Interview – Missing, Dead, & Unidentified with Joelle Steele

by Jon Weiss (May 2018)

I interviewed Joelle Steele as part of my master’s research into ways of identifying people. Ms. Steele has been practicing face and ear identification professionally since 1980 and is the author of several books on the subject.

Jon Weiss: Where did you study face and ear identification?

Joelle Steele: I started by simply reading a lot of books on anthropometry – at least 50 of them, plus a lot of articles.

JW: I didn’t realize there were that many books on the subject.

JS: Well, at the time – this is back in the 1970s – what was available was a lot of very old texts, and most were not in English. But I have an advantage in reading them because I’m fluent in English but I can also read fairly well in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. I also have a German friend and she helped me with the German texts. Most of these older books are very short, or they only have a chapter or two that apply to the anthropometry of the face and head.

JW: Did you take any classes?

JS: Sort of. I audited a couple classes in forensic anthropology and anatomy. With the anatomy class, I stopped after learning about the anatomy of the head since that was my primary interest. But I really expanded on all that information when I was traveling in the 1980s. During that time I consulted with many experts throughout the United States, and I picked their brains on everything I could think of about the human face and head.

JW: Any particular experts?

JS: There were a lot of them, but the ones who taught me the most were Ray Iwata, W.R. Stark, and Leslie G. Farkaš. They taught me a lot about cranio-facial anatomy and the development of the human face over time. And then there was Simon Fuchs and Clyde Snow who taught me about forensic anthropology and the identification and analysis of bones.

JW: The bones of the face and head?

JS: Yes. In fact, to this day, my favorite expression – next to “Ears don’t lie,” is “Bones don’t lie.” Bones are so incredibly important to the identification process. If you don’t understand the bone structure of the face and head, you absolutely cannot accurately compare faces to identify a person.

JW: And what about the ears?

JS: Right, the ears. Well, I had begun studying the face back in the 1970s, and that was when I first met the late ear expert, Al Iannarelli, in San Francisco. He gave me a copy of his first book on ears and later gave me a draft of his manuscript for a proposed revision to that book, which was later published in 1989. He taught me everything he knew about using the ears as identifiers, and we wrote and spoke to each other over the years until about a year or so before he passed away in 2015.

JW: And you went on to write your own book about ear identification?

JS: Yes, The External Ear. Al didn’t have the advantage of the Internet when he wrote his book, Ear Identification. But I did. And that meant I had access to a lot more ear photographs to examine and research. So while his measurement techniques are great, some of his research in the heredity of ear characteristics was inaccurate.

JW: How so?

JS: In general, he believed that the shapes and patterns of ears ran in families, and they do – sometimes, but not always. That’s where the photographs on the Internet came in so handy in my research. I could study the ears of entire families going back a few generations, and I also studied my own family’s ears going back five generations.

JW: What did you learn about inheritance in your family?

JS: Not nearly as much as I learned in studying eight generations of Queen Elizabeth’s side of the family. No consistent genetic ear resemblances at all in that family.

JW: But the royal family does have other characteristics that make them resemble each other, don’t they?

JS: Yes, they do. But not all families share resemblances. Or, if they do, sometimes the resemblance is not direct or skips a generation or two. For example, I look like my father who looks like his mother who looks like her father. My brother, as a child, looked like our father did when he was a child. But as an adult, my brother doesn’t look like our father. He looks like our mother’s paternal grandfather.

JW: So in identifying people, it’s all about the facial bones and the ears?

JS: Absolutely. The first thing I look at when I’m comparing faces are the ears. They are as unique as fingerprints. If the ears don’t match, I’m done because the two faces are not a match. If the ears aren’t visible, I go straight to the bone structure, and that determines the proportions of the face. If the proportions don’t match, again, I’m done because the two faces don’t match.

JW: What about ear prints? From what I’ve managed to read about them, they don’t seem to be reliable for identification.

JS: They aren’t. Even if you deliberately try to make an ear print, you’d be hard pressed to come out with anything that wasn’t distorted or simply missing sufficient detail to analyze and compare. Maybe if there was some highly unusual thing about the ears, like they were overly large or deformed in some way. Otherwise, ear prints fall short when it comes to identification.

JW: When we first spoke, you referred me to your article about the importance of aligning the eyes.

JS: Yes, that’s a great shortcut that is very accurate for seeing if the face proportions match. I use this method when the ears aren’t visible. I align the eyes until the pupils are in a straight line. Then I make the irises the same size. Then I look at the faces side by side. At this point everything should line up perfectly if they are the same person.

JW: Why does this method work so well?

JS: Because the eyes are stable in size. They don’t get fat or grow thin with time. Even if they begin to bulge due to a thyroid condition, or if one iris is bigger than the other, you can still analyze and compare them. In the case of one iris being bigger, it would just have to be bigger on whatever face you compare it to. So using the eyes as a basis for comparison is pretty much a no-brainer since everything else on the face is subject to change either due to age, facial expression, etc. So, to give you the most frequent example of why this method works so well, if one face has eyes that are larger in proportion to the face than the eyes of the face in another photo, then the face with the larger eyes will have a head that is much smaller.

JW: This seems to be a very effective method. But I haven’t seen anything about it in journals about face recognition software.

JS: That’s because face recognition software is designed for use with giant databases. It works by looking for a very limited number of matching face points and then, unlike in TV and movies, the software generates as many as 50-100 possible matches that need to be examined manually. When I compare faces, I already have images that may be the unidentified or missing person, so I only need to compare one unknown face to a few known ones that have gone missing or are deceased.

JW: So you actually work with cadavers?

JS: Sometimes, but usually just with photos of the living or the dead. It depends on whether or not the photo of the deceased is taken straight on or if it’s in profile or three-quarter view. Those make comparisons more difficult. Also, again, I want to see the ears too. So sometimes, if it’s a current case, I can request that someone take better photos, or I can go to the morgue and take photos myself, because it’s always easier with photos. But I don’t do this very often. I did on occasion when I was living in the Los Angeles area and later when I lived just south of the San Francisco Bay Area.

JW: What about decomposition? Doesn’t that affect your ability to identify the deceased?

JS: It can, but it depends on what stage of decomp the body is in. If it’s not at the bloating stage, which happens after rigor mortis has run its course and can last anywhere from three to ten days or so, then it’s not as difficult. Bloating can really distort the face. But, in the end, if the ears are still intact, that’s what I want to see.

JW: Do you deal with criminal cases? Murders?

JS: That’s very rare for me. But the process is the same. Most cases I work on are civil, cold cases, unidentified or missing persons, and the like.

JW: What kinds of cases are these civil and cold cases?

JS: They vary considerably, but in general it’s all about people who look alike but are not exactly alike, or someone masquerading as another person, or someone who was missing and turns up but is not who they say they are. Sometimes it’s just about a photo that someone sells for a lot of money as being a famous person, but it’s later discovered that it’s not that famous person at all. Cold cases are pretty much the same.

JW: Why don’t you compare faces of children with other children or adults?

JS: Faces do not become truly stable in their development until about the age of 20 or so. Along the way, children’s faces change very quickly and sometimes very dramatically. I have found it impossible to make accurate comparisons between/among children and definitely not between a child and an adult. This is a job for someone who does face progression.

JW: Speaking of children, one last question about ears. You mentioned to me that people should photograph the ears of their children. Can you expand on that?

JS: Sure. And it’s not just the ears of children. Even though we have fingerprinting and DNA for identification, in a worst-case scenario when a child’s or adult’s remains are found, sometimes many miles away from where they lived, the fastest way to identify them is if their ears have been photographed regularly and can be compared to the deceased.

JW: Why is that?

JS: Well, ears are largely made of cartilage, and up until a body becomes skeletal – and sometimes longer – that cartilage is fairly much intact. You can see this in mummies that are thousands of years old. And, in every photo I’ve ever had to analyze of an exhumed body or of someone’s recently discovered remains, their ears were still in very good condition for analysis and comparison. So, I would like to see people get in the habit of photographing their ears at least once a year. Pull the hair back so that you can see the entire ear and then snap the photos. Takes seconds, and hopefully you’ll never need the photos.

NOTE: This interview has been reproduced on this website with permission of both parties.