The Man Who Brings the Faces of the Dead Back to Life

Hew Morrison is no ordinary portrait artist. He has never seen the faces of his subjects as they are all dead—in some cases, for thousands of years.

Morrison, a forensic artist from Inverness in Scotland, reconstructs the faces of the unknown dead. Some are based on ancient historical relics, while others are used to help identify missing persons in unsolved cold cases.

More recently, he worked on reconstructing the face of the first-ever pregnant Egyptian mummy to be discovered. The woman is believed to have died around 2,000 years ago while 28 weeks pregnant.

"I either work with CT scans or photographs of skulls," Morrison told Newsweek. "With facial reconstruction, it is the anatomy of a skull that does the talking, as the skull is the scaffolding of a face."

Morrison builds upon these images, using what little information exists about the subject and their background. "The process initially involves determining the age, sex and ancestry of the individual, then markers that correlate with these factors are placed at certain points of the skull surface.

"The muscles and soft tissues of the face are then added to the surface of the skull and sculpted to fit with the underlying bone," Morrison added.

In cases where DNA data is available, features such as hair and eye color can also be determined, he said. In some cases, historical records can also be used to shed a bit more light on how the individual may have appeared during their lifetime.

Morrison works with the International Cold Case Analysis Project and the U.K. missing persons' charity Locate International to reconstruct the faces of dead people who have remained unidentified by authorities.

One project Morrison collaborated on with Locate International involved a cold case from 2004, when a woman's body was found in a river at the foot of the Wembley Point tower in London. To this day, the woman's identity remains a mystery.

Morrison created a portrait of the woman as part of the charity's appeal to identify her, and since it was released, several witnesses have come forward with new information.

The BBC news outlet in England said that several people had told the charity that they saw the woman on the day of her death looking "distressed" in the lift of the Wembley Point tower.

Another project was the case of the mysteriously well-dressed man, known only as The Gentleman, whose body was pulled out of the North Sea near Germany's Heligoland archipelago in 1994.

The man was smartly dressed but had injuries on his head and body, and cast-iron weights tied around his waist in what appears to have been an effort to hide his body at the bottom of the sea.

Morrison's reconstruction was part of a renewed effort to discover who the missing gentleman was. Analysis of the dead man's bones found that he appeared to have spent most of his life in Australia, but his identity is still unknown.

Morrison also works with private clients on projects such as comparing suspect photos to CCTV footage and aiding private investigations in unsolved homicides and missing persons' cases.

While Morrison usually works with clients on commission, he occasionally comes across stories in the news that grab his attention. "If, at the time, I feel that this may be an interesting project to work on, due to the circumstances of the discovery or the location where they are found, then I will approach the other parties, usually archaeological companies," he said.

"One such case was the discovery of an early Bronze Age woman in a cist burial in a place called Achavanich in the north of Scotland. I am from Inverness in the north of Scotland, so this discovery really piqued my interest. I approached the archaeologist/researcher, and we worked on this project together."

After the original reconstruction, Morrison and his collaborators were able to run an ancient DNA analysis on the subject so that the image could be updated to more accurately represent the figure's face.

The analysis revealed that the woman, whom archaeologists have named Ava, was aged between 18 and 25 when she died and likely had brown eyes and black hair, which Morrison depicted in his reconstruction. She was also lactose-intolerant, although that cannot be seen in the face alone.

"As a whole, I have had a positive response to my work. In some of the live forensic cases that I have worked on, after the facial image has been released to the public, there have been positive leads in these cases," Morrison said.

"With regards to historical facial reconstructions, people have commented on the fact that the faces are very life-like and sometimes remind them of someone that they know. Being able to look at the faces of individuals from the past can give us a great opportunity to identify with our own ancient ancestors."

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