SOUTHWEST FLORIDA — We all have a personal story that defines us, and it's ours to tell. But some of those stories are being told by people at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota.
Those stories have one thing in common: they don't have a name. The only thing they have left is a skull, because that's how they were found when their lives ended. One man is on a mission to identify skulls sitting on shelves at Medical Examiner's Offices across the country.
He's doing this with students and staff at Ringling, along with law enforcement agencies from around the world.
In an exclusive story, Fox 4 Senior Reporter Kaitlin Knapp explains how they're trying to give them their names back:
"This is a story. There’s 10 active cases that need to be told," said Joe Mullins, a senior forensic imaging specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, while referencing a skull. "They were born with a name, they’ve lost it, so let’s give it back to them."
Mullins is also an adjunct professor at the George Mason University. He's determined to give faces to all unidentified skulls across the country.
"The bigger picture is I want to clear the shelves of the ME’s offices across the U.S.," he said.
At a week-long workshop, Mullins is showing students, staff and law enforcement from around the world how to create a facial approximation using clay and science.
But how does he get the skulls?
"No investigator is going to give me or a bunch of art students a bunch real skulls," he said.
The specialist is using his relationships built over the years and cold calls to ME's offices. He called the District 21 Medical Examiner's Office in Southwest Florida, which covers our entire area.
They allowed him to take a 3D scan of four skulls sitting on their shelf, using a company called FARO.
Then, after a 3D print, Mullins and everyone in the room got to work.
"It is a great mystery to work on," said Ringling senior, Noah Shadowens. "I don’t want this to sit there on the shelf for very long."
Knapp was there when Shadowens came to the workshop last year.
"I’m a little bit more comfortable this time, because it’s less guess work on the bottom half [of the skull]," he said. "It affected me in a way that I could not not come back."
Shadowens worked on an active case from Fort Myers. For five days, he worked on the facial approximation.
"His nose has been broken, his jaw is a little bit crooked," he said. "This time I did have a bottom jaw and my age range is 30 to 40."
Shadowens was one of many people in the room with a case.
"Some of the other agencies decided to send their artists here to learn how to do this," Mullins said.
The Orange County Sheriff's Office sent two detectives to work on a homicide case. New Jersey State Police and even officers from Luxembourg in Europe came with their own cases, too.
"This is the opportunity to hopefully put that face out there and hopefully give resolution to these cases for the investigators," Mullins said. "The spotlight is kind of dimming on these colder cases. This is an opportunity to put it back in the spotlight."
Some of those investigators are from our area. Fort Myers Cold Case Detective Richard Harasym came to the workshop as a spectator.
"First of all being a detective, you always want to know how things are done, you’re explained the procedure of how it was done," he said. "There's a lot of unidentified remains in the whole country. There’s not enough artists like this out there doing this."
He drove up to Sarasota because one of his homicide cold cases is getting a face, done personally by Mullins.
"This particular case that we brought here today — this is the third time we’ve had this procedure done," Harasym said. "To me this was another way of getting our John Doe out there to the public to try and see if we can get him identified."
Mullins says he normally never gets to talk to the investigators on the case, which helps him even more.
"It’s great, I love to directly talk to the investigator because a lot of times I don’t get that — I’m just working with the medical examiner," he said. "I’m just here to help his investigation — that’s really what it boils down to."
The case Mullins is working on goes back decades and is considered a homicide. The man's remains were found on a dirt road east of Ortiz Avenue in 2007 at a transient camp. However, Harasym says he was likely killed between 1994 and 1996.
The man, Harasym says, likely frequented the Salvation Army on Edison Avenue or Lions Park on Cleveland Avenue.
"Despite the longevity of the cold case, he believes someone can identify him," Harasym said.
Mullins calls it art with a purpose.
Knapp obtained records with more information about the three other skulls people in the class worked on that came from Southwest Florida.
A woman's skull was found in a Cape Coral canal on May 8, 2024 near Northeast 19th Place and Kismet Parkway East. The report says a kayaker found her skull. It's not clear how she died.
We do know she died between 2021 and 2024. She is either Asian, White or Hispanic.
The man below was found at a commercial tree nursery in Clewiston in 2020. Employees at the nursery were getting ready to plan when they found the African American man's skull. He is said to have died years prior to being found. The only information known is his height — between 5'0" and 5'8".
Then, there were another set of remains found in Fort Myers, separate from Harasym's case. This is what Shadowens worked on.
A man's full skeletal remains were found in Fort Myers. They said it's White man between 30 and 40-years-old. He was found on August 30, 2024. However, he likely died between 2023-2024.
"I haven’t had the opportunity to see what it’s like to be solved, and I’m chasing that feeling of ‘oh they recognize this person," Shadowens said.
Well, days after the workshop, someone did!
Harasym called Knapp and said though it wasn't his case, he did some digging and identified him thanks to Shadowens' facial approximation. His name is Shane Williams.
The detective said there was a journal.
They think it had been in the elements for five to six months, maybe longer. In the journal, he says there was a phone number and a person's first name.
Harasym says he played with the name and number and came back with the last name Williams, possibly a brother. The detective couldn't reach him, so he tracked down someone else who was named in the journal. The only name in there was Riley.
Riley called him back and Harasym sent Riley a piece of the handwriting found in the journal, which she said was her boyfriend's brother, Shane.
Harasym sent the facial approximation and a piece of the handwriting to Shane's brother, who confirmed it was him. He said they hadn't heard from Shane in about a year and had been battling drug issues.
Knapp talked to Shane's brother who said the nose, mouth, cheek and eyes jumped out at him when he looked at the facial approximation made.
The detective contacted the ME's Office to confirm the identity. He says they went to Lee Health and obtained X-ray records. They confirmed it was Shane Williams.
"This is your calling, isn’t it?" Knapp asked Shadowens.
"Oh yeah," he replied. "I want to continue to take unidentified skulls...it’s really difficult to get into this field, but I think it’s really important and there are not a lot of people that do it."
Mullins says there's a shortage of people in the field, which is why he's also teaching people how to do this.
"Motivating someone to do this that I’m so passionate about, like again, it makes me feel like I’ve done — I’m doing something right," he said.
If you recognize any of the faces, call the law enforcement agency where the remains were found.
"These aren’t skulls. It’s somebody’s mom, it’s somebody’s dad, somebody’s brother," Mullins said. "We need to tell these stories, we need to get it out there, we need to get the picture out there."
