Betty Pat Gatliff, a forensic sculptor who helped law enforcement identify scores of people who had gone missing or been murdered by deftly reconstructing their faces, died on Jan. 5 in a hospital in Oklahoma City. She was 89.

Her nephew James Gatliff said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Ms. Gatliff’s artistic skills and intimate understanding of facial architecture led many police departments, coroners and medical examiners to send her the skulls of people whose faces had decomposed or been rendered unrecognizable by acts of violence.

Ms. Gatliff advanced the niche field of facial reconstruction well before the advent of modern forensics and television shows like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Over more than 40 years, first as a government employee and then as a freelancer, she sculpted about 300 faces and produced an estimated 70 percent rate of identification, according to her records.

“Betty Pat’s influence was broad and far-reaching,” Steve Johnson, a past president of the International Association for Identification, a forensic sciences organization, said by email. “I’m not sure I could say she was the best, but she was at the top of the discipline as far as knowledge and experience are concerned.”