Face of ‘Baby Bones’ revealed: Can you ID this girl?

The embargo is over, and the face can finally be revealed.

It's the face of a mystery girl, probably 5 to 8 years old, whose charred skeletal remains were found in a wooded area of Monmouth County, N.J., in 2005.

She probably disappeared at least a year before that.

If you think you recognize her, call the America's Most Wanted hotline at 1-800-274-6388 (1-800-CRIMETV), or the tipline of the N.J. State Police, 1-866-657-7411.

The bust was unveiled Tuesday as the cameras of America's Most Wanted rolled in the South Philadelphia home of renowned forensic sculptor Frank Bender.

But the show didn't want photographs released until today - the day before the case, dubbed "Baby Bones," airs at 9 p.m. on Fox.

Also featured tomorrow will be the South Philadelphia murder of Beau Zabel, an aspiring teacher murdered for his iPod last June 15. The show first told that story in July, but with the case still unsolved, host John Walsh himself came to town to retrace Zabel's steps and rebroadcast surveillance video of a possible suspect.

(A link to that video is also at right.)

During the filming of the "Baby Bones" unveiling, Walsh asked viewers to think if they knew of a child who disappeared in 2004 or earlier, whose parents or guardians moved away, or might have offered some suspicious explanation, like she went to live with relatives.

The body, apparently malnourished and with a broken rib, was "thrown away like a pile of garbage," then set on fire, he said.

Because checking records of missing children proved fruitless, her disappearance was probably never reported, suggesting that someone supposed to care for her was responsible for her death, Walsh said.

Despite the release of a drawing and a computer-generated likeness in 2007, the case reached "a dead end ... it all came up negative," Walsh said.

So the show turned to Bender, who has helped with many cases, including the hunt for John List, a North Jersey man who killed his wife and three children in 1971.

At the FBI's request, AMW gave Bender the challenge of sculpting a likeness based on a single 20-year-old photograph.

The resemblance was so accurate, calls came pouring in from around Richmond, Va., where List, under a new identity, was working as an accountant.

Walsh gushed about how dead-on the bust was.

"It was mind-boggling to me," he said.

In the "Baby Bones" case, Bender began with the child's actual skull, applying layers of soft clay.

The final bust is a painted copy created from a mold.

Walsh also hopes viewers will crack the Zabel case, even though the surveillance video doesn't clearly show the suspect's face.

"Absolutely," Walsh said. "I've caught people with busts, I've caught people with very grainy grainy video ... we've caught people just off logos on their sweatshirts, logos on their baseball caps, their habits of smoking a certain kind of cigarette or beer. We even caught a guy because he sang the same song in a bar all the time."

For more on these and other cases, including missing persons, go to the show's website, www.amw.com.