The content of Dark Areas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. It's commercials like this that started to make art fun for millions of children growing up.

It's.

The new Play-Doh, Dr. Drill, and Fill.

First, the.

Drilling must begin.

Then put.

The Play-Doh.

Filling.

In. Now his Play-Doh teeth are done. Dr. Dr. Drillin' Fill is fun.

You can make it with Play-Doh.

Okay, so maybe molding colorful blobs of clay was the extent of art for some of us. But maybe you took it a step further and learned from the who millions of people owe a lot of credit to for teaching us to love painting.

Hello, I'm Bob Ross, and I'd like to welcome you to the 29th Joy of Painting series. Let's start with a little two-inch brush and a touch of the listerins and we just load a little bit right into the bristles.

A lot of what makes a great artist is possessing a combination of natural talent, interest, and the ability to turn mundane things into beautiful creations. Famous artists have said they can see artwork in their mind before they ever pick up a brush or begin chiseling away at a hunk of stone. Vincent van Gogh is famously quoted as saying, I dream my painting and I paint my dream. That's definitely inspiring. But what if your art wasn't about dreams or landscapes? Or in the words of Bob Ross, fuzzy, friendly forests. What if it was of the dead, the wanted, or the missing, and it was really only meant for one thing, solving crimes. In this episode of Dark Areas, I'm sitting down with a forensic artist who specializes in giving identity to the dead, missing, and on the run. I just.

Have your basic clay tools that you would go and buy at a craft store.

The art supplies on Samantha Mulner's desk inside the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations headquarters in London, Ohio, are unimpressive.

I actually use marbles for their eyeballs, and I just draw the iris and the pupil on with markers.

Aside from her basic supplies, everything else in her office, though, makes you take a step back and definitely left a lasting mark in my memory.

He was my first one, and he had an underbite, which you can see, too, in his identification.

There are half a dozen busts of clay heads mounted to boards sitting on our shelves. Each face looks so real. It's like a person is actually gazing at me silently. All around this level of the building, poster boards and paper flyers cling to the walls and sides of cubicles. I make a mental note that all these hanging around just add to the faces staring back at me. It's overwhelming. Every one of the pictures is either someone who's gone missing, needs to be identified, or was identified, but has never seen their killer held responsible. The walls are just lines of lost people, literally. It's Samantha's job to give these individuals closure, starting with establishing their identity. In other words, giving them a face.

So if they find skeletal remains somewhere in the state of Ohio, then they would contact me, and I can help them do a clay reconstruction of what that person might have looked like. I can also do post-mortem images, which is somebody maybe who isn't completely skeletal. They can send me those photos of that person. I can do a post-mortem image, which is just a more tasteful image of the person rather than them being in a morgue. And then that way, it's a little less traumatizing to the family to see this image that's a little bit cleaned up. And then we can do identification that way.

When Samantha first got her job as a Criminal Intelligence Analyst for the Ohio Attorney General's office, she knew she wanted to work in law enforcement, but she didn't necessarily think the state agency would foster her artistic skills.

I actually have always done art. Everybody in my family is super artistic. My dad does chainsaw carvings. My mom was super crafty. And so I always painted and things like that. I never sculpted before this job. As a kid, I watched way too many crime shows. I was obsessed with bones. I wanted to be Angela Montenegro. That was my goal in life. Getting to do that at 23, 24 years old was awesome. That was my end game goal. And so to be able to come here and have that opportunity was really cool.

When the BCI hired her, the agency knew she had a natural gift for art, but at the time didn't have a way to utilize her skills. Not long after sending her to a forensic artist training conference, what Samantha was naturally good at became apparent, sculpting.

Facial reconstruction and different forensic art things were something that the agency couldn't offer. We found a training. She sent me to the training, and it was amazing. My very first test case I got to do, I got to see it on the last day what this person actually looked like, and it was really cool how close it came out, and it just made me really believe in this process.

Clay facial reconstructions have become Samantha's passion. Reconstructions are facial renderings of a murder victim or even suspect that are literally carved into a chunk of clay. The sculptures are usually photographed and often put on display to help law enforcement get the word out to the public that they need help identifying that person. Samantha comes into the picture with this process on day one. I do my.

Clay reconstructions. I build my own stands, I go to the hardware store, I bounce my stuff, I build my own stands. I've been able to build some really awesome partnerships with local hospitals and with the Ohio State University. So whenever I get a skull, I will take it to the hospital. They will do a CT scan of the skull, and then that will generate a 3D picture of that skull. And then I take it to Ohio State. They convert it from the CT scan to something that can be digitally printed, and they will just literally print it on a 3D printer. Then I can operate off of that plastic replica rather than the actual skull, which back in old times, they used to operate right directly on the skull. But then you are unable to preserve evidence. If there's further DNA testing that needs to be done, all of that is underneath a bunch of clay.

She can only start sculpting after she learns specific information from investigators.

If there's a lot of information found, maybe this person hasn't completely decomposed, and I can see, Oh, he had facial hair, or, Hair is recovered in general. Sometimes people are dumped and they're completely nude, so I don't have clothing to go upon. I have no idea how thin or heavy they were in their life. I also heavily rely on anthropologists to examine their remains and give me their best guess on race, ethnicity, age, sex, all of that.

Those kinds of details matter a lot because the faces of so many of the people she's trying to recreate literally have been erased.

Most of the cases I've worked on are homicide victims, and so they've had everything taken from them, even their name. And so to be able to work on these and to try to capture at least one feature correctly, so that way maybe their family member can recognize them, it's so important. Just in general, just to give them another shot to be identified. I would say for facial reconstruction, especially, one of the most difficult parts of it is when you don't have all of the remains, especially if somebody is completely skeletonized. You're going off of clues, but not everything in your skeletal structure is going to reflect your soft tissue features. What I have found is a lot of times when skeletal remains are located, they've been there for at least a year. And if they've been out in the elements, there's animal activity, and not all the bones are recovered. So one of the things that is often not recovered is the jawbone or the mandible. Without that bone, it makes recreating a face very difficult.

Difficult, but not impossible. If anthropologists can at least determine the race and gender of an unknown set of remains, even if there's pieces of the skull that are missing, Samantha can, with a certain degree of accuracy, make a clay bust that should reflect true-life characteristics about that person's face.

One thing I definitely notice is on most Caucasian skulls, we have a much more defined nasal ridge. So our nose bone is more defined, where if it's an African-American skull, it's softer. Same thing with an Asian skull, as their nose bone is much softer. Male skulls often have stronger jaws and larger skulls in general. It's not by much. So if you're not comparing it to other skulls, you don't really see it.

It should be said, though, that a forensic artist's estimates only go so far, and that's because people are not always just one ethnicity. That's the beauty of the world we live in. Societies are a melting pot of ethnicities. Pinpointing precise details in a clay reconstruction becomes very challenging when you consider so many variables could be at play.

You can definitely see the difference between male and female, and a lot of it's like brow ridge. Males usually have a stronger brow ridge. But I also worked this female that I was looking at her skull, and I was shocked it was a female. And even the anthropologist said the same thing because she had a really strong jawbone, and they all said the same exact thing that they were all really shocked by that. But when she was identified, I mean, she did. She had a strong jawbone. So the biggest misconception is just that people expect a facial reconstruction to look exactly like the person. I think they have to consider just how much information is there. Like I said, people expect it to be like a photograph, but we can't get too specific in a reconstruction because then it's going to pull... If somebody's like, oh, well, my sister's nose doesn't look like that, so I'm not going to report her as a potential match, where if we are a little less specific, it hopefully will draw in some more tips and leads.

One question that's always come up in my mind is how people's weight gain and loss can affect their features and the likelihood that someone would be able to recognize them. Samantha says, With clay reconstructions, she tries to use clues like their height and the size of any clothing found on the victim to help her estimate how heavy their face should look or not. For example, she says that if someone's skeleton indicates they're very short, but maybe an article of clothing around them is size large or extra large, then she may make their reconstruction representative of them being heavier set if there are other pieces of evidence that would support that. To start somewhere, though, Samantha begins every case the same way.

I start my clay reconstruction. I do the muscle structure, and then I put these average tissue depth markers that have been determined by the FBI, and I put those in, and I start to build the face. And even then, it starts to take shape. But then it's really just trying to capture the crinkles in your eyes and making sure that the nose doesn't just look like a glob of clay, but it really does look like somebody's nose. If they do have a broken nose, trying to capture that the best that I can. And I think the more that I've done reconstructions, the better I get at them, because I have learned, especially through identifications, what things I maybe did correctly, what things I could have done better. I just try, I think, every time to make things look as a little bit more realistic, but also try to keep in mind those things that I first examined when I looked at the skull, and really making sure that those are coming through, not putting distracting hair on the reconstruction if I don't know what it looks like. Just really taking into account the time period they were found, their age, male or female, and then really just trying to focus on bringing out if they have a strong jawbone, if they have just different features.

And trying to, like I said, you don't know everything that the soft tissue does, but if you can capture one or two features correctly, it might spark somebody's memory when they look at that photo.

And that's really the whole point, using art she's made to make a difference.

Facial reconstruction and forensic art is a sexy topic, so people are interested in it. People are going to read that story where they may not read just like, Oh, human remains are found, and may not really think about what the descriptors are in the paragraph that is written. It's not just words on a page saying, skeletal remains are found, but it's an image that people can connect to.

Do you feel like if somebody doesn't have a face to them that no one in the public really cares? Yeah, I think.

It's really easy to skip over a news story that's just like, Oh, human remains found. Is that interesting? Yes, but it gives you nothing to look at. What does the word Caucasian, Hispanic, what does that really mean? I mean, you see people every day of different ethnicities and stuff, but you don't really think about their features and what they look like. So you could give a description, and that's not going to mean much to you. But if you have a face to look at, it's a little bit more real. It's not just human remains that are found just like animal bones that are found. It's a human person that was murdered or maybe took their own life, or something happened to them. And then I think if you have an actual face to look at, it makes it more real. And I think it brings out more compassion, or empathy, or people want to actually help when they have a person to look at that was a victim.

What are those moments like for you, where you step back and you go, someone has to know this person?

There's one I worked on. He's still not solved. But he was found in an abandoned building. More than likely, he was homeless. Most of his teeth were missing, and he had never had dental work, but he also had several... It looked like his nose had been fractured multiple times. So that was one that when I did the reconstruction based upon the information that I had, had a very distinct skull. We had his jawbone. We had the top of the skull. We had everything. So that one has bummed me out that he hasn't been solved yet. But like I said, these are the coldest of the cold cases. His family may have never reported him missing. If he did live a homeless lifestyle, somebody may have never reported him missing. But that's one that really stuck with me that I was just looking at him like, man. And then I go through missing persons reports after I create this reconstruction, and I start looking for people that look similar. And of course, after we push these out, people will call in tips as well. And you really look at some of these spaces and you're like, wow, how is it not this person?

And then it sucks sometimes you get DNA back and it's not like they fit everything. And it's like, how many people are still missing from this time period that look just like this guy and don't match? It blows your mind.

In cases like that, where it seems like no matter how many leads feel promising but dead end-to-end. Not all hope is lost, at least not anymore. And that's because of two words, genetic genealogy.

Sean Grady has already been sentenced to death in the murders of two Ashland County women. Grate says he wants to talk to officials in a third county about a murder case there. We had a serial killer in Ashland, Ohio. A woman had been kidnapped by him, and he fell asleep. She stole his phone. She called 911, police rescued her. And when they got to the house, they found two other women deceased in the house. He ended up confessing to those homicides, and he confessed to two other women that he had murdered, as well as a fifth woman that was Jane Doe in Marion County.

Grace confessed to killing a woman more than 10 years ago. Her body found in 2007. But Grace says he didn't know her name.

She was found nude. There was no clothing around her, but she was skeletal. But she had really great teeth, and they estimated her between 15 and 22 years old. I had just started doing reconstructions at the time, and they asked if I would do a reconstruction on her. So I did. They showed him and he said it looks like her. He said that she sold magazines, but he couldn't really remember her name. He thought it was Dana or Diana. But he was really working with police to try to identify her. He saw her one day and he was mad and he said, Oh, I want to buy some magazines for you, but I forgot my wallet at home. So she jumped in the car with him and then he murdered her. Well, fast forward to, I think, it was 2016 is when he finally starts coming forth about all this like, Yes, I killed her. So we start working on this case. We do the reconstruction, we get all these tips in, and we still can't identify her. So then I start going through every single BMV record of a Dana or Diana that hadn't renewed her driver's license since about the time that he said that he had killed her.

I can't find her. He's like, I think she had an Ohio ID. I remember holding on to her ID for a while, which is spooky, but I couldn't find any in Ohio.

It was in that moment that Samantha remembered something she learned a long time ago in training, that just like paint and clay have lots of different base elements that tell you exactly what it's made of, so too does the human body.

One of the things we had done at my training was called isotope testing. And so every single set of remains that we were working on at this training down in Florida, we did isotope testing. The anthropologist did that, and they were able to tell you what geographic area you came from based upon your bones. And we know the things that you ate, the that you drank, it all exists in different weights or isotopes throughout the world. And so that's what we did for her. We sent her remains down to the University of South Florida. They did the isotope testing, and the results came back that she was from Southern United States, somewhere between Texas and Florida and one of the states in between. Then I start searching all the missing persons from down there and we start collecting DNA and still nobody is matching. And so we're just so frustrated. Then genealogy came out and we sent it to the DNA Doe Project and they were able to come up with a name.

That name was Dana Lowry, a young mother of two from Louisiana whose family had never reported her missing back in 2007.

She was in her lower 20s. She had two daughters. Both her parents were deceased before she went missing, so she was with a boyfriend. But I think things were rocky, and she decided to go and sell magazines, and she did. And she sold to the wrong person. And when she didn't come home, he thought maybe she just found a new boyfriend, found a new life, and never reported her missing. And her daughters grew up thinking that their mom abandoned her, but she was a victim to a serial killer. I worked with Marion County. We were able to get the DNA standards from his daughters down in Louisiana, which is where she was from, and make the match.

When authorities compared Dana's official Louisiana driver's license photo to the reconstruction Samantha had made prior to the genetic genealogy testing, the images were very, very similar. Dana's killer, Cian Grate, claimed to have murdered several women throughout Ohio. Multiple victims is a common claim that serial killers make that law enforcement can never fully accept without definitive proof.

The past tells us that people that are serial killers love to claim crimes even that aren't their own because it gives them more fame to their name. And so we're in this situation where everything else he's told us is the truth. But is he claiming this Jane Doe as well? And how truthful is he being? And then her name ended up being Dana Lowry. So that was amazing. He did remember her first name. She didn't have an Ohio ID, but everything else that he had said was spot on. She sold magazines and yeah, it was crazy.

The Dana Lowry case taught Samantha that her work as a forensic artist is that much more successful when coupled with the advancements in DNA technology. She's been able to uncover an entire new pool of victims or missing people through the use of genetic genealogy research. This new pool makes up a lot of those faces I saw lining the walls of the VCI.

There are thousands in the United States. And 9/11 could happen over and over and over, and it still wouldn't equal the amount of unidentified remains that we have in the United States. Thousands of people that are unidentified, thousands of people that have lost their name that have fallen victim to criminals who can't even be prosecuted because we don't know who they are, who their victims are. Forensic art used to be the last ditch effort to ID these people. Now we have genealogy, which is the last step essentially, until maybe even new technology comes out. But what I have been finding is I was doing these reconstructions, and then genealogy came out, and genealogy was finding these people that were never reported missing, that were estrange from their families. And we were able to make matches that never would have been matched before because so many people were never reported. Sometimes it's discouraging because it's just like, man. But when you do solve one of those unsolvable cases, it's amazing because it's a chance and it's hope, and it's hopefully hope for other law enforcement agencies.

If for some reason, genetic genealogy testing can't be done in a case, Samantha's next tool to take a case forward rests with the click of her computer mouse. The work she does with digital art can be the tipping point for a case that's been patiently waiting for new traction for years. So this case right here, this is a really big case in the true crime space.

So what's with this one? Brian Shafer has been missing for quite some time.

What happened to Brian Shafer?

He was.

An OSU student who disappeared back in 2006, never to be seen or heard from again.

He had gone out with, he was a medical student at Ohio State. He had gone out with some friends to a bar called The Uglie Tuna. They have surveillance footage of him walking into the bar or at least being outside of the bar and then never returning home. And he's never been found.

The case of Brian Shafer vanishing from Ohio State has been a mystery that dozens of true crime TV shows, podcasts, and articles have covered. It's a mind boggling, unsolved missing persons case that for the sake of this show, I won't go into all of my rabbit hole theories about. We could be here for hours. But Crime Junky podcast did a deep dive on Bryan Schaefer a few years back, and I highly recommend listening to that episode. Samantha has spent hours working on a digital age progression of what Bryan would look like now, 15 years after he was last seen on surveillance footage in OSU's Bar district. She showed me a picture of Bryan from 2006, as well as the most recent age progression image of him she made in Photoshop. I've got to say, seeing those two images side by side was pretty amazing. There's links to the photos on our website, darkarenas. Com, so definitely go take a look. Basically, with Bryan and all other age progressions Samantha does for missing persons cases, she studies a subject's family and life history as much as possible in order to accurately predict how they'll age.

The postmortem images and age progressions is all in Photoshop, so it's not like a Snapchat filter. I don't just put somebody's face in there and then the filter does it. Everybody ages a little differently and we're likely to age like our parents or aunts and uncles or siblings. So when somebody's been missing for 20 years and they have a sibling that's maybe five years older than them, I can use those photos to see how did their sibling age, how did their parents age. And then I'm taking into account those things when I am aging this person. Some people are going to get bags under their eyes. Some people won't. Genetics does definitely play a big part into that. So the more reference photos I have from the family, if they looked like their dad, or an aunt, or something like that, that definitely helps me to be more accurate. But definitely, you have to take into account their lifestyle. So are they using drugs for 20 years? They're going to age a little bit more quickly. So even if they are 50 years old is what they would they might look closer to 60 because they've lived this a lifestyle.

As you might have guessed, someone's ethnicity or race is an important factor when it comes to age progressing them. For example, Samantha has found after studying bone structures that Caucasians tend to age faster, while individuals of African-American or Asian-American descent age more slowly and retain youthful features longer. Pretty regularly, law enforcement will ask Samantha to update an age progression of a person that's still missing. Police do this to help weed out influxes of tips and information that come in from all over the country. And the Bryan Schaefer case is no exception.

With these missing persons, a lot of people will say, Oh, I saw this homeless person in Texas that looks just like Brian Shafer. One of the reasons they had requested an age progression is to see if we do age progress him, are we able to maybe... Did he just decide to leave and create a new life? And is he living somewhere else? And so that's part of the reason why they want to do the age progression.

Samantha doesn't just do age progressions on the Brian Shafers of the world, though. She digitally ages wanted fugitives, too.

I worked in escape fugitive. His name is Gordon Lambert, and he escaped in 1987. And we age progressed him. And it was based upon his family members' photos. He has several brothers. And so I just used their photos to age progress him. And it was so interesting. I worked with the Marshalls on this. So after we pushed out this age progression image, I sat down with one of the Marshalls, and we started going through Facebook posts, and we thought we found him. And we were so excited because he looked just like my age progression photo. And we're doing all this work to try to figure out who this person was. And we ended up finding out that he had another brother that we just didn't know about. And he looks just like this brother. So that was super interesting. Did you ever find Gordon Lambert? We did not find him yet. No. So Gordon.

Lambert escaped prison in 1987. Yes.

And he's still out there. And he's still out there.

And there's an image that you've.

Created that.

Should.

Look.

Like him a lot because you looked at his family members and said, this is my most accurate creation of what I think he would look like in 2021.

Right.

Samantha's age progression of Gordon Lamber is on our website. What's wild to me is that the digital rendering she made of him seems so spot on. It's altered just enough from his original mugshot from Oriant Correctional Institution to look like a man that's aged 34 years. I hope one day, the right person will see the age progression image and report him if he's still alive. According to the US Marshals, Gordon is wanted for aggravated robbery and assault for shooting at two police officers who were trying to arrest him back in the 1980s. Now, with him being on the run for decades, he's obviously wanted for escaping prison. Samantha says when it comes to age progressions, she rarely creates multiple versions of a person, even in dough cases that are cold. Multiple versions, meaning she could put facial hair on or off somebody or have that person in various stages of weight gain or weight loss. Unfortunately, because her caseload is so heavy, she can't create multiple or even duplicates of the same person. This is a standard practice for most forensic sketch artists, unless law enforcement requires them to do so otherwise. Samantha just tries her best to make the person appear as they were last reported or as their bone structure indicates they would look.

Another tactful and downright tricky thing Samantha does with forensic art is age regression, making an older person look way younger than they actually are. This approach is often used to catch child predators and criminals committing a variety of online crimes against children.

We can age regress the people that work on the task force and then use those photos to maybe say, Hey, I'm 13 years old, and lure somebody that's trying to take advantage of a 13-year-old that doesn't really exist, but is just a law enforcement officer. A 13-year-old girl is what we're aiming for, and we're starting with a 30-year-old investigator. We can put her hair in piggtails, and I can take her picture, and then I'm slowly going to take away age lines. I'm going to shrink down her features a little bit because we're all a little bit softer. And as you get older, your nasal ridge gets more defined, just different features. Our eyes sink in a little bit. You're going to get crow's feet when you smile and things like that. Those are all things I'm going to want to take away. And then also just trying to put her in a background that looks like maybe a playground or something like that rather than a cubicle. But that's just another cool tool that we can use to go after those people that are targeting children.

When you think about it, making a 30 or 40-year-old woman or man look like a child to hopefully lure a predator is dark stuff. I mean, I'm on board with it, but I'm not sure I could be the one staring at Photoshop for hours trying to make an adult look like an appealing young child for a predator to come after. Yeah, no, I'm good. But Samantha takes that part of the job and all other aspects very seriously. Even the darkest of the dark parts, like sculpting the face of a deceased person or murder victim who is so destroyed they barely have any identifying features left.

The hardest part of the job is the nature of these cases. I've worked a few serial killer cases now. I've worked people that were bound and thrown in a well. I've worked women that have been murdered. And just like the worst thing, things that make up your nightmares, like that's the reality of the cases that I'm working. And people think it's exciting oh, cool, you're working on a skull. That's so neat. But the reality is that's a real human who really went through something really terrible. Is it neat to be able to do this job? Is it neat to be able to use my art to help identify victims? For sure. But it's also very dark in the fact that I'm really working with real human remains. I'm taking a real human skull to the hospital to get a CT scan. It's cool to tell the story, and the job is fascinating, and all of that. But it's also really sad, the reality of these cases. When I've had identifications, I've literally broken down and cried because I'm excited that they're identified, but I'm so sad about what happened to this person. Excited that their family now knows, but their family also is faced with what really happened.

I would think that would be the hardest part, too, which feels strange because having closure and answers to someone's identity should feel rewarding. But I get it. There's a serious depression that comes when you have to process the horror of how a victim's life ended.

How do you tell a family like, Sorry, the only thing we have to return to you is the skull. We don't have anything else. That is, I would say, the darker side of it is just the reality of what has happened to these people.

I thought about that as I walked the face-filled halls of the BCI on our way out. The nagging question lingered. What happened to all of these people? Their endings may have come when they died or disappeared, but the endings of their stories are far from over. Their stories are like a bunch of micro dot paintings that are slowly being drawn. It may take a long time to see their full picture, but one day, a forensic artist, law enforcement, and genetic genealogy labs are going to reveal the complete canvas of their cases. I just hope that happens sooner rather than later. This episode of Dark Arenas was written and produced by Delia D'Ambrah, with writing assistant from executive producer, Ashley Floors. You can find pictures and source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Darkarenas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?