The Girl Next Door

Will Forensic Reconstruction Help ID Nameless Murder Victim?

(CBS) 
Detectives informed Don and Shannon that their father Greg wasn’t coming home.

But why would Doug DeBruin want to kill Greg May? According to police, the motivation was Greg May’s antique collection, worth a quarter of a million dollars. DeBruin was seen at a flea market, selling off everything his old friend once owned.

"To see my father's property surrounded by him and him giving it away practically. It's hard to see that picture," says Don May.

For prosecutor John Kies, proving Doug DeBruin committed the murder wasn't going to be easy. Although police did find a small trace of May's blood on DeBruin's jacket, the rest of the case was thin.

"Most of what we had at this point was circumstantial evidence. That Doug DeBruin got caught with Greg May's goods. That no one had heard from Gregory May," says Kies. "And that his car and wallet were abandoned in Aurora, Ill."

But what troubled Kies most was that he couldn't even prove Greg May was dead.

"The defense was going to come back with, 'How did you know he just didn't disappear somewhere? And if you believe he's dead, how do you know he was murdered?' That was a big burden that we had to overcome," says Kies.

What Kies didn't know was that, seven months after Greg May's disappearance, a clue was found hundreds of miles from Bellevue. It was a clue that would test the talents of forensic artist Frank Bender and help solve the mystery of what happened to Greg May.

After finding out their father was dead and that his one-time friend Doug DeBruin was suspected of killing him, Don and Shannon May traveled half way across the country to Iowa to search for their father’s body.

Where DeBruin might have left Greg May’s body was anyone’s guess. And DeBruin wasn’t talking.

So Don and Shannon blanketed the area with flyers. They offered a $15,000 reward, hoping someone could lead them to their father’s body.

Why didn't they just let the police handle it?

"We needed to feel like we were doing something, doing everything we could," says Don.

But what Don and Shannon didn't know was that the remains of their father had already been found, 400 miles away in Kearney, Miss.

To Kearney Det. Tom O’Leary, the discovery was as mysterious as it was chilling: a skull, left at a truck stop, imbedded in a block of concrete. O’Leary had no idea it was Greg May’s.

"We’ve never worked a case like this. We started our investigation with only, you know, a human skull. No identity, no nothing," says O'Leary.

So just as Scott Dudek had done in Castro Valley, Calif., Detective O’Leary turned to facial reconstruction.

"People are pretty visual. I thought, you know, we’d have a better chance of identifying the victim if you could actually put a face to him," says O'Leary.

Detective O’Leary called on Philadelphia artist Frank Bender, who in his spare time helps solve crime.

"Oh I call myself the re-composer of the decomposed in the classical fashion," says Bender, who has worked with law enforcement on more than 40 cases, sculpting faces from skulls of the unknown.

"When you start looking at the forms of the skull, you start to just get a feel for what the person looks like," says Bender.

What did this particular skull tell him? "That the individual was middle aged. A little on the heavy side. Balding. I just went with that feeling," says Bender, who created a bust. "I just felt that eventually he would be identified."

Tom O’Leary was just as confident.

"The reconstruction sat on my file cabinet. He stared me in the face when I walked in the morning. He’s the last person I saw when I went home at night" he says. "One day, you know, the right lead would come in."

Little did Det. O’Leary know that the right lead would come from Mississippi, from Ellen Leach, the Home Depot cashier and DOE Network volunteer.