Hello, thanks for listening to The Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service,

with me, Jane Wilkinson. Today the story of a man who builds the faces

of the dead from the cast of skulls, who used pioneering work which began in 1975, soft

crimes across the world. All these occasions, they always start with

a phone call. Hello, is that Mr. Neve? Yes, are you the man who does heads? Yes, we've

got this body, we've got this skull, we've got this head, can you reconstruct it for us?

This is Richard Neve, an expert in facial reconstruction. His work includes two kings, one native

American chief, and someone who might look like the son of God. It all began in the

northwest of England in 1975, when the Egyptian mummy of a 13-year-old girl was

unwrapped at Manchester Museum. This was all rather new and exciting and the media got

very excited, and there was considerable dismay when we actually got to where

the body was to find that it had been very, very badly damaged and the whole

thing had been smashed into pieces. And it was at that point that the guys

leading the investigation had turned to me and said, could I fix the skull back

together again? The request proved career-changing for Richard who was working as a

forensic artist at Manchester University. Only he did more than just fix the

skull. He built the face of girls 1770 that should become known. We wanted to

make it look as real as possible. And I went to the eye hospital and I said, could

I have a couple of glass eyes? And then he gave me a funny look and he said, you've

only got one problem. We don't make glass eyes in pairs. Now if you think about it,

of course it's common sense. It is one eye that is gone. And he said, you can have

what you like out of these and he gave me a box full of assorted prosthetic eyes.

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