Bill Wilson was selling homemade whirligigs from a roadside stand near Mission and stopped to fill his water bottle in a small creek when he spotted something that resembled an old bowl.

He used his bottle to flip over the object. It was no bowl. Staring up at him was half of a human skull.

That was 1995. Police called the victim Jane Doe, as they did not know her name, when she died, how her skull ended up in the Mission-area swamp, or where the rest of her remains were hidden.

Fast-forward 16 years and officers still don’t have the answers to any of those questions.

However, they at least now have a face — or the best guess police can make of what Jane Doe’s face might have looked like.

Thanks to modern technology, a new composite sketch of Jane Doe has been created for B.C.’s Missing Women Task Force. Police provided it exclusively to The Vancouver Sun, hoping the image will spark a memory among people who knew the woman when she was alive.

“We hope the public will be able to push this to a conclusion. Somebody knows who this is,” said task force Sgt. Dan Almas.

“There are many missing people whose cases aren’t solved. But because so much effort has been made to identify this person, it is surprising it has taken this long.”

This Jane Doe is one of the most mysterious missing person files in British Columbia.

The task force believes it has exhausted every effort to identify her through police missing person reports, and is now hoping the composite will generate new tips from the public to crack open this old case.

Over the years, information about Jane Doe’s file has been sent to nearly every police agency and detachment in Canada, and to many in Washington State.

Her DNA has also been sent to every police lab in the country for comparison to other unsolved missing women files.

Police last issued a public appeal in this case in 2000, releasing a far-less-detailed composite sketch and airing a CrimeStoppers segment on a local TV station.

Pickton connection

Jane Doe was back in the headlines after police made a shocking find in 2002 while searching Robert (Willie) Pickton’s Port Coquitlam farm for evidence in the notorious serial murder case: a heel and rib bone with the same DNA as the skull were found buried in a pit behind a slaughterhouse.

Pickton was charged (although never convicted) in her death, and her case received substantial media attention throughout his year-long trial, which ended in 2007 with his conviction for six other murders.

In 2008, Jane Doe’s DNA and the new composite sketch were sent to Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization. It issued a so-called “black notice” on unidentified bodies to its 188 member countries for comparison to unsolved files worldwide.

The Interpol effort elicited no clues.

In fact, throughout the last decade, there has been little to no response from the public about Jane Doe — a frustrating situation that Almas hopes will now change.

The composite sketch was completed in 2008 by an FBI artist, but couldn’t be released publicly until after Pickton had completed all his court appeals. (Last summer, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Pickton’s final appeal.)

It took police more than a decade to create such a detailed composite because they had very little to work with: All that was ever found of Jane Doe’s face was the skeletonized upper right half of her head.

Her skull had been crudely cut in two with a reciprocating saw. The left side has never been located. The lower jaw is also missing.

Desperate to advance this case, the task force sent the partial skull in 2006 to the National Research Council in Ottawa, which Almas said had the most advanced scanning technology police could locate in North America. It created a high-resolution, three-dimensional digital computer image of the skull.

In 2007, Carl Adrian, a top forensic artist with the FBI, used the 3D computer image to create the composite — as best he could given the limited information forensic scientists could conclude about Jane Doe: She was Caucasian with no other racial mixes in her blood and was between 20 and 40 years old.

Adrian sketched what the right side of her upper face would likely have looked like based on the shape of the skull, and then made a mirror image to fill in the left side of the upper face — which isn’t a perfect solution, Almas noted, because no face is exactly symmetrical.

Then, Adrian approximated what Jane Doe’s nose, mouth and lower jaw would have looked like based on information from experts who had examined the skull over the years. For example, a forensic dentist determined Jane Doe had teeth removed from her upper right jaw at different times before her death, and could not rule out that she may have worn dentures.

The hair and shirt collar in the sketch, of course, were done randomly — there is no way to know how she styled her hair or its colour, or what she was wearing when last seen.

For all of those reasons, Almas stressed he wants members of the public to contact police even if they think this sketch merely resembles someone they once knew who is now missing; despite Adrian’s best efforts, it is unlikely Jane Doe looked identical to this composite.

“Even if it doesn’t look exactly like someone they are thinking of, we still want them to call us. We will follow up on every tip,” he said.

No missing persons report

Police now believe it is possible that Jane Doe has never been reported missing. Perhaps that’s because she was estranged from her relatives and they don’t know she disappeared, or because her family is under the mistaken belief that someone else made a missing persons report, Almas said.

Precisely when Jane Doe died could never be pinpointed by forensic experts, who have suggested a range of one to 10 years before the skull was found. So, Almas said, police are interested in tips from the public about women who disappeared as early as 1985 and as late as 1995.

The mystery of this case deepens by how police became aware of Jane Doe in the first place — the strange discovery in February 1995 by the man selling whirligigs along Highway 7, close to where the Fraser and Stave rivers intersect.

Why and how the skull was dumped at the Mission slough is a conundrum. A pathologist testified at Pickton’s trial the skull had likely not been lying in that rural patch of land for longer than a couple of weeks.

The site was searched by police dogs and the nearby waters probed by the RCMP dive team in 1995, but no further remains were ever found.

A kilometre-long stretch of the area was analyzed even more extensively for several weeks in 2003 after police found the heel and rib bones on Pickton’s farm. Officers returned to the Mission slough with some students of anthropology and archeology to sift through the leafy ground cover, conduct detailed hand and line searches, and excavate some portions by hand.

Still, no further evidence linked to the skull was located.

Tool experts later concluded Jane Doe’s skull had been cut in the same manner as three other partial skulls police found on Pickton’s farm.

Although investigators still didn’t know any more details about Jane Doe’s identity or death, they charged the former pig farmer with her murder.

Evidence disregarded

Her journey for justice, however, hit many road blocks.

Pickton’s trial judge ruled the first-degree murder charge pertaining to Jane Doe should be stayed because of an administrative error on the indictment.

Prosecutors later convinced the judge to allow jurors to hear details about Jane Doe as so-called similar-fact evidence during Pickton’s 2007 trial. At the end of the Crown’s lengthy case, though, the defence successfully argued prosecutors hadn’t proven there were enough similarities between Jane Doe and the six women Pickton was on trial for murdering.

Justice James Williams then told the jurors they must disregard all the evidence they had heard for the previous eight months about Jane Doe, including testimony from 26 of the 98 Crown witnesses.

Prosecutors, who believe as many as three other bones from Pickton’s pit (another heel and rib, as well as an ankle) may have also come from Jane Doe, complained the ruling had “tremendous implications” for the trial.

It was the Crown’s theory that Pickton regularly drove to Mission to get rid of body parts that were too big to take to the Vancouver rendering plant, where he disposed of pig innards. Jane Doe’s skull was crucial evidence to support this theory, which was also bolstered by the testimony of a witness who said Pickton dumped unspecified things on back roads near Mission.

Jane Doe’s removal, return, and final removal from the trial was all the more troubling given a pre-trial ruling the judge made in 2006: “I consider it likely that the same person is responsible for the dismemberment of Jane Doe and at least three of the six [victims at the centre of the trial].”

Almas, who became involved in this file in 2002 when Pickton was first arrested, said rather than being frustrated by this 16-year-old puzzle, he and his task force colleagues remain hopeful they will one day find the answer.

“There is so much importance to trying to solve a case like this,” he said. “There is a family somewhere who would like to know what happened to their loved one. And knowing this case is such a mystery, to put a name to this woman and bring some closure would be very satisfying.”

Almas is asking anyone with information that might be relevant to this case — no matter how big or small — to call the task force’s tip line at 1-877-687-3377.

lculbert@vancouversun.com