I can't tell you too much about who I am or how I know what I know. What I can tell you is that I have connections in the missing-person-turned-homicide investigation of a teenage boy somewhere in the Midwest.
About a year ago, in the lead-up to Halloween, there was this meme going around with a picture showing the top of a skeleton: the skull, neck and shoulder blades. People would forward it on with MMS's, tweets and the like with simple messages like "Happy Halloween," or "Boo!," etc. You might've gotten one yourself.
Eventually, the meme found its way to somebody with a bit of knowledge about anatomy and they realized that the skeleton in the picture was awfully realistic. They reported it to law enforcement. But it would be weeks before the report made it through the bureaucracy to a medical examiner who verified that the image did indeed warrant some an investigation.
The M.E. was convinced that the skeleton was indeed the genuine article, but of particular concern to her was the pinkish tone of the bones, and the trace amounts of what appeared to be blood and flesh still on it. What also concerned her were a series of scrape marks that could be seen on the bones when the photo was examined at high resolution. They appeared to encompass the entire skull and the M.E.'s opinion was that these were made when the flesh was stripped off the body - by something with very sharp and very hard teeth.
There seemed to be no legitimate reason for a photo like this to be circulating among the public. Law enforcement determined that it was either a leaked crime scene photo, or evidence to an as-yet undiscovered crime. They considered that the photo might've been taken by some callous private citizens (read asshole kids) who'd found a dead body, photographed it, published it online, and never reported it to the cops. Even more disturbing was the possibility that the photo was published by the psycho who had done this and wanted the world to admire his handiwork.
The trouble was that we had only one photo to go on, which made it really hard to determine whether or not the photo was even related to an active or solved case. The exif-data; the data buried within the jpeg file that detail where the photo had come from, what camera had taken it, when it had been taken, etc., had all been wiped clean; which isn't hard to do if you know what you're doing. All we had to go on was the photo itself.
I won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say that the computer forensics techs made a thorough sweep of the national crime scene photo database and determined that the photo didn't pertain to any case in the digital archives.
Several other analyses were run on the photo, but the one that paid off was the facial reconstruction simulation - a piece of software that scans the photo of the skull and determines what the guy would've looked like when he was still alive. Eventually, we were able to match the reconstructed face to an active case file out-of-state: the skull belonged to a teenage boy, let's call him "Jack," who had been reported missing.
While the photo itself was being investigated, the meme was also being examined. We were charting its course back from the concerned citizen who initially reported the image to the police, to the first person who'd ever sent the image. It wasn't easy as the meme leapfrogged back-and-forth across several popular messaging services along its way. Just over a week after the victim's identity was confirmed, we were able to determine who had started the meme. We'll call her "Jill".
What was of immediate interest to law enforcement was that Jill's name was already on record in Jack's case file - she was apparently a school friend of his and one of the last people to see him alive.
A warrant was issued for Jill's cell phone and she was brought in for questioning. Right away there was something odd about the situation. The cell phone's built-in camera was of far lower resolution than the photo. The phone was thoroughly analysed and an MMS was recovered containing the skeleton photo. But while the phone had a definite record of receiving the message, it was later discovered that Jill's service provider had no record of ever transmitting the MMS to her.
