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- Our victim was stabbed numerous times.
That showed a lot of anger and hatred and violence.
This was not an accident,
that the suspect meant to kill our victim.
- She had no identification.
She had no jewelry.
She had no purse.
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- We get a Jane Doe case, you have to start at square one.
Who was she?
Where did she come from?
Who is her family, who can tell us about her?
And in this particular case, we had none of that.
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That DNA match was to a convicted felon
named Wilson Chouest.
- It turned out Wilson Chouest was a serial rapist.
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- My name is Carl Koppelman.
I'm a volunteer with the DNA Doe project.
I've acquired somewhat of a reputation.
Throughout my life,
I've had a talent for drawing faces.
My focus is the postmortem facial reconstructions.
I've probably created 300 postmortem
facial reconstruction depictions.
One of the first cases was the case of Kern County Jane Doe.
There are various things that happens
to a person when they pass away.
Their eyebrows often go up,
the cheeks and jowls tend to sag down,
smile lines disappear.
Lips will droop.
You have to recognize and compensate
for as you're trying to depict the person living.
She had two tattoos on her arms.
She was described as Hispanic or Native American.
But being that she had Seattle written on her tattoo,
I presumed that she probably came from
a northern indigenous population.
My process involves merging the photo of the deceased person
with photos of living persons
to give life and vitality to that face.
When I first put out the image, I just put it
out on my Facebook page, and it got distributed very widely.
Eventually, the Kern County Sheriff's Office
had spotted that image online and decided it was suitable
for their own publicity on the case.
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At some point, word came in that there was a woman
up in Alberta, Canada who believed that this was her aunt.
Her information looked credible.
- I was in the city of Calgary with a woman's conference,
and I said, I need to talk about my Auntie Shirley.
One of the women at that gathering,
she said, look on Facebook, and there's a posting
there that there's a Jane Doe project
looking for this family that this woman may belong to.
And I'm like, Oh my God.
And I looked at her and I said, I know it's her.
I know it is her.
And then when I seen the tattoos,
that was positive for me.
I couldn't believe it.
So I reached out.
- I thought, aha, that the tattoo says Shirley on it.
That's her name, Shirley.
And she was from an indigenous community up in Canada,
which tied in with my expectation that
this was probably
from a northern indigenous community.
I thought this had to be the right person.
- The Jane Doe project asked me to upload my DNA.
- The big suspense was waiting the month and a half
for, for the results.
- It was Shirley.
I cried.
I laughed.
I mean, it was just crazy.
A lot of emotions.
- We had been working on this for quite a while
and when this news came in, it was very exciting to see
because this was a very difficult case.
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