DEAD MEN TELL TALES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19808, 9 December 1938, Page 16

DEAD MEN TELL TALES

“MURDER CONSULTANT”

iURMOULDING OF VICTIMS

Tales that dead men tell enable Professor Theodore Iliram Sawyei to be “murder-consultant" to a score of United States police departments.

Often years after a crime lie can provide the police with an accurate description of what Jhe victim looked like, his age, height, weight, his nationality, a shrewd guess at his job, and when necessary a remarkable lifelike photograph of. his ace.

Professpr Sawyer is 57. He has expressionless grey eyes behind gold-

rimmed spectacles, a likim* tor ft:.* starched collars, and a habit of constantly stroking his stubbly grey moustache.

He says: “Till crack qf doom, bones will talk” —and then explained some of the measurements which reveal the dead men’s tales.

Sex is determined from skull measurements. A man's skull is larger than a woman’s, with the eyebrow ridges more marked.

Height is gauged from the limb bones, especially the thigh bone. A man's stature is 1.38 times the length of his thigh bone, plus 813.0 G millimetres —a formula checked from thousands of cases.

Illnesses like scarlet fever and measles which retard growth, are shown in the bones. Eo accurate is this measuring science that the face can be built up from the skull, molded with clay liven form and expression. Professor Sawyer said that in such

■rises where faces have been reconstructed identification has followed line times out of ten.