Carl Koppelman draws dead people.
Specifically, Koppleman, a 53-year-old who lives near LA, makes reconstructions based on post-mortem photos of unidentified bodies, in the hopes that a drawing of a person’s face that’s closer to how they appeared in life will assist in identifying them, sometimes decades after their death.
“Everybody likes a good mystery,” Koppelman says. “I’ve been kind of always been intrigued by mysteries. Unsolved mysteries and crime stories and that sort of thing.”
He has plenty of material to work with. There are nearly 11,000 unidentified bodies listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database (known as “NamUs”), which represents just a quarter of the estimated 40,000 unidentified bodies believed to be on record at medical examiner and coroners’ offices across the country. For many of these bodies, only a few biographical details are available for identification; some were found years after death, which can make determining an age, year of death, or even gender impossible, let alone provide an image for the person’s relatives or loved ones to identify—if the person has relatives or loved ones looking for them in the first place.
The “lucky” bodies are found close enough to time of death and in good enough condition that a reconstruction of their face can be created and released to the public. The problem is, sometimes those reconstructions just aren’t very good. Resources are scant and some of these cases are decades old, with only the crudest of sketches, drawn by a clearly untrained hand, to go by. Sometimes, if enough time has gone by without an identification and the post-mortem photo isn’t too graphic, law enforcement will release those photos as well.
Koppelman came across one of those photos in 2009. It was a man who was found in an abandoned Philadelphia hotel in 2006, having bled to death from a cut on his foot.
“I looked at the post-mortem photo and I looked at the sketch and I said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t even look like the same person to me,'” Koppelman says.
Koppelman is an accountant by trade but had recently been laid off and was taking care of his ill mother in 2009. He’d become interested in amateur crime-solving websites around this time (he’s a moderator at WebSleuths, one of the largest of such communities), specifically the forums that try to match unidentified bodies to missing persons, not without some success. It’s easier than ever to do this with the internet, and publicly accessible databases that list both missing persons and unidentified people, like NamUs, have helped them give names to bodies found decades ago.

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