Forensic artist Auriole Prince was trained by the FBI and has worked on hundreds of missing people cases, including the search for Madeleine McCann. Reporter Michael Purton met her at her Cheltenham base to find out more.
WHEN police began uncovering buried bodies at the home of Fred West in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, in 1994, they turned to the charity Missing People to identify some of the teenage girls and young women.
Missing People's help in bringing closure to the families of these women and girls, whose whereabouts had been unknown for years, inspired artist Auriole to work for the charity.
At first she was a case worker, liaising with families and police in the search for missing people, but her artistic ability led to the charity sending her to the FBI's training centre in Quantico in the US for a month.
There she learned to create pictures showing how a face would be affected by aging, and how to construct an image of a person based on skeletal remains.
Auriole, 41, who lives in Charlton Kings, said: "After the Fred West case I was blown away by the fact that those girls, who had been missing for 20 years and turned out to have been murdered, were identified by Missing People and the family got some kind of closure.
"After I left art college I was doing exhibitions and I decided to volunteer with Missing People and I just got swept away by the work there and being able to help families."
She added: "The FBI training was totally surreal. It's an amazing place because it has its own completely fake little town so that they can stage training operations.
"Around 12 people were training in total, and the others were from all over America. We stayed on the campus and it was not long after 9/11 so security was very tight."
The skills she learned with the FBI led to her helping with the searches for hundreds of missing people, including Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Edwards and teenager Dinah McNicol, who was later found to have been murdered by Peter Tobin.
Although neither of these cases have had a positive outcome, there have been plenty of success stories.
Auriole said: "I did a case where a father had abducted his two daughters and taken them to Pakistan, and the mother had done everything to try to find them.
"I did an age progression to show how they would look five years after they were taken, and they ended up being found and reunited with their mother."
She added: "I did a 2D drawing facial reconstruction from the skeletal remains of a man found in Croydon in 2003.
"He was then recognised and identified as an elderly man who had walked out of his residential home 20 years ago and not been seen since.
"He had obviously fallen down by the rail tracks and laid there and got buried under leaves and such, and a couple of boys out playing football had found his remains.
"He was recognised by his family from the drawing. It was nice to be able to give them that sense of closure."
Auriole left Missing People in 2005 to start her own company, Change My Face, and has become the go-to woman for the media when they want to show how people would have been altered by time.
She has continued to help with missing person searches, and a year after the 2007 disappearance of toddler Madeleine McCann in the Algarve, she created images to help with the search.
"I showed how she would look after a year and with different hairstyles and hats," she said.
She also created an image to show how April Fabb, who went missing aged 13 in Norfolk in 1969, would have looked in 2011.
"I had to work from an old black and white photocopy, making it quite hard to do. I used reference pictures of her mum and dad to get a closer likeness," she said.
Auriole has created images to show how John Lennon would have looked on his 70th birthday, and how Marilyn Monroe would have looked if she had lived to old age.
From her office in Parabola Road, she has also developed a number of computer programmes which show people the toll drinking, smoking, poor diet and tanning would take on their appearance.
The Drinking Time Machine, where users can upload their photo to see how years of heavy drinking would alter them, has been used in schools to warn children about the effects of alcohol.
Auriole is now on the council of the Medical Artists' Association, and her skills are in demand to show people considering cosmetic surgery how they would look after going under the knife.
For more information on Auriole and her business, go to Changemyface.com
