The first thing Trooper Sarah Krebs noticed on the unidentified skull were the teeth. Shiny, white, well-cared-for teeth.
“You could tell he was someone who took care of himself, someone other people cared about,” the eight-year Michigan State Police veteran said.
And so began a long process, including 120 hours of intricate 3-D clay reconstruction, that led Krebs, a forensic police artist, to give the skull a face and ultimately identify the body of Steve Hudson, missing from Mississauga for more than a year.
His car was found last January in Amherstburg, near Windsor, but there had been no sign of him since.
Hudson’s decomposed body washed ashore near a nuclear power plant in Michigan May 6.
Police found no signs of foul play.
Krebs was called in to work with the skull after fingerprints, DNA and vague tips led to a dead end.
She was readying a media release when Hudson’s picture stared out at her from a computer screen.
“I thought it was pretty uncanny how much recognition I got in the face,” she said. “It jumped right off the website at me.”
Tests confirmed the body was of the 36-year-old man from Peel.
Peel police have closed their missing person file on Hudson, Const. Adam Minion said yesterday.
