MONTREAL -- In a renewed effort to identify the remains of 15 people, the RCMP has announced it is partnering with the New York Academy of Art for a project it describes as sui generis.
"This was a unique opportunity to have 15 Canadian faces reconstructed in a single week,” said RCMP Chief Superintendent Marie-Claude Arsenault, officer in charge of sensitive and specialized investigative services. “We hope to give a face and a name to people whose loved ones don't know what happened to them."
The RCMP said it has the unidentified remains of more than 700 people in its national database.“Without knowing their identities, it's impossible to return them [to their] home[s],” the force states.
“With the help of a unique partnership, the RCMP is giving a face to some of these people in the hopes of unlocking the mystery of who they are.”
The project will use 3D-printed versions of real skulls supplied by the British Columbia Coroners Service and the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner Service.
Select artists from the academy will then take part in a forensic sculpturing workshop to mould the missing faces.
“Academy students will put their anatomical knowledge and artistic skills to work in order to reconstruct each of the faces with clay,” the RCMP explains.
The 15 skulls are all male and were located between 1972 and 2019. They were chosen for the initiative because they were in the best overall condition.
The skulls were printed in batches of four in Ottawa, with each group taking 48 hours to complete.
The newly refreshed faces will be added to the Canada's Missing website in the hopes that someone will recognize them, “and giving some closure to families.”
Since the workshop’s creation in 2015, it has reconstructed dozens of faces in collaboration with the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, resulting in at least four visual identifications.
The RCMP says it hopes, in the future, to bring the workshop to Canada to increase the country’s facial recognition capability. The workshop takes place from Jan. 6 to 10.
