Carl Koppelman

Carl Koppelman is an American professional accountant and unpaid volunteer forensic sketch artist.

Koppelman has attributed growing up in the 1970s, when there was a growing coverage of serial killers, to starting his fascination with crime and unsolved mysteries.

Koppelman has also attributed several key incidents as formative memories.

The first of these happened when he was 9, during the 1972 Summer Olympics, when terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes.

Koppelman has cited this as being one of the earlier memories of the evil that people do to each other.

The next key event happened in 1977, when Koppelman was 14.

A friend of Koppelman's brother, 17-year-old John LaMay, was killed by the "trash bag killer" Patrick Kearney.

This incident directly impacted Koppelman's sphere of community.

The third notable incident did not directly impact Koppelman, but was a formative experience for him nonetheless.

In 1979, when Koppelman was 16, 16-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer was killed by the "tool box killers" in neighboring Redondo Beach, California.

Koppelman remembers following news of the case in the newspaper.

During his young adulthood, Koppelman worked multiple different odd jobs, many of them unrelated to each other.

These jobs included construction work, working in the meat room at a grocery store, and a metalworking job in the aerospace industry.

Koppelman never worked in a profession that required artistry, but he had done art recreationally for most of his life.

Koppelman, who did not enjoy any of the jobs he held, went to Long Beach State University to study accounting.

After college, Koppelman worked as an internal auditor for the Los Angeles County Municipal Court, and a Senior Accountant for Princess Cruises, based in Santa Clarita, California.

Koppelman's first reconstruction was of a male found dead of accidental causes in a motel in Philadelphia in 2006, later identified as Joseph Cole.

After this, Koppelman continued to create reconstructions.

Initially, Koppelman would do reconstructions based on which cases had postmortem photos publicly available online, though as he grew in rapport Koppelman began to work with law enforcement on cases.

Nancy Monahan's website for missing and unidentified people in Pennsylvania asked to use one of Koppelman's reconstructions, this one being of an unidentified male who died in a hospital in Los Angeles after a coma caused by blunt trauma to the head, who was later identified as George Pollard of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Koppelman's reconstruction was directly attributed to helping match the identification, as loved ones of Pollard saw the reconstruction on Monahan's website and noted the similarities between the reconstruction and George Pollard.

Pollard's case is often attributed to be Koppelman's first significant contribution as a forensic artist.

Since 2009, Koppelman has drawn over 250 reconstructions and age progressions of missing and unidentified people.

Following that, Koppelman worked as a Senior Financial Analyst for The Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California until 2009, when his aging mother's failing health prevented him from making the commute.

Koppelman subsequently became his mother's full-time caretaker at her house in El Segundo, California.

At the time, his mother was 86.

Because of how much care his mother needed, most of Koppelman's interaction with the rest of the world took place online during this time.

Koppelman first became truly interested in crime and forensics in August 2009, after the media storm surrounding the safe return of Jaycee Dugard.

Koppelman reports sitting in his mother's home on the computer, looking at online news articles about the case and photos of Dugard.

Through his seeking of material about the case, Koppelman first came across Websleuths, a forum website for armchair enthusiasts of crime investigation.

Koppelman began to explore the website, and found himself gravitating specifically towards the forum for the missing and unidentified.

Over time, Koppelman shifted from reading the discussions to pitching in on them, spending up to 12 hours a day searching for leads, from sources such as old yearbooks and Classmates.com pages.

Koppelman posts under the username CarlK90245.

Koppelman has stated that the skills he learned as an accountant helped him in his pursuits as a web sleuth, including the large spreadsheet he keeps of listings from NamUs.

Koppelman continued to contribute, eventually being appointed as an unpaid administrator for the forum.

Koppelman's work as an amateur sketch artist began in 2009, when he noted that police reconstructions of unidentified and formerly unidentified decedents often did not resemble their subjects, as well as looking stiff and not lively.

In 2017, after his mother's death, Koppelman sold her house and returned to work.

Since he began his forensic involvement, Koppelman has helped to close 8 cases as of 2019.

Koppelman has no specific criteria for how he picks which cases he will reconstruct.

Koppelman's renderings themselves have been credited in the identifications of 3 unidentified decedents.