On the Job 

When she was in sixth grade, Samantha Molnar received a toy facial reconstruction kit from her parents. She’s been hooked on forensic science ever since.

After the criminal intelligence/missing persons analyst started working two years ago in the Missing Persons Unit of the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), she became serious about learning how to do forensic facial reconstruction.

“We came across cases where we had skulls but no faces, and the DNA wasn’t hitting,” she said. “So, we looked into some facial reconstruction training.”

In 2015, Molnar attended a course hosted by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and taught by forensic artist Joe Mullins at the University of South Florida.

During the training, she was given a skull, a synopsis with an estimated age range, and the clothes the man had been wearing to give and idea of his size.

“On the last day, I got to find out what he looked like in real life,” she said. “It was really remarkable how close it was. I was kind of emotional to see how this really does work. It’s not just a clay project.”

Her first case

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine unveiled Molnar’s first Jane Doe facial reconstruction at a Dec. 8, 2016, news conference in hopes that skeletal remains found May 1 in Greene County could be identified by the public.

She was soon identified as Tiffany Dawn Chambers, 33, of Florida, who was last seen around July 16, 2015, in Springfield, Ohio. In January 2017, a 35-year-old inmate from Springfield was charged with aggravated murder, abuse of a corpse, and other counts in her death.

When the body was first discovered, Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer issued a press release with photos of the clothing found with it. No leads resulted, so he requested BCI’s assistance in identifying the woman. DNA was extracted and compared to state and national databases with no matches.

The body was identified when a detective with the Springfield Police Division received Chambers’ missing person case and made inquiries into unidentified remains.

With assistance from law enforcement in Florida, a DNA sample from a Chambers family member was collected and tested at BCI. That DNA profile led to the positive identification.
 
The sheriff thanked the Attorney General and his staff in the BCI’s Missing Persons Unit for “an incredible amount of support in getting the deceased identified.”