I answer the heroic question

“Death, where is thy sting?” with

“It is here in my heart and mind and memories.”

– MAYA ANGELOU

I HAD ALREADY spent an inordinate amount of time on the victim's eyes, and I was starting to get frustrated. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to make her look alive.

Early the day before, I'd propped this woman's head up in the middle of my kitchen table, and I'd been working on it ever since. Now it was two a.m.-long past my usual bedtime-but I just couldn't stop.

Maybe if I worked on another part of the face? I ran my fingers over her cold, smooth cheeks, trying to shake the feeling that her lifeless stare was somehow directed at me. Pressing my thumbs against the soft fold that formed her lower lip, I reshaped her frown into a smile. Then I realized with a start what I had done. After everything she'd gone through, how in the world could I imagine this woman smiling?

My colleagues and I knew far too little about the woman whose face I was attempting to re-create, but what we did know was chilling. About three months before, her remains had been discovered at Peck's Landing, a recreational spot on the Wisconsin River, near the tiny town of Baraboo. A teenager swimming in the river had found a black duffel bag on a sandbar. Thinking it contained camping equipment, he had pulled it over to the trail along the shore. When he opened it, he discovered a plastic trash bag that had come open just enough to disclose the foul-smelling bloody remains of what he assumed was a dead animal. Disgusted, he dumped the plastic-wrapped remains out onto the trail, hung the duffel bag on a nearby tree, and took off. Investigators would have to track him down later to get his story.

That same afternoon, two young brothers were out on their usual Sunday hike along the trail with their mother. They'd gone ahead of her and run into the bloody trash bag. Typical kids, they poked at it with sticks until the plastic tore away and exposed the rotting flesh. They, too, assumed the remains must be from an animal, and they eagerly called their mother over to see what they'd found. She swiftly pulled her kids away and called 911.

When the Sauk County Sheriff's Department determined that the bag contained a human torso, a full-scale search began for additional evidence regarding what was obviously a brutal crime. Over the next few days, searchers found seven more plastic bags full of body parts, each marked with the logo of a local grocery chain. The bags revealed the systematically butchered body parts of a young woman in her twenties-her shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles almost surgically cut apart, her legs literally deboned. She had been decapitated and her skull had been skinned. The face had been completely flayed from the bone.

Ironically, the very steps that the killer had taken to conceal his victim's identity helped preserve it. The plastic bags, neatly tied shut and thrown into the river, had protected their contents much better than had the remains simply been tossed into the woods. Not only had the plastic prevented maggots and other scavengers from eating the flesh, but the river had acted as a refrigerator, slowing the process of natural rot and decay. This young woman's remains still had a story to tell-if only we knew how to hear it.

When Sauk County Homicide Detective Joe Welsch first called me for help, he sounded more discouraged than any detective I'd ever talked to.

“Frankly,” Joe began, “this poor girl has been butchered in a way no one up here has ever seen before.”

I had the impression that he was young and maybe a little nervous.

“And then there are all those other cases-that woman they found out in New Hampshire, floating in the New Hampshire River, about ten days before ours. Her body was mutilated, too, just like our victim's.”

I had also heard about that woman, and I knew that Joe and I were thinking the same thing: serial killer. Such killers are extremely rare, and those of us in the law enforcement community know that they're usually the least likely explanation for any homicide. Still, the sheer brutality of this murder was out of the ordinary. Serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper seemed unsatisfied to merely kill their victims. The added insult of mutilation or even cannibalism took the act of homicide over the edge of predictable human behavior. This case fit that profile. If Joe had a serial killer in his jurisdiction, he was right to be worried.

“We've already put one serial killer behind bars up here,” he went on. “And the folks in Chicago have had twelve women dumped on the streets in the past few months. I've talked to the FBI profiler there, and the one in Madison. We're all trying real hard not to jump to any conclusions. But I'd feel a whole lot better if we could just figure out who this woman is.”

Yes, I thought, the clock was ticking. Every minute that we didn't know who this woman was gave the killer one more minute to cover his tracks-or to plan his next murder.

Joe read to me from the autopsy report. “Internal organs and brain, all present-but barely recognizable… Teeth all present, and in excellent condition… No identifying scars or tattoos… No evidence of previously broken bones…” This was the standard medical examiner's checklist, and now I understood just how serious Joe's problem was: Virtually nothing about this young woman's body could be used to tell us who she was.

“What about fingerprints?” I asked.

Joe sighed. “Well, we have them, and we don't have them. She had started to decompose by the time we got to her, and after all that time in the water, the skin on her hands was sloughing off.”

As a result, Joe told me, his fingerprint expert had had to harden the skin by soaking it in formalin. Then he had teased the epidermis away from the victim's fingertips so that the outer layer of skin could be lifted off in one piece, a maneuver known as de-gloving. The resulting epidermal glove offered a kind of ghostly outline of the victim's fingers, allowing Joe's expert to slip his own fingers, one at a time, into the victim's skin. By rolling each of her fingertips onto an inked pad and a white piece of paper, he had somehow managed to lift six readable prints-a remarkably high number.

“But that's great,” I said. It's so difficult to get fingerprints when remains are badly decomposed that I wondered for a moment why Joe sounded so discouraged. Then he reminded me how frustratingly limited fingerprint information can be.

“Yes,” Joe said, “but we haven't found any prints that match. You know, when we first got the prints, I thought that all I had to do was enter them into a database. The computer would generate a list of a few missing persons, and bingo! We'd have our woman.”

Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic formula for matching the fingerprints of unidentified victims to those of missing persons unless the missing person's fingerprints are already on file in a national or international database. The prints of convicted criminals are usually on file with the arresting agency, but if local police or sheriffs don't submit those prints to a national computerized database, investigators in other jurisdictions can't match them to prints from an unidentified person. Even the most specific biological profiles (age, race, sex, stature, weight, hair color, eye color) can match thousands of missing persons. If investigators haven't included dental records or fingerprints in the missing persons reports they file, then each John or Jane Doe who resembles the victim's biological profile must be examined by hand-and either included or excluded as a possible match.