Deputy Leslie Willingham was awarded the Sheriff's Recognition Award by Denton County Sheriff Will Travis Thursday, but the reason for the honor goes far beyond the county lines.
Willingham helped police in University Park this month identify a suspect in an aggravated sexual assault by putting together a sketch from witness accounts.
The suspect was arrested last week in Corsicana, just hours after the sketch was released, and officers said he later confessed to the University Park crime.
Identifying the unknown has become something of a specially to the forensic artist lately, especially after successfully wrapping up a case across the country that she's been working on for near two years.
Willingham was contacted in late 2012 by a fellow officer on behalf of a department in Dover, Delaware. On Nov. 2, 2012 the department found an unidentified body behind a hardware store that had been decomposing for about three months and was in stages of mummification.
"She sent a picture and it was, you know, something out of a horror movie," said Willingham.
Willingham was able to identify enough bone structures to believe that she could reconstruct the victim's face and offered to give it a try for free.
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"Because this guy has a name," Willingham said. "He's got family and he needs to be returned to his family."
At times, she even had to put up her own funding to help get a 3D printing of the man's head shipped to her in Texas.
Once it arrived, though, she worked for two years with clay and other art tools to recreate what she believed the man's face and head looked like, and pictures were released to the public in late June.
Eight days later the family of 33-year-old Ian Withrow, a missing man from the Dover area, came forward to finally identify the body that they now knew was his.
Willingham said the recognition for her work is great, but it's putting a name with the missing man's face that really served as her reward.
"Finally had it," she said. "I was able to come home and look at the sculpture and say, 'Your name is Ian. I know your name.'"
Willingham first took up forensic artistry after seeing the effects of another missing persons case from more than 20 years ago and being frustrated that there weren't enough experts around to solve such crimes.
She said she is still haunted by that case.
"How many years has her family been wondering where she's at?" Willingham said. "It bothers me a lot that that case has not been solved, but there are still 9,721 people unidentified in the United States. Why is the question. Why?"
Willingham is the only certified peace officer who is also a forensic artist in the state of Texas. She is also one of only 32 forensic artists nationwide to be certified by the International Association for Identification.
"That case up in Delaware could not have been solved without her. The one here lately, the one in University Park, she was a tremendous asset in that, and I couldn't be more proud to call her our own," said Travis.
Willingham plans to continue taking on the tough cases and said if the opportunity arises, she would still love to go and try her hand at that 20-plus-year-old cold case that inspired her to go into the field in the first place.
