Aged Photos Help Find Missing Kids

In 1980, while teaching at the University of Michigan, medical illustrator Lewis Sadler began trying to predict how children’s faces would change over the course of time. His goal was to help plastic surgeons select the proper procedures when reconstructing the faces of kids disfigured by birth defects.

Five years later, Sadler was an associate professor of biomed-ical illustration at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas. Scott Barrows, a former Health Science Center medical illustrator turned freelancer, was asked to “age” the photographs of two kids who were to be featured in a television show on missing children. When Barrows called for help, Sadler was skeptical; he didn’t think it could be done.

Despite misgivings, Sadler collaborated with Barrows to produce what they theorized were current likenesses of two sisters abducted seven years before. Twenty minutes after the show aired on network television, the girls were located. “There wasn’t any going back after that,” Sadler says.

Today, Sadler, who is director of Medical Illustration Services, and Barrows are the only medical illustrators in the country using Sadler’s technique for forecasting how faces mature. In the past two years they’ve “aged” photos of sixty children. Sixteen of them have been located, most recently a thirteen-year-old girl who was reunited with her mother in February, ten years after disappearing.

Sadler’s technique is based on data that establishes norms for forty-three “anatomical points” on the face. For instance, the statistically normal distance between the inside corners of the eyes is 25 millimeters for a three-year-old Caucasian boy. For a nine-year-old Caucasian boy, it’s 31.7 millimeters. If a child is, say, 10 percent larger than normal at that anatomical point, Sadler then assumes that the child will remain 10 percent larger than normal at age nine. In this fashion, he calculates and plots the dimensions of the various points.

Of course, Sadler’s technique can’t take wild-card variables into account-a sudden growth spurt, tremendous weight gain, the addition of braces. Some of his “aged” photos have been uncannily accurate, but others haven’t even been close. Oddly enough, though, Sadler’s most recent success came from an apparent failure. “It didn’t look like her to me,” he concedes, “but seventy-five people called.” The child was found.

Each face takes twenty hours to construct by hand. Sadler and Barrows are trying to raise money for a computer to speed things up; meanwhile they each have a waiting list of about sixty missing children.

Despite the long hours and the draining experience of dealing with distraught parents, neither man accepts money for his work. As Sadler explains, “The parents very often have gone through every penny they have to hire another detective. We do it because we can do it.”