Your RAM was corrupted (hence dying soon after), which wrote bad data to the game cache.

When pulling your character model from the cache, instead of pulling Elf Model, Elf Texture, it pulled Orc Model, and some texture not meant for that model.

This kind of thing used to happen a LOT (still does, sometimes), and there's plenty of funny screenshots floating around. As others have said, there were even programs that could swap things for you so you could see whatever you wanted (but others wouldn't).

Just deleting the Cache folder would have fixed your problem... until the next RAM fuckup.