PAUL MOODY HAS ONE OF THOSE SOFT, PLEASANT-SOUNDING VOICES: deep baritone, comforting, late-night talk radio–worthy. He projects an earnest air, conjuring the paternal, neighbor-next-door type. With his receding silver-brown hairline and gentle overall demeanor, there’s a reticence about Moody. Being around him, you feel safe, calm—and yet, at the same time, it’s clear that the tactical pencil in Moody’s shirt pocket and the Glock .40 strapped to his hip are weapons the six-foot, two-hundred-pound Illinois native would have no trouble using with faultless accuracy if the situation warranted it.
Moody’s ties with the Jane Doe case date back to 2007, when he was employed by the Illinois State Police (ISP). FDLE SA Ken Pinkard had reopened the Jane Doe investigation and contacted Moody, who was known nationwide as a forensic reconstruction artist, and was also on the Certification Board for Forensic Art with the International Association for Identification. Besides, Dennis Haley knew Moody from both having started their law enforcement careers with the Danville (Illinois) Police Department.
Moody’s path had taken him from the Danville PD to Kansas City, before stepping away from police work for a period. It was 1985 when Moody moved back to Danville and went to work for the ISP, where he stayed for the next twenty-five years, filling the role of trooper, sergeant, and a host of other jobs—including SWAT—before retiring an acting master sergeant.
Throughout his tenure, Moody was “never really a big fan of forensic art.” The old Smith and Wesson Identi-Kit, he explained, was something he had little use for, adding, “It seemed generic.” But a friend in the ISP’s crime scene investigation (CSI) division, however, learned how to draw and became part of the ISP’s forensic-art detail. “You know what,” that friend told Moody one day, “I’m buried. You think you could give me a hand with some of this work?”
Heading toward retirement, already an artist (landscapes and portraits), Moody considered the offer. Bringing unknown victims back to their families, Moody felt, along with helping to identify rapists, murderers, and predators of all types, was a noble cause.
Still, Moody thought brass would never allow him to leave his job and step into a forensic-art gig. As it happened, however, the state had recently created a mentoring program within the department. So Moody’s friend began training him.
By 2008, now retired from the ISP, Moody relocated to Florida and went to work for the PBSO as a forensic artist. Any skull, Moody explained, “gives you about a seventy percent road map. So you have to take other things into consideration. It’s not an exact science, but works well enough to have some success.”
With Moody and Haley convinced that Jesperson, under my guidance, wanted to help, Haley sent Jesperson a black-and-white rendering of Jane Doe that Moody had completed in 2007 for SA Ken Pinkard while still with the ISP. Jane appeared to be middle-aged. Her hair pulled back, her nose large, her facial features slim and taut. She looked older than what Jesperson had claimed and what Moody knew after familiarizing himself with the reports and Jane’s skull. What they didn’t tell Jesperson was that the images created from this particular black-and-white rendering, between 2007 and 2014, had failed to yield any significant leads.
Jesperson sent the sketch back to Haley with an emphatic no: “Not even close. She’s too old.” She also looked Native American. Jesperson had been firm: Jane was white.
Haley called Moody and asked him to initiate a dialogue with Jesperson. Both being artists, Jesperson and Moody needed to devise a plan to generate an image Jesperson was comfortable with.
Whenever he sat down to create a computer rendering or pencil sketch of any Jane/John Doe, Paul Moody relied not only on the skull, but police and ME reports, interviews, and any other data he could get his hands on. Thus, it was unprecedented to have the actual murderer help identify one of his Jane Doe victims.
Back when Moody was with the ISP, FDLE SA Ken Pinkard had sent him all they had on Jane, including photos of a clay reconstruction done in 1994, just after Jane was found by that prison highway worker. As he fell back into the case, reevaluating those twenty-plus-year-old materials, the one fact that struck Moody was that Jane’s skull and the medical examiner’s report clashed. The ME claimed Jane was between thirty-five and fifty-five years old, but Moody was certain after a careful study—including complicated measurements—of her skull and mandible (lower jawbone) that she was much younger. Probably in her early or late twenties, as Jesperson had maintained.
As we discussed the reconstruction and drawing I’d convinced him to do for Moody, Jesperson said during a call near this time, “One of the worst things they could do is put the wrong drawing of her out into the public forum.” His fear was that once an incorrect bell had been rung, there would be no way to stop the reverberation. In fact, Jesperson was onto something—that 1994 clay bust of Jane had not generated one lead.
“The clay reconstructions do work and are still being used regularly,” Moody clarified. “Some think they are the only way to go. Like anything else, some clay work is good and some is poor. Karen T. Taylor”—a world renowned forensic artist and consultant on CBS’s CSI—“came up with the two-dimensional technique and I adapted it for digital work in Adobe Photoshop. I feel that digital work is faster. It doesn’t alter the skull/mandible by adding a foreign substance (clay) to it. And I prefer the end result over clay.”
As Moody continued his work, several issues arose. One, the 1994 bust portrayed, same as Moody’s 2007 sketch, a Latina or Native American female, with features that failed to compare with the actual skull measurements Moody had since made. There was more “art” than science involved in the bust, in Moody’s opinion. Plus, Jesperson had rejected it.
They needed to start over, from scratch.
Armed with help from the man who had stared Jane in the eyes and killed her, Moody needed a drawing from Jesperson to complete his work. The idea was to create an entire new set of digitally rendered images based on all of the (new and old) information, some of which included my interviews with Jesperson and my push to get him to help with a drawing of his own.
Jesperson sent Moody a letter, telling the cop he needed a picture as a baseline to begin his portrait.