• Beheaded cleric gets his face back after six centuries

    Univ. of Dundee

    A forensic reconstruction shows the face of Simon of Sudbury, a 14th-century archbishop of Canterbury who was beheaded by English rebels.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    More than 600 years after he was beheaded, Simon of Sudbury has his face back,  thanks to a 21st-century virtual forensics project.

    Sudbury was the archbishop of Canterbury when he lost his face, along with the rest of his head, in 1381. It was a mighty fall from grace for the man who made his way up to the top of England's ecclesiastical ladder and crowned King Richard II. But when Sudbury introduced the third Poll Tax as Lord Chancellor in 1380, the country's peasants had had enough. Sudbury was said to be so unpopular that the guards at the Tower of London just let rebels rush in during the Great Rising of 1381 and drag the bishop to his execution on Tower Hill.

    Sudbury's head was put on a spike on London Bridge. Under cover of darkness, a man from the bishop's native Suffolk supposedly had it taken down and brought to St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury. (The bishop's body, meanwhile, ended up in a grave in Canterbury Cathedral, and the legend was that his ghost haunted the cathedral's tower.)

    Now fast-forward six centuries: A Suffolk school worker named Ian Copeman worked with church officials to have Sudbury's partly mummified skull (with bits of facial tissue still attached) put through a CT scan at a local hospital. The readings from the skull were sent along to the University of Dundee's Center for Anatomy and Human Identification. In the past, the center has helped reconstruct the faces of other personages such as Johann Sebastian Bach. the sister of Cleopatra and the son of Ramses II. 

    Under the guidance of center director Caroline Wilkinson, forensic artist Adrienne Barker took on the project. She digitally removed the extra facial tissue and had the CT data turned into a cast of the skull, using rapid prototyping. Using that cast as her foundation, Barker built up layers of clay to simulate muscle, fat and skin. The teeth were missing from the skull, perhaps because they were sold off as relics, so Barker had to use a bit of artistry to fill out the face. But she told me she followed "the current most accurate standards" to complete the project.

    Barker acknowledged that the result, unveiled last month at St. Gregory's Church, shows that Sudbury was "strange-looking fellow." She told Discovery News that some onlookers at the church gasped when they saw his visage. "He was compared to characters such as Spock and Shrek," she said.

    For better or worse, this is probably how Simon of Sudbury will be known from now on. Barker noted that the only other depictions to come to light are found in two stained-glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral.

    "Both of them were done in Victorian times, a good 400 years after Simon was killed, so they're not really accurate," Barker said. "This is the most accurate reconstruction."

    Now she's filling out an educational website about the Simon of Sudbury project that she hopes will get kids interested in forensics.

    Barker acknowledged that "a lot of people think that it's morbid" to put make-believe flesh on the shape of a 600-year-old skull. But she thinks it's "really fascinating," and I'm betting a lot of kids will as well.

    Other faces from history:

    Tip o' the Log to Discovery News' Rossella Lorenzi.

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

  • Was this the face of Jack the Ripper?

    Trevor Marriott

    This face reconstruction is based on a description of German merchant seaman Carl Feigenbaum contained in New York prison records. Feigenbaum is among scores of potential suspects in the 1888 "Jack the Ripper" murders.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    A reconstruction of a murderer's face has reawakened interest in one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries: Who was the serial killer behind Britain's "Jack the Ripper" murders in 1888?

    More than 100 suspects have been suggested over the years, including Lewis Carroll (author of "Alice in Wonderland") and Victorian painter Walter Sickert (who was fingered in a book by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell after a $4 million investigation). This week, the BBC is throwing a spotlight on a dark-horse candidate: German merchant seaman Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in New York in 1896 for a totally different killing.

    Feigenbaum was convicted for the murder of his landlady in Manhattan, and his attorney, Willam Sanford Lawton, said afterward that his client admitted to having an "all-absorbing passion ... to kill and mutilate every woman who falls in my way." It was Lawton who first suggested that Feigenbaum was behind the murders of women in London eight years earlier.

    More than a century later, retired British police detective Trevor Marriott has put together Lawton's claims and other evidence to build a case against Feigenbaum, and the case received a big boost from the BBC One program "National Treasures Live."

    Marriott matched up shipping records with the timing of some of the murders, and suggested that Feigenbaum's ship could have been docked in London at the time. He also argues that not all the killings attributed to Jack the Ripper were done by the same person, based on his analysis of the locations and the different ways in which the the victims were slashed to death.

    The traditional lore surrounding Jack the Ripper is that he must have been familiar with anatomical dissection, because he removed the internal organs of his victims so quickly and skillfully. Marriott contends that the organs couldn't have been cut out at the scene of the crime, but were removed at the London mortuary by doctors in training.

    To add a little spice to the story, Marriott provided the BBC (and Cosmic Log) with a reconstruction of Feigenbaum's face, based on a description of the suspect from his New York admittance form.

    Does Marriott make his case? Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Dundee who reported on the story for BBC One, says she's still on the fence. "Initially, I thought Carl Feigenbaum was that serial killer. His profile fit," she writes on the BBC website. "But further evidence ... may show these murders were not all committed by the same person. Feigenbaum could have been responsible for one, some or perhaps all."

    Others put less stock in Marriott's hypothesis. In a detailed analysis published on "Casebook: Jack the Ripper," one of the best-known websites for Ripperology, Wolf Vanderlinden says Marriott's theory is "plausible but not proven":

    "Could the Ripper have been a German sailor? Or an American sailor? Or a Portuguese sailor? Or a Malay sailor? Of course. Could he have been a butcher, baker, tinker, tailor, beggar man or thief? Of course. Could he have been Carl Feigenbaum? Not with the almost complete lack of evidence that has been presented to support his candidacy. Wishful thinking cannot solve this puzzle."

    In an email, Marriott acknowledged that his theory has been a hard sell among "hard-line Ripperologists," particularly because of the dissection issue:

    "The thought that the killer, after killing the victims, removed these organs has been an integral part of the Ripper mystery for 123 years. In fact it is one of the reasons that has kept the Ripper mystery alive all of these years. So of course there are those that for whatever reason want to keep it as it is and choose not to accept new findings."

    What do you think? Will the mystery ever be solved, or will it continue to be one of the world's best-known unsolved "cold cases"? To add to the mystery, here are some links to past speculation in the case of Jack the Ripper:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.