Who helps identify Sacramento’s John and Jane Does? Meet the coroner’s forensic sketch artist

Barbara Anderson’s muses are skeletal remains and fragments of soft tissue.

Since becoming the Sacramento Police Department’s first forensic sketch artist, she has drawn at least a thousand sketches of the anonymous, both alive and dead, in the past three decades.

The Sacramento County Coroner’s Office currently has 67 active “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” cases dating back to 1975, according to the coroner’s website. Seventeen of those cases have accompanying sketches while the rest only include descriptions with distinguishing features or personal effects like the victim was “wearing a shell type necklace.”

Eight of the cases are classified as children. Some of them have been assigned an approximate age. Some have been left without a best guess; their approximate age is listed as “unknown.”

Since 2006, 16 cases have been identified, mostly by DNA, according to Sacramento County Coroner Kimberly Gin. The last case that Anderson helped identify was in 2016 – of a man who was unnamed for more than 36 years.

“The hardest part of the job is waiting,” Anderson said.

More often than not, the bodies of people who are found and have not been identified, including the ones that Anderson sketches, can remain unnamed in the morgue for anywhere from 10 to 20 years.

Once the Coroner’s Office feels that all leads have been exhausted on a particular case, the body usually ends up getting buried at a cemetery, according to Gin.

Anderson’s interest in forensic art came at a young age. She’s from a family of artists and had earned a degree in criminal justice from Sacramento State.

She trained at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for three weeks, where she was taught how to create a face based on witness descriptions and draw faces on skulls. Drawing live suspects involves a very different process from sketching the dead, Anderson said.

Anderson also attended classes on advanced facial recognition techniques and trained at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to learn how to age faces from a child to an adult.

“I enjoy the challenge, and if I can help in any way, count me in,” she said.

The sketching process

Before Anderson gets the call to make the drawing, the police department usually starts by running through their databases and DNA tests to try and identify the discovered body. When nothing comes up, they’ll turn to her.

The process of creating the sketch is a team effort, Anderson said. Sketch artists will work with other experts, like forensic anthropologists and entomologists, to help determine the age of the body and when the person died.

All the information comes from the physical remains, such as the size tag on the clothing or any jewelry.

Anderson will also make note of any evidence of the person’s habits that she could gather from the remains. For example, if there’s erosion on a tooth, it may suggest that the person had a nervous habit of biting their nails or chewing on a toothpick, which could be a characteristic that helps identify them.

These features end up in the case description on the website as well.

Closure for families

Anderson’s sketch helped identify the body of a man who was found in a homemade shelter in Sacramento in 2006. This was the first case to be solved as a result of the coroner’s website featuring Sacramento’s unidentified dead. The website had been established three months prior to the discovery of the person’s identity.

Anderson had created a sketch from the skull of the decomposed body that was found in 2003 and passed the sketch over to the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.

Detective Pat Keller from the Cold Case Homicide Unit of the Sacramento Police Department came across the sketch online, according to a Sacramento Bee article from 2006. He recognized the drawing as being Leon Danker, an unhoused man he had been looking to question in a homicide case. Keller contacted the family in Arizona, and DNA confirmed the match.

Danker was originally from Iowa, and it was unclear when or how he had arrived to Sacramento. He had been a key witness in a 1990 trial of an unhoused man convicted of murdering his son in Sacramento, where he had testified that he had lived for four years at a homeless campsite near the crime scene.

He was 52 when he died. Though his mother had died a few months before her son, Anderson’s sketch helped Danker’s remaining family find closure.

“I hadn’t known what he was like for 30-plus years. I just hope he had a decent life,” said Danker’s brother, Quentin, in the Bee article.

The evolution of forensic art

When Anderson first started out, forensic artists used Identi-Kits to help recreate faces. They were plastic overlays with face parts on them that would be used to build a face.

Robin Burcell, a now-retired forensic sketch artist from Lodi, said they used to call them “Mr. Potato Head kits.”

Computer programs, like Composite Sketch, quickly replaced the Identi-Kits. Now, sketch artists can use tablets and styluses to create their sketches.

With newer technology, some of the sketch work ends up looking more like photographs than drawings. Some companies are even able to build a face based on a DNA profile.

Burcell, however, finds that this can be problematic in trying to identify people. She said when people see a photo, it’s easier to dismiss it as someone you don’t know versus when looking at a sketch.

“It’s so realistic that it makes it a more concrete thought,” Burcell said.

Despite technological advances in forensics, the identification of a person relies heavily on the people looking for them. In the case of Danker and Joaquin Islas-Moreno, the man identified in 2016, their respective families had spent years searching for them.

“It takes somebody looking for their loved one,” Anderson said. “That’s the challenge.”