Therefore, in June 2016, Elizabeth Nelson faced a problem. Nelson, who was an investigator at the Spokane County, Washington, medical examiner's office at the time, was in the morgue looking at the body of a man who authorities had pulled from a backlog in the Spokane River. He appeared to have been dead for at least two weeks, and that period in the water had radically altered the contours of his face, lips, and eyes. He had been a tall, bald man with a long gray beard. He was not carrying his wallet and the clues to his identity were few.
"Even if he was a relative of yours, you wouldn't have recognized him," Nelson told me.
Nelson sees each unidentified body as both a practical and an existential problem. Without having his name, she could not inform the man's family of his death or return his remains, and it would be difficult for the police to investigate the case. But she also has to do with the issue of dignity. A name is the least that should accompany a dead person when they are buried.
So the investigator turned to Facebook and sent a message to the only person she thought could make the dead man look like he did when he was alive: Carl Koppelman, a fifty-something accountant who was living in El Segundo at the time. California, in a house in the suburbs where he lovingly cared for his sick mother. "Carl, this is Elizabeth from the Spokane Medical Examiner's Office," he wrote. She left certain things out: as always, she expected a quick result. As usual, she couldn't pay.
“Send me the photos,” Koppelman replied.
Koppelman is not a detective or a forensic anthropologist. He does not work for a government agency or at a university. He is technically a hobbyist, largely self-taught; he works alone and without pay, without further ado. However, he has built a reputation among detectives, medical examiners, and fellow detectives for his portraits of the dead. Unlike police sketches, Koppelman's portraits have soulful eyes and lively features. Whatever death has done to the people they represent, even if he reduced them to skeletons, he can make them appear alive. The pictures of him had already solved cases, and Nelson, who knew that his skills are "phenomenal", hoped that he would be able to work magic on him again.
But as he sat at his weathered oak desk and brought up the images on his monitor, Koppelman quickly realized that the drowned man's face would be one of the most difficult he had ever worked on. With his ability to quell fear and disgust after his years in this vocation, he studied the images the way a grandmaster analyzes a chessboard. What had been the plays of death and the river? How could he fight back?
Using software called Corel Photo-Paint, he smoothed the man's complexion, filled in his beard and slimmed down his cheeks and lips. The finished portrait depicted a man with a twinkle in his eye and a slight, brooding smile on his lips, in the cream T-shirt he was wearing when he was found, with a beautiful summer sky in the background.
Koppelman emailed the image to Nelson, who posted it on social media and sent it to local news outlets. Almost immediately, an employee at a local homeless shelter called. It seemed to her that she had recognized a man from her hostel; she also remembered his shirt. Nelson and his colleagues were able to get the man's medical file, compare it to the body found in the river, and confirm the man's identity. The dead man had a name, Donald Nyden, and he was 68 years old. The medical examiner's office notified Nyden's family in Virginia of the news; the police were able to investigate and found that no crime had been committed.
In online communities searching for the missing and the dead, Koppelman's efforts were cheered: “Rest in peace, Donald. And Carl, again, amazing job." But Carl, a tall, heavyset man with a reserved demeanor and a streak of perfectionism, could only see where he had gone wrong. "He had a pretty thin face, but I portrayed him with a slightly fuller face," he recalls. Koppelman took note of all the nuances he had yet to master and vowed to improve when it came to drowning victims in the future.
And there would be future victims, of all kinds, because the unnamed dead present an endless stream of tragedies for families and law enforcement in this country. Those victims haunt Koppelman, who enshrines the haunting details of each case in his prodigious memory: the bones and tattered clothing of a murder victim in 1980s Oklahoma; the inscription on the watch of an unidentified man in 2001. He has immersed himself in hundreds of cases, and with his artistic skills, aptitude with spreadsheets and obsessive investigative skills, he played a direct role in helping to unravel what least 13 cases.
Most of them are not like Donald Nyden's; they gnash for years and may never be resolved. However, Koppelman perseveres, because there are families who are still waiting and wondering. According to Koppelman, death is one thing, "but dealing with a missing person in the family is totally different." More than a decade of volunteer work taught her that the torment of never knowing what happened to a loved one is a kind of singular hell.
