tries to show how that person might have aged — sketching what a child would look like as an adult, what an adult might look like after decades have passed.

Most major investigations in the United States in the last half-century have called on three Oklahomans who are pioneers in these fields.

Dr. Clyde Snow

Forensic anthropologist
Norman

Dr. Clyde Snow tells the stories of the dead.

Whether it be mass graves in war-torn countries, serial-killer investigations or anything in between, the stories always start the same — with skeletal remains.

Snow, one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists, said he works to create osteobiographies — biographies of people based on evidence seen in their skeletons.

"Preferably, we like to have a complete skeleton, which consists of around 200 bones and 30 or so teeth," Snow said. "We seldom wind up with that in a forensic contact. It is very seldom that a complete skeleton is recovered."

Depending upon the amount of the skeleton recovered, Snow works to determine characteristics such as the age at death, gender and ethnic background.

"We can determine stature if we have any of the bones of the arms and legs," he said. "Many other things show up on the bones right-handed, left-handed, old disease and injuries.

"In the living body, bone is a very dynamic tissue and responds to many kinds of stress — nutritional stress, mechanical stress of various kinds — so you may even see evidence of the sports or occupations the person engaged in."

Then Snow tries to determine how the person died. Once the osteobiography is complete, authorities compare it to a list of missing people.

For several decades, Snow has been a consultant to the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner's Office as well as the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office in Chicago.

His list of worldwide experiences is long. He testified at the genocide trial of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, presenting evidence of killings that he gathered in the 1990s when he and a team of scientists researched mass graves in Iraq's Kurdish region.

In Argentina, Snow helped exhume skeletons from clandestine graves where thousands of people were believed to have been buried in the late 1970s after being killed by the death squads of the military dictatorship.

During his work on the investigation of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, he saw a shift in how missing-persons cases were handled in the U.S.

Twenty-eight skeletons were found under Gacy's house in Chicago, and he also is believed to have killed several other people, Snow said.

In an effort to identify the victims, investigators asked Cook County authorities to provide a list of missing young men and teenagers matching the age range of the deceased.

"It took them three months, and they sent us a list of more than 14,000," Snow said. "In those days, a kid would go missing and come back 24 hours later, but the police never followed up.

"Thanks to the Gacy case, I think that was the first time that police departments all over the country started tightening up on their procedures and doing follow-up," he said. "If we were to ask for such a list now, it would take about 24 hours and have a few dozen names."

Betty Pat. Gatliff

Retired medical illustrator and instructor of forensic sculpture
Norman

Betty Pat. Gatliff acknowledges that she likely has more experience with facial reconstruction than anyone else in the world. But she began her groundbreaking career a little doubtfully.

Gatliff completed her first facial reconstruction in 1967 while working as a medical illustrator at the Federal Aviation Administration.

The skull of a young man had been found near El Reno the year before.

Snow, working as a consultant with the state Medical Examiner's Office, took the skull to her and said, "We need to put a face on this," Gatliff remembers.

Hesitant at first, Gatliff began by heeding Snow's directions about the characteristics of the dead man. As her guide, she relied on a text by Dr. Wilton Krogman — one of the founders of physical and forensic anthropology in the United States — to re-create the man's face out of clay.

"So I would read awhile and work awhile and read awhile and work awhile," Gatliff said. "Finally, I got a face on, and the young man was identified in a day or so. So I thought there must be something to this."

Now considered a legend in her field, Gatliff has completed 219 forensic sculptures. But identifying remains hasn't been the only use for her skills.

"A lot of museums have skulls, and they get to wondering, 'I wonder what this person looked like in their life on this Earth,' " she said.

So among Gatliff's other reconstructions are seven soldiers from the Custer battlefield and several mummies, including King Tut. In 1983, Gatliff showed the world what the "Boy King" might have looked like by sculpting Tutankhamen's likeness for Life magazine.

"There is no limit to what could be done with it, I suppose, but most of my work has been on homicides," she said. "When someone is identified and you finally see a picture, it is interesting to make comparisons and see how close you have come.

"There is always a likeness, because the skull predicts the face."

Now with more than 42 years of sculpture under her belt, Gatliff said her main interest is teaching — passing the torch to the next generation.

"I don't do very many cases anymore," she said. "It has to be a pretty special case to get me to do it, because there are other people who need the experience. I am 78 years old, so I am trying to wind down a little bit, but I do like to teach, and I keep teaching."

Harvey Pratt

OSBI forensic artist
Oklahoma City

There's a good chance that most people in the United States have seen a sketch by police forensic artist Harvey Pratt at one point or another.

Even a fugitive murderer reportedly felt unnerved to see his own likeness in one nationally publicized sketch.

After the 1981 slaying of businessman Roger Wheeler at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Pratt sketched the gunman based on witness descriptions. That drawing was featured on the first episode of "Unsolved Mysteries," Tulsa Police Sgt. Mike Huff said.

The man who eventually would be identified as Wheeler's killer, mob hit man John Martorano, saw the sketch when it aired on the popular television show.

"Years later, Martorano told me while I was interviewing him in a secret federal lockup location that he saw a striking resemblance to himself in the drawing, and it ruined his Hawaii vacation," Huff said.

Pratt began his law enforcement career in 1965 with the Midwest City Police Department, where he created his first witness-description drawing a year later. That first attempt in forensic art resulted in an arrest and conviction.

He joined the OSBI in 1972 and was a student of Gatliff's.

During his career, Pratt estimates that he has created about 8,000 witness- description drawings across the country. He also estimates that he has completed 500 to 600 soft-tissue postmortem drawings, 45 skeletal reconstructions and 100 skull tracings, all involving unidentified bodies.

"The majority are young women that are missing. They are just lost from our society," Pratt said. "They fell away from their families — or they were thrown away — and they end up being very transient, moving about, moving from one area to another, and when they left, nobody thought anything about it."

A few of the major national investigations he has worked on are the Green River, BTK and I-5 serial killings. He also was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.

In Oklahoma, in addition to drawing Wheeler's killer, Pratt worked on cases including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the slayings of three Girl Scouts at a campground near Locust Grove in 1977, and the murders of six people at an Oklahoma City Sirloin Stockade restaurant in 1978.

Pratt is credited with developing a new technique to identify the dead in the late 1980s. Using the soft-tissue postmortem drawing method, the forensic artist draws or paints on a photograph of an unidentified victim. The resulting image — with tissue damage or decomposition repaired — is more presentable when asking for the public's assistance in identification.

"Man, all of a sudden I was identifying bodies all over the country," Pratt said. "They were just inundating me with photographs, because no one was doing that."

As an American Indian, Pratt was raised to be respectful of the dead. He was reluctant to work with remains at first, but with the success he had in identifying skeletal remains and helping families find a certain level of closure, his concerns dissipated.

"I try to be very respectful of human remains and not be flippant about it," he said. "This is a person — a person who walked on this Earth — so I try to be very respectful of the remains and ask them for some help in identifying them so we can put them back in this Earth. I like to consider myself a relatively spiritual person, and I pray about it."

When someone is reported missing in Tulsa:

1. Police try to find the person at all of the places he or she frequents and talk to people the person knows.

2. Officers try to determine whether foul play is involved or whether the missing person’s physical or mental condition indicates a potential danger to his or her welfare.

3. A description of the missing person is broadcast over the police radio.

4. Police complete a report, and the case is entered over the National Crime Information Center computer system.

5. The missing-persons case is assigned to a detective.

6. Police conduct 60- and 90-day updates to verify that the person is still missing and that the case is still in the National Crime Information Center’s computer system.

Nicole Marshall 581-8459
nicole.marshall@tulsaworld.com

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