One Carroll County detective recently completed FBI training as a forensic imaging artist ? and was only one of a dozen worldwide this year to do so.
“Some day, we?re going to uncover a body dumped in Carroll County,” Detective Doug Epperson said from the Carroll County Advocacy & Investigation Center, which investigates crimes against children.
“They?re running out of space in the cities.”
Epperson started working for the Carroll County Sheriff?s Office last year after two decades of investigating homicides and rapes in Prince George?s County.
Sheriff Kenneth Tregoning told county commissioners this week that Epperson recently completed the FBI three-week Forensic Facial Imaging School in Quantico, Va.
Fewer than 300 investigators nationwide have received the FBI?s special training, according to informationprovided by sheriff?s office spokesman Sgt. Phil Kasten.
As an illustration major at the University of Maryland, College Park, Epperson said he always has loved art.
And while in Prince George?s County, he created composite sketches using a computer and tracked down a suspected rapist that way.
But software is limited, he said, and fails to provide the details only a hand-drawn picture can deliver.
Forensic artist Karen Taylor and medical illustrator Betty Gatliff, who worked on reconstructions of John F. Kennedy and King Tut, taught the courses.
Epperson said he will work on drawings of suspects and missing children for not only Carroll County, but ? perhaps ? the entire state.
He also was trained to create 3-D clay sculptures from the skulls of uncovered bodies as a means of identifying uncovered remains.
