Vail
Justice for Kara & Jessica
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Forgive me if this was posted somewhere else but I wanted to share this wonderful story about one of our mods Carl Koppelman who has been featured in Vocativ mag for his work on artist reconstruction.
Carl Koppelman has a morbid hobby—with a noble aim
“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.”
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.
At least one of Koppelman’s drawings has led to the identification of a body, he says. Kenneth Ecker fell or jumped off a Brooklyn apartment building in September 2011, but was still unidentified two months later despite being a height and weight (6’8″ and about 550 pounds) that would make it hard to disappear in a crowd. Koppelman drew an image and posted it in Websleuths, including a photo of a Spider-Man beanie Ecker had been wearing when he was found. One of this friends came across Koppelman’s post on Websleuths by Googling for large men wearing Spider-Man caps and recognized Ecker from Koppelman’s drawing.
http://www.vocativ.com/328851/meet-the-man-who-draws-dead-bodies/
Carl Koppelman has a morbid hobby—with a noble aim
“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.”
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.
At least one of Koppelman’s drawings has led to the identification of a body, he says. Kenneth Ecker fell or jumped off a Brooklyn apartment building in September 2011, but was still unidentified two months later despite being a height and weight (6’8″ and about 550 pounds) that would make it hard to disappear in a crowd. Koppelman drew an image and posted it in Websleuths, including a photo of a Spider-Man beanie Ecker had been wearing when he was found. One of this friends came across Koppelman’s post on Websleuths by Googling for large men wearing Spider-Man caps and recognized Ecker from Koppelman’s drawing.
http://www.vocativ.com/328851/meet-the-man-who-draws-dead-bodies/
