BEHIND THE CRIMES: How the OPP's forensic artist puts a face to a name

An obvious telltale is the impossible-to-ignore head, neatly perched on a desk next to a cupboard where a jar of glass eyes sits alongside slender bricks of professional-grade modelling clay.

Subdued lighting and music provide a backdrop for the creative process in a room that feels a world away from the button-down culture here at OPP general headquarters in Orillia.

Not everyone is necessarily a fan of the unorthodox atmosphere.

“Certain people don’t like my office — other ones don’t mind it,” Way, 46, says. “Policing is very uniform. This just gives me a feeling like I’m in a good space to do that kind of work.”

That work is forensic art, and the identification constable's unique skills are brought to bear in a variety of often tragic circumstances, most notably when police need help identifying remains.

His drawings and painstakingly rendered 3-D facial reconstructions literally put a face to the nameless in the hope the resulting image might trigger a flash of recognition in the public.

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• Dec 31, 1969
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• Dec 31, 1969
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Some of the cases are decades old.

“But they never close,” he says. “You just keep trying.”

Way’s unique relationship with the dead was forged in a previous career, when his work as a funeral director found him involved in duties ranging from body removal to restorations — the latter job requiring an especially skilful approach when the deceased was disfigured due to disease or trauma.

“I liked trying to make them look like that didn’t happen,” he said, recalling one woman who’d lost her upper palate and nose to cancer, leaving her face with a gaping hole.

Working from photos provided by the family, Way used reconstructive wax to sculpt the face into a presentable semblance of its former self.

“They loved it, and I loved it,” he says, while acknowledging that some may find the comment morbid, though he doesn’t intend it that way.

“Death is a weird thing,” he adds. “It’s the only thing — birth and death — that every human from every culture, every lifestyle, every socioeconomic background (experiences), no one escapes it.”

Death binds us all.

“There is no two ways about it,” he says.

Now in his sixth year with the OPP, the Tay Township man previously worked for Barrie Police Service in roles that included time as a crime scene investigator.

It was a nagging curiosity about the sketch artists who help law enforcement identify wanted suspects that led him to pester his superiors to send him to Washington D.C. for training by the FBI in this specialized field.

“Finally, someone said, ‘Yeah, go ahead’,” he says.

Composite drawings — sketches of suspects based on recollections of crime victims or witnesses — are his bread and butter and require travel to detachments across the province for interviews that inevitably rely on our imperfect powers of recall.

He does what he can to coax out of his subjects meaningful bits of description that could help bring a face into being — or at the very least an acceptable likeness of that face.

Though his work is artistic in its method, it should not be confused with art for the sake of expression, says Way, who prefers realism when drawing on his own time.

“It is purposeful, and the way they are drawn is purposeful,” he says. “It’s not haphazard; it’s not a lack of ability to make them look nicer — it’s a methodical decision-making about where I stop and what the picture looks like for a purpose.”

Aiming for a broad representation rather than a narrow one, just like a caricaturist captures a person’s essence by amplifying certain features, Way says there is a fine line between landing in the ballpark of what a person looked like and adding too much detail.

“I’m not getting all this stuff perfect, not even close. My goal is like seven-and-a-half or eight out of 10, because that tells me (the person providing the description is) actually analyzing.”

The process for 3-D facial reconstruction is considerably more involved.

In addition to being provided a case file with photos from the scene where the body was discovered, Way is given autopsy information and the anthropology report that includes an individual’s sex, age and ancestry.

“Those are the things that affect our outward appearance the most,” he says.

He’ll then analyze the skull to determine how its contours might inform the person’s outward features.

“There’s a ridge on the back of your skull,” he says as an example. “If it’s really strong — because of the way your muscles across the top of your head go — then you probably have strong lateral lines across your forehead.”

Age is also a consideration.

“If it’s a 20 year old, he’s probably not having droopy eyes.”

Technical observations are noted, and calculations made as he prepares for the reconstructive process that follows.

Rubber erasers cut to varying lengths are fixed to the skull to mark tissue depths for specific areas of the face, a process that takes into consideration a host of factors including ancestry, age and sex.

Over these, Way will lay strips of clay to replicate the numerous facial muscles that “give us our expression,” working the malleable material with his hands and sculpting tools.

At some point in the process, it happens — “there is a moment where it looks like somebody.”

Mounted on a custom-built stand at his desk is the skull of a man whose body had been submerged in the water for several years, the now-brittle bones requiring added care when handling.

A dowel runs through the base of the skull where the spinal column would be, an L-bracket resting against the roof of the mouth to keep it aloft.

“It’s a human; I don’t want to damage anything. I want to be as gentle and as proper with human remains as I can be.”

Nearby, seated on a high shelf, is the reconstructed skull of a man whose remains were pulled from Lake Erie in the early 1980s, a single bullet hole in the back of his head.

Regardless of the method Way employs to bring his subjects to life, so to speak, the end goal is always the same.

“It’s always about creating a face, whether I’m doing age progression, whether I’m doing 3-D reconstruction, whether I’m doing 2-D reconstruction.”

Age progression is the process of depicting a missing or wanted person as they might look years after disappearing.

Way may also be called on to work from an old morgue photo of a body that was decomposed or disfigured, creating a drawing with “enough of a likeness that someone might go, ‘I think that’s Aunt Sherry’.”

The process is science-based but it is also subjective, relying on the ability of the artist to create an image that jogs a memory and makes a connection, however seemingly tenuous that connection may initially seem.

“I don’t pretend it is anything more than it is. The way it works is likeness plus context equals identification — and that’s sometimes.”

He gives an example.

A body discovered in Sudbury was identified after a relative of the deceased man not only recognized the provided image, but remembered his uncle had been hitchhiking from Edmonton and planned to stop and visit friends in the northern Ontario community.

Likeness plus context equals identification.

“They checked DNA with the family out there and it was him.”

These are moments of success, of course, and yet, in his eyes, the work is just “one part of the machine.

“At the end of the day, I don’t care how we identify people — truly. Whether we identify them through my work and it’s classically perfect — they put it out on the six o’clock news and someone’s like, ‘I know who that is’ — that’s awesome.

“But if we do the drawing and the citizen or the victim feels like they are being heard, they are being listened to, the police are helping them and they end up (identifying) him through a confidential informant, a confession, through his parents, through my drawing, it doesn’t really matter to me. I just like knowing that the whole thing is working.”