by Lois Gibson
“I had on my apartment!” I shrieked. “That’s what I was wearing! My home. He didn’t know what I had on when he decided to come crashing through the door and kill me!”
Sid apologized, of course. He felt awful, because he just didn’t know what to say.
I had no one at that time to help me process my still-simmering rage over the attack, no idea what to do with it and the sweet man who adored me was clueless.
We never spoke of it again.
So I kept all that emotional turmoil bubbling just beneath the surface, but by then, I’d grown skilled at living an outwardly normal, even happy life, in spite of it.
And Sid tried to help me launch the career I dreamed of. Whenever he came home and said that a new guy had started work, I asked him to describe the man for me. He did and I created a sketch. The next day, I dropped Sid off at work and waited in the car. Soon he emerged from the building with the new guy—coffee cup in hand—in tow. Then I held up the sketch and made a comparison.
Time and time again, the guy was a dead ringer.
And at night, I kept watching the news programs. But I saw only one sketch displayed and it wasn’t a sketch at all. I realized it was an Identi-Kit composite. With an Identi-Kit, the witness would begin with a generic face shape and the detective would then overlay facial features imprinted on sheets of clear acetate until a reasonably close facsimile to the witness’s description could be reached.
But those kit-faces never look real and the one I saw during that period on the evening news was no exception. The face looked flat, a clumsy depiction that bore no subtle shadings to give the face its shape and texture. It didn’t resemble a real person you might see on the street.
That’s when I knew that the Houston Police Department did not have a forensic sketch artist, even though one person with whom I spoke said that they did. What they had was a harried and hurried detective, doing the best he or she could with what was available, and it wasn’t much.
Sometimes, detectives were interviewed on the evening news concerning this crime or that. They were usually taciturn and jaded. They seemed to be always tired and discouraged and had dark circles under their eyes.
My heart went out to them. It seemed to me that they had an impossible job. The crimes kept coming, wave upon wave, and they were doing the best they could to hold back the overwhelming tide.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to help. I burned to jump into the fray. It ate at me, day and night. I knew my talents could be of some use. I knew my sketches could help them.
If I could just get someone to give me a chance.
When our son Brent was born, he came out looking like a manly little man, muscular, trim and square-chested. He was not a cuddle baby. He did not want to be held, rocked and lulled. Almost from the beginning, he fought to get up and go, as if he wanted to try his hand at rock climbing or join the Marines.
I tried to rock, to nurse, struggled to keep him from crawling out of my arms and watched the daily litany of crime goose-step across my TV screen. The politicians droned on about how something had to be done about this relentless crime wave and the newscaster offered up yet another dazzling description of the perpetrator: 5′9″ or 5′10″ tall, brown hair, brown eyes, etc., etc.
In one bloody twenty-four-hour period, nine murders were committed in Houston and many of the crime scenes included eyewitnesses. And yet, as always, all they had to offer the media was the same generic description.
“Momma Nadine,” my dear mother-in-law, who had come to live with us and was a wonderful help with the baby, noticed that part of the reason Brent was so restless and wouldn’t sleep through the night was because the kid was hungry. Even with supplemental bottles, I couldn’t keep him comfortable. Before the pediatrician got a clue as to what was wrong, Momma Nadine showed me how to mix up rice cereal and formula and feed it to Brent on a spoon.
Immediately, he was satisfied and slept all night from then on.
After that, I was able to get some sleep and have a little time to myself. I started giving some serious thought as to how I could break down this concrete wall that was the police department.
One day, after about twenty fruitless calls, I remembered something my daddy had said to me when I was a skinny, shy little girl about to enter the terrifying arena of selling Girl Scout cookies. I was eight years old at the time and absolutely mortified at the idea of knocking on people’s doors and trying to get them to buy cookies.
Pulling me down beside him as he sat at the breakfast table, my daddy said, “Lois, do you think that when someone buys a box of your cookies, they’re doing you a favor?”
I nodded. Shoot yeah, they were doing me a favor.
And he said, “No, no! You’re looking at it all wrong! You see, you are doing them a favor, just by going up to their door!”
“I am?” That sounded doubtful to me.
“Well, let me ask you something. Are those good cookies?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “They’re real good. They taste better than any cookies I ever had!”
“All right. They’re great cookies. Let me ask you this. Do they have to pay for the cookies right then?”
I shook my head. “We take their order and they don’t have to pay until we deliver the cookies.”
“Uh, huh.” Nodding, he glanced over at me and asked slyly, “Do they have to pick up the cookies?”
“No!” I cried. “We take the cookies right to them, to their door.”
“That sounds pretty good. Do you think these people might buy cookies anyway, say, at the grocery store?”
I agreed that yes, most people did buy cookies at the grocery.
Taking me by my little arms, he said, “Honey, I want you to remember this for the rest of your life. Don’t think that these people are doing you a favor just because they buy these cookies from you. Remember, they would be buying cookies anyway and these are delicious cookies. They don’t even have to pay for them right away and you will deliver them right to their door! You see, you are doing them a favor, aren’t you? Now, here is what I want you to say when you go up to someone’s door.”
I leaned closer.
“Say, This is your lucky day!”
He told me that I should use that approach for everything from a job interview to getting ahead in life.
I did just that and I sold more cookies than any other rookie Girl Scout in Kansas City.
Now, sitting in my rocker, watching my active infant son scramble and scoot around on the floor (trying to find a way to bust out of the joint, no doubt), I thought about what my dad had said. I decided that I needed to change my approach. I needed to convince the police department that this was, indeed, their lucky day.
So I made another call to them.
“Robbery,” I said firmly.
This time they put me through.
“Hello. My name is Lois Gibson. I am a portrait artist and I can draw the faces of suspects from witness descriptions,” I rushed on. “I’d like to offer—”
“Well…”
“I’ll bring all my gear down to HPD myself. I’ll set it up in your office. All you have to do is send somebody down to the jail, look at someone there, then come back and describe the person to me.”
“Hey,” interrupted one detective before I could finish my rehearsed speech, “We’ll fix you up with a guard and you can go down to the jail yourself and draw all the perverts you want!”
I heard him laughing as I hung up.
Sometimes I sat in my rocker, stared up at the ceiling, cried and talked to God. I told Him that I understood, now, why I had been attacked and that I knew what my purpose was on this planet and how I could use such a terrible thing for good, to help others. And I prayed for His help in breaking through the hard shell of a major metropolitan bureaucracy. But there were a lot of times when it just seemed impossible.
Every day, when I put Brent down for his long afternoon nap, I got on the phone and went through my rehearse
d speech.
“If my drawing is good,” I said as persuasively as possible to a reluctant cop, “then think what a wonderful thing that would be to help with your investigations. And if I’m no good, then hey, I’m just a housewife, right? You guys are armed, after all. I’ll leave. What have you got to lose?”
One day, I launched wearily into my act, to a lieutenant. And when I was done, the policeman said, “You need to call Lieutenant Don McWilliams.”
Okay. Fine. I’ll call the damn detective, I thought and redialed the police department, hoping the big sarcastic sigh I was heaving couldn’t be heard over the phone.
Finally I had the name of the right person.
“Lieutenant McWilliams,” I said. “Hi. My name is Lois Gibson. I’m a practiced portrait artist and I am positive I can draw a good resemblance from a description given by a witness who has seen a face,” I recited. “I can prove it to you. I’ll bring my gear down to your office. You send somebody over to the jail and have them look at anyone they want. Have them come back and describe one of the inmates to me and I guarantee you I can draw the guy just from their description.”
And without hesitation, Lt. McWilliams said, “Well, come on down, girl! Let’s see you do it!”
I almost dropped the phone. I wasn’t even sure I had heard correctly. Had he just said come on down, like some kind of game show announcer?
I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t say anything for a moment or two.
Lt. McWilliams went on to set up a date and time and when I offered to drive there myself, he said, “Nah, no problem, I’ll send someone to come pick you up.”
And just like that, I got my first opportunity to perform.
I was nervous on the sunny afternoon when I handed the baby over to Momma Nadine and got ready to leave for the Houston Police Department. I was just so ready to show what I could do. After all, I’d been doing it in my head for more than two years and not only that, but with Sid’s help, during that time I had been practicing on unwitting “suspects,” drawing their portraits using only Sid’s description—and that didn’t even count the thousands of quick portraits I’d done with watercolors and pastels along the River Walk and in malls all over Texas.
I was ready, I told myself. I could do it. All I had to do was convince a bunch of hard-nosed cops that they needed me and that this was their lucky day.
Officer Howard White picked me up and helped me load my cumbersome easel and my drawing supplies into the squad car. He was funny, entertaining and personable on the drive to the police department. He acted as if he did this sort of thing every day and it helped me to feel as if it was something I did every day, too.
The Robbery Division was housed in a 1950s-era building that was spartan but serviceable and Lt. Don McWilliams worked in a small office. When I first met McWilliams—whom I’ve since come to love and refer to, like everyone else who knows him, as “Mac”—he reminded me of the actor Wilford Brimley in his younger days. He had large, powerful legs, a firm handshake and a soft-spoken, homey demeanor. There wasn’t a great deal of room to set up my easel in his office, but I was not deterred. I made myself a little corner studio adjacent to the open doorway.
Years later and still grateful, I asked Lt. McWilliams what had motivated him to take a chance on an unknown like me—a female artist.
His answer was pure cop: “Aww, my captain didn’t want to deal with you. He told me to let you come on in just so we could get rid of you.”
We laugh about that even now.
When I was ready, McWilliams said, “Why don’t we send one of the detectives down to lockup and he’ll come back with a suspect description for you?”
I shook my head. In an act of almost brazen chutzpah—since this was clearly the biggest test of my life—I said, “No, I’d rather you not use a detective. Detectives are trained to be keen observers and they would notice details that most crime victims and witnesses would not.”
I paused, then said, “I want you to pick out the ditziest dingbat you can find. And don’t tell the person what we’re trying to do. After all, most people don’t plan ahead of time to pay attention during a crime, do they?”
Oh Lord, what a brassy dame I was.
You’ve heard that expression, “be careful what you wish for”?
I should have known better than to present any kind of challenge to detectives, because believe me, they went out of their way to find the spaciest space cadet they could round up.
They took the young woman to the jail and when they returned and she found out what I intended to do, she let out a cat-like holler, put her hands over her horrified face and cried, “Ohhhh NOOOOO! They didn’t tell me we were going to make a drawing! No, no! I can’t remember enough to do a drawing!”
Great, I thought through a frozen smile, you had to ask for a dingbat.
I learned a valuable lesson. Never give a cop a chance to get one up on you. It’s just too much fun for them.
In a soothing voice, I got the blond to admit that she had noticed that the guy was a white male, in his twenties. Starting at the top of the head, I said, “Okay, what kind of hair did he have?”
“Uh…uh…I don’t knoooow,” she whined, growing more befuddled the longer she spoke. Holding her hand up to cover her forehead, she said vaguely, “It was just all dark up here. Just all…dark.”
Trying not to grind my teeth, I did my best to depict generic dark hair covering the perpetrator’s forehead and asked her to describe his eyebrows and eyes.
As I worked, I was well aware that various Robbery personnel who were passing in the hallway were stopping and leaning into the doorway to see what was going on. Eventually, there was a small crowd congregated, craning their necks to see.
As we began to concentrate on the nose and facial structure, I could hear them exclaiming in awe and amazement at how good I was.
This was just what I wanted to hear. And after so many years of doing portraits in front of an audience, it didn’t bother me in the least.
Then we got to the mouth. The young woman said, “He had these really weird teeth…I don’t know…I can’t describe it.”
Eighteen months of dental school were not wasted.
After a little gentle prodding, I figured out that the man had what is known as “spaced maxillary laterals” and that these teeth were slightly rotated, so they would appear as “pegged laterals” and so I drew that.
For the first time, I felt a grin tugging at the corners of my mouth. I knew I’d nailed him.
When I was finished, the detectives showed me a dark Polaroid snapshot of the guy, but I couldn’t tell much except for one thing: he was wearing a baseball cap. No wonder she couldn’t describe his hair! It was my first lesson in how to direct a forensic sketch session.
However, the really frustrating thing about the Polaroid was not the baseball cap, but the fact that the guy wasn’t smiling.
There was too much riding on this for me to take a chance. “Lt. McWilliams,” I asked, “Would you mind terribly having this man brought up here so that we can see his teeth?”
Surprised, but game, McWilliams sent a detective to bring the man from the jail. They corralled him in the small office, next to where I had placed the drawing and I asked him to smile.
He did.
And there were those lovely little pegged laterals.
Everybody gathered around the sketch was wildly impressed, but like most artists, I wasn’t really satisfied with the likeness I’d made. But if there was one thing I’d learned by then, it was to pretend otherwise. So I acted as pleased as they were.
They took the guy back down to the jail, the dingbat soon left and Lt. McWilliams asked for my phone number.
I gave it to him and another detective was summoned to drive me home.
And for the first time, I felt petrified. What was going to happen next? Would they drop my number in a drawer and forget about it? Would I get a real chance to prove what I could do?
Was I
on my way or just on my way home?
One of the things they don’t teach you in Trailblazer 101 is that when you are the very first person to do a thing, to beat down a door and open up opportunities for others to follow, there aren’t any textbooks to read, no courses to take, not even a mentor to guide and help you. You’re on your own, baby, and every single lesson you learn comes the hard way.
It only took a couple of weeks for my first “hard knocks” lesson.
I got a call from the Robbery division to come in and do a witness sketch for a robbery case. (Years later, I learned from Lt. McWilliams that he’d been so impressed with my work that very first time that he was sold, “from then on.”)
I didn’t know that then, of course. I was excited, but this time, I was really nervous. Although I’d done thousands of portraits and had done many sketches of persons described to me by other people—I had never actually sat down with a crime victim before.
This was it, the real thing.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to impress the detectives, although that was certainly part of it, because the better I did, the more likely they would call me back; but as a victim of crime myself, I really, really wanted to help this witness. I believed that God had put me there for this purpose and I wanted to do the best I possibly could.
But there was nothing, nothing, easy about that first crime sketch. For one thing, I didn’t yet have a parking permit, so I had to park six blocks away. Six blocks is no big problem—unless you happen to be hauling more than fifty pounds of gear. And in Houston, sweat is a way of life. So I arrived at my first appointment sweating like Michael Jordan in the third quarter of the play-offs and feeling pretty much like it, too.
The detectives were glad to see me and everybody was expecting to handle my time with the witness as they had our trial run, so they were surprised when I told them that I needed to be alone with the witness. Still, they were agreeable, although they didn’t really have anywhere to put me. I wound up in what turned out to be, basically, a storeroom that was about the size of two phone booths.