Navy releases computerized reconstructed face from man's body found in May 1997
Wednesday, Oct 29, 2008 - 05:10 PM
By BILL GEROUX
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Navy investigators released new information today about a man's body discovered in 1997 in the water at Naval Station Norfolk in an effort to solve the enduring mystery of who he was and how he died.
"It would be quite an accomplishment to give him back his name," said Amanda Burke, the latest of a half-dozen special agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) to take up the case of "John Doe."
At a press conference, Burke and fellow agent Giff Parker distributed copies of a digital computerized reconstruction of the man's face, based on examination of his skull.
The agents also said his pockets contained a bag from a Naval Exchange; an obscure rap tape called "Ill Style Live"; cigarettes; and papers suggesting he had stayed at a local motel and visited the Navy family service center at Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach shortly before his death.
The NCIS had been withholding those details as an investigative tool if the case ended up pointing toward a homicide, Parker said, but the case has grown so cold that the agency decided to release them in the hope they would provide a break.
"John Doe's" remains were discovered in May 1997 in the water between piers 10 and 11 during a dredging operation at the naval base. He carried no identification. His body was so badly decomposed that an autopsy failed to determine a cause of death. But medical examiners concluded he was a black man age 21 to 27, standing between five feet 10 inches and six feet 1 inch tall.
At the time, the NCIS checked all Navy and Marine commands for reported deserters, and the Military Sea-Lift Command for missing workers, without success, Parker said. In January 1998, the man was buried as John Doe in a Norfolk cemetery.
After Burke was transferred to Norfolk in 2005, she arranged for the body to be exhumed so that a forensic scientist could produce a clay sculpture of what John Doe's face might have looked like.
News reports of the inquiry generated a flood of tips, including about a dozen promising ones, but DNA tests and dental records eliminated those possibilities one-by-one, leaving investigators back where they started, Burke said.
Earlier this year, a former NCIS agent working for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offered to perform a new facial reconstruction using computer images. The new image was similar, but different enough that investigators decided it would be worth publicizing. It's impossible to say which of the two images is more accurate, Parker said.
The possibilities are numerous, Parker said: John Doe may have been a military man on terminal leave -- wrapping up his years of service by taking a bloc of accumulated leave time, with no command waiting for him to report to or missing him if he did not.
He may have been a military dependent, or even a civilian who wandered onto the base. Much of sprawling Naval Station Norfolk was opened to the public in November 1995 an experiment in concentrating security on the most sensitive areas within the base before the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 prompted the Navy to close the base again.
It's even possible he died off the base and his body was carried by the currents of the Elizabeth River to the spot along the piers where it was found, Burke said. Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or
wgeroux@timesdispatch.com.
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-10-29-0199.html