Age Progression
Age Progression
Age Regression Answers an Old Question
Toddler to Teen to Twentysomething
The Technology Behind the Face
Just before Thanksgiving in 1971, a middle-aged accountant from Westfield, New Jersey, shot and killed his four children, his wife, and his mother. Then he turned on all the lights in the house, packed a suitcase, and slipped out the front door. Police unsuccessfully searched for this killer, John List, for eighteen years.
Nearly two decades after the killing spree, forensic artist Frank A. Bender created a sculpture of the murderous accountant, instinctively aging his artwork to look like what he thought List might look like in the present day. Bender’s three-dimensional reconstruction appeared on television, and it brought in a phone call that finally led police to List. He was living a new life under a new name with a new wife in Colorado, but he looked very much like Bender had predicted he would.
Forensic artists like Bender help police put names to faces. Their talents capture the looks of possible suspects for police to track down and question. They can also return faces to accident and murder victims to give police a place to start with identifying unknown bodies and providing answers in unsolved cases. Even when the police already know exactly who they are looking for, as in the case of John List, an artist’s talent can help the case by putting a new face to an old name. These are cases in which artists have a great deal of information to go on from the start, even pictures of the person they need to draw. The challenge is that the pictures are old ones. The artist is asked to age the face in the photographs in the hope of finding a person who has been avoiding police detection for years.
Finding Fugitives
The television show America’s Most Wanted first aired in 1988. Each week since its first episode, the show has featured criminals whom police across the country are trying to catch. In most of these cases, the mystery is not what the person did or to whom, but where the criminal is now. Forensic artists have a leading role in the success of America’s Most Wanted, which in the spring of 2008 led to the capture of the show’s one-thousandth featured
criminal. Part of the show’s success depends on broadcasting forensic artists’ depictions of what fugitives, who have been on the run for years, might look like now. The capture of John List was one of the show’s earliest success stories.
To provide the kind of updated images featured on America’s Most Wanted, forensic artists use a process called age progression. They add a few years, or even a few decades, to a face in a picture the police have on file. This makeover modernizes the person’s appearance into one that people living with or around the fugitive today might recognize. The long list of fugitives caught after being featured on America’s Most Wanted is evidence that age progression works.
Turning the Clock Forward
Age progression is different than composite sketching or facial reconstruction because the artist already knows exactly what the person looks like—or at least, what the person used to look like. Adding age-related changes, however, takes much the same skill and knowledge that is needed for drawing composite sketches or reconstructing decomposed faces. The artist must know the structure of the human face well in order to add the right kinds of changes to age a picture. Specifically, the artist needs to know how human faces grow, develop, and change over time, and also how they stay the same. Forensic artist Karen T. Taylor says that “expressions may contribute to a certain ‘look’ throughout life.” This quality, she says, “is what allows us to recognize childhood and adolescent friends as adults when we see them at class reunions.”32
Looking for a characteristic expression in existing photographs of a fugitive, therefore, is an important starting point for an artist who is doing an age progression. Photographs serve as an outline for the aging features the artist will add to a face. There is more to the process than making existing wrinkles look a little deeper and turning hair gray. The artist must also predict how the shape of the face itself is likely to change over time. Skin sags with age, but in what directions and to what
degree is something the artist must figure out in order to accurately age the face in the photo.
Another step in performing an age progression is looking at photographs of the fugitive’s close relatives, such as parents, grandparents, and siblings. The way people age is often inherited. Therefore, a close look at pictures of a brother or sister, a mom or a dad, or even a person’s grandparents will give the artist valuable clues about whether to add a double chin or take away half of the person’s hair.
An artist also needs a few details about the fugitive’s personality and lifestyle before starting an age progression. People’s personal habits, diet, and how well or how poorly they take care of themselves have a direct effect on the way their faces age with time. “You have to look at what lifestyle they’re into,” says Amber Weiss, a forensic artist for the DeKalb Police Department in Illinois. “Are they heavy into drugs? Do they spend a lot of time outside?”33 Cigarette smokers, habitual sunbathers, and lifelong overeaters may age somewhat differently, for example, than people with healthier habits. A forensic artist often interviews people who knew the fugitive before he or she disappeared to figure out what kind of lifestyle the person had. Physical signs of different health habits can be factored into an age progression.
All of this information can be helpful, but in the end, solid knowledge of how human faces age and change is the best tool an artist has. Artists are often called upon to create age progressions
Age Regression Answers an Old Question
The Ohio Historical Society has a picture of a woman it just cannot identify. Records about the woman’s portrait give her name, Mary Worthington Tiffin, the wife of the state’s first governor. But Mary Tiffin died in 1808, and the clothing the woman in the photograph is wearing was not in fashion until a decade or two later. The woman in the picture cannot be Mary Tiffin.
The Ohio Historical Society was so bothered by the mystery that it called in a forensic artist to perform an age regression, instead of an age progression. Using the same techniques artists use to predict how a person will age, the artist worked backwards to predict how the mystery woman would have looked as a child.
There was a family resemblance, in the age-regressed photo, to pictures of other Worthington children. The woman in the picture may have been a family member of the real Mary Worthington Tiffin, a relative who lived long enough to enjoy the ladies’ fashions she was wearing in the picture. As for her real name, the historical society may never know.
for subjects whose lifestyle and habits are not known and for missing children whose lifestyle and habits are still developing.
Toddler to Teen to Twentysomething
In June 1996 a four-year-old girl and her two-year-old sister were kidnapped from their father’s home in Houston, Texas. He did not see them again for eleven years. When the girls were finally found living with their mother in Costa Rica, it was because of an age-progressed photo posted in a Wal-Mart store. One of the girl’s classmates saw the picture and recognized it immediately. The sisters were finally reunited with their father because of a portrait drawn from a few childhood pictures that were more than a decade old.
This case is just one of many success stories of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organization whose age progressions have been used to help find more than 120,000 lost or kidnapped kids. Like America’s
Face Surgery for the Future
The same scientific principles that help forensic investigators predict what children will look like as teenagers or adults is also helping plastic surgeons. Children born with birth defects, such as cleft palate (a split in the bone that makes up the roof of the mouth), often need surgery to repair the places where the bones of their face are not growing normally.
Replacing bones of the face or adding to them can change the way a child will look as he grows. Plastic surgeons want to give the child a face that will grow with him, one that will still look natural when he is an adult. These surgeons often use the same kinds of age-progression techniques that police departments use to predict how a lost child will naturally change as he or she ages.
Surgeons must predict the growth lines of the child’s bones and leave enough room for the growth that will take place in the head and face.
Just like forensic age progressions, surgical age progressions are very personal, and they depend on accurate calculations. No two people age exactly the same way, so no two age progressions (or surgeries) can be exactly alike.
Most Wanted, the NCMEC gets pictures out to the public in the hope that someone will recognize the children and call police. The difference between the NCMEC and America’s Most Wanted is that the NCMEC is trying to find missing children, not criminals, perhaps making the quest to find them even more desperate. “In cases of missing and abducted children, the need for an ‘up-to-date’ look of the child is critical,”34 says Taylor.
It can be far trickier, however, for forensic artists to add years to faces of children than to faces of adults. For one thing,
an adult’s skull has already taken on the general shape it will hold throughout life, and age progression of adults is therefore focused mostly on changes to skin and hair. Very little about a young child’s face, however, will look the same after ten years have passed. The skull itself goes through tremendous changes as its bones grow and develop. The teeth fall out and new ones grow in. Skin gets thicker and may grow facial hair or develop pimples. Hair changes color. And next to nothing may be known about a child’s lifestyle, diet, or sun exposure when he or she has been missing a long time. “The image of a child who’s been missing for years is the more challenging task,” says author and forensic psychology professor Katherine Ramsland. “The artist has to rely on a number of factors to get it right.”35
Creating successful age progressions that solve cases keep forensic artists motivated in spite of the challenges. An artist who not only understands what kinds of changes a face will need but who can also combine this knowledge with artistic talent possesses a winning combination of skills for creating the kinds of recognizable images that brought the kidnapped Texas girls home.
Where to Begin
A lot of research goes into every successful age progression before the artist even sits down at the drawing board. A face, Taylor says, “should be carefully studied and compared with any available family photographs. There may actually be a resemblance of specific features to grandparents or other relatives that is stronger than resemblance to parents.”36 Particularly useful are photos of family members taken when these people were the same age as that to which the victim’s face needs to be progressed. “All of this involves training,”37 says Taylor.
The age-progression process itself begins by finding specific places called reference points on the face in the photograph. These points are used to draw triangles over the parts of the face that change over time. After the reference-point triangles have been drawn, the artist can experiment with the sides of certain triangles, lengthening or shortening them to determine which facial features need to grow and change, and in what proportions.
In children, for instance, the face gets wider and longer with age. The chin grows down and out. Eyes get narrower. The mouth grows wider and the bridge of the nose rises. The top half of the head also gets bigger. Changing the shapes of the various triangles laid over the picture is a quick way to determine how to make these important changes to the proportions of the face. How many or how few of these changes are made depends on what the artist knows about human biology, what she sees in family photos, and the target age she is aiming for. “Knowing the age of the child when the picture was taken,” says image analysis expert John C. Russ, “and using data that describe the relative rates of growth of different parts of the head and face . . . a picture can be adjusted to compensate for these changes and show the way the child’s face would be expected to appear at a different age.”38
Like all forensic art, deciding on a new face shape for an age progression requires a special mix of science and logic, artistic skill, and usually a bit of the artist’s gut feeling. In the end, the outline of the face the artist has created will hopefully be a close match to the shape of the person’s face now, a face that someone watching television or walking out of a department store might look up and suddenly recognize.
Fine Detail
Few people are able to escape showing certain signs of age. Gravity tugs at the corners of the mouth and the lids of the eyes. Faces also get used to the expressions their owners make throughout life—expressions that usually stay the same from childhood into old age. Frowners frown, grinners grin, and over the years, the lines from these expressions get carved into the skin. Changes—those that gravity makes to every face and those that are specific to one face alone—are what make it possible for forensic artists to add years to photos in ways that are recognizable, often strikingly so.
Forensic artists depend on their knowledge of how faces and facial muscles work and move to get an age progression right. All faces eventually wrinkle, but it is not enough to merely add wrinkles to an age-progressed face at random. They have to be the right wrinkles, in the right places, because very specific wrinkles and creases form after years of making a certain smile or frown or raising one eyebrow a certain way. The eyes, especially, are places where wrinkles must be accurate in an age-progressed image. “There is usually a strong retention
of a ‘look’ in the eye area as we grow,” says Taylor. “Childhood expressions may last a lifetime.”39 A few crows’ feet in the right places can help bring a child’s photo into the second or third decade of life.
More than Just Wrinkles
Forensic artists add other important changes to faces, too, depending on the age they are trying to target in their age progression. A chin that the artist believes would have drooped with time needs shadows beneath it. Cheeks may need shading to look less plump and more hollow. In elderly persons, there might be circles under the eyes, and eyebrows and eyelashes may have grown thin. Teenagers may get acne. Young men often have a hint of hair on their upper lip and along the jawline.
Teeth, too, take a lot of an artist’s time during an age progression. Teeth are one of the most important parts of any face. For a teenager, teeth may need to be drawn both with and without braces to provide examples of very different possible looks. If the artist is working from a photo of a six-year-old who is missing both front teeth, the age-progressed photo will be created with permanent front teeth in place. For an elderly person, teeth might have grown yellow, and a few might be missing. Whatever changes an artist makes, the teeth are one area of the finished face that must be right. “Lack of attention to the teeth can produce a very incorrect or even distorted look in a finished updated image,”40 says Taylor. This is perhaps the last structural change the artist will make to the face before giving the age progression its final touch: clothing and accessories.
The Fashion Makeover
As with any composite sketch or facial reconstruction, hair and clothing can make the difference between the success and failure of an age-progressed image. After all, a fugitive whose last good picture was taken in 1979 when he had long hair and a mustache will almost certainly have updated his look in the years since. A picture of a little boy in blue overalls, likewise, will require a much different outfit if anyone is to recognize a picture of him as a teen.
Adding or taking away a beard or mustache, cutting or coloring hair, putting makeup and jewelry on women and teens, and using accessories such as glasses and hats are crucial decisions in a successful forensic age progression. Providing several possible variations of a person’s look, based on different hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, is particularly important in the age progression of fugitives, people who generally do not wish to be found and may go to great lengths to make themselves look entirely different than they did in their “former” life. These people may change their look often, so the more different appearances and styles the artist can give to the drawing of the fugitive, the better the odds that someone will recognize one of the pictures.
In cases of kidnapped children, too, the success of an age progression may improve if the artist provides a few different possible versions. Although kids or teens who have been abducted may not realize that police and family are looking for them and may not be deliberately masking their appearance, predicting their “look” is challenging nevertheless. The most recent available photos of a missing child may have been taken when she was very young, long before she had a chance to develop her own sense of style. It is the artist’s job to guess how a teenager whom no one has seen in years would decide to wear her clothes and hair. As much as possible, artists try to make these determinations based on what they know about the individual from interviewing family members and friends.
The Technology Behind the Face
The need to generate multiple images quickly, especially showing the same basic face with multiple hairstyles, accessories, and types of clothing, has led to the use of computers. With a computer program, Taylor says, “it’s a simple matter to provide multiple alternate looks without having to draw the whole thing over again. It’s more efficient to do this with a computer.”41
However, computers cannot do the work alone. It is not true that computers can create accurate age progressions with little dependence on an artist’s time and skill. This false belief underestimates how difficult it is for an artist to predict the specific ways one person’s face will change over time. The facial reconstruction of John List, for example, did not involve a computer at all, just Frank A. Bender’s instinct about the kind of man List was and how that would predict the kind of older man he would turn out to be. Although a valuable tool, a computer is no match for the skill and instinct of the artist who operates it. Computers cannot replace the training in art, psychology, and biology that forensic artists use to do their job.
Today’s computer-generated images do, however, reflect an ever-advancing digital world that benefits the different fields of forensic art. In fact, the same technology that can speed up the process of age progression is revolutionizing the forensic use of photographic images of all kinds. If a photograph exists in a criminal case, no matter how poor its quality may be, modern technology can often make it useful for the forensic investigation.