The girl in the photo had brilliant blue eyes. So brilliant, in fact, that there was little doubt on the parts of investigators that the body found murdered and stuffed into a well couldn’t have been their victim: The recovered remains had eyes as brown as a sparrow, and the missing girl didn’t wear contacts. But, in a twist worthy of the movies, both young women were the same, a fact that was proved conclusively by matching dental x-rays.
It wasn’t a case of photo retouching. Her family vouched for the accuracy of the picture. Instead, the mystery of the blue-eyed missing person who surfaced as a set of brown-eyed human remains translated into a case where blunt head trauma resulted in hemorrhaging in the vitreous humor, which combined with slight decomposition, effectively changed the eye color. Says Deputy Coroner Investigator David Van Norman of the San Bernardino County (California) Sheriff’s Department, who worked that case, “I never looked at eye color the same way after that.”
Eye color, like many descriptors used to portray suspects, witnesses and missing persons, may seem like a no-brainer when it comes to checking the box, but it – along with a disturbing amount of other “factual” information – can be very subjective. Van Norman points to a Jane Doe his office recovered whose eyes, under post mortem examination, were described by different people as “gray, brown and green.” Says Van Norman, “Estimating eye color is far too subjective to be used to rule out a match.”
