Faces of Evil

by Lois Gibson

  When she came to that time, one of the men was holding her arms to the floor while the other was preparing to rape her. Sarah kicked and struggled, but her efforts were feeble.

  “I thought I was going to die,” she said quietly, “and if it hadn’t been for my dogs…”

  Just then, all Sarah could see was a blur of flying fur while the air was filled with the snarls and growls of her beloved pets and the screams of her attackers as they tried to fend off the ferociously protective animals, who were biting the men’s faces, arms, anything they could grasp in their sharp teeth.

  Both men jumped up and ran out of the house, hotly pursued by the dogs. Battered, bleeding, but alive, Sarah felt as if she’d been dropped onto the floor by a tornado.

  And it was so… so quiet.

  The detectives were amazed, not just by the quality of the drawings I presented to them, but by the warm hug Sarah and I exchanged as she left. They were certain that these were the same two men they’d been trying to catch all summer. Buoyed by my success with their most difficult witness, they described the line-up of witnesses I would be seeing the rest of the day.

  All three were waitresses. One had been run off the road as she drove home from work; two others were attacked as they walked home. All had been hit in the head, most likely with hammers, and one had sustained a skull fracture.

  And then there was the incredible lady whose skull was bashed in; when she came to, she discovered that her guts were strewn out on the ground around her, yet still had the presence of mind to gather them close to her bleeding body and stagger down the road for help.

  All the girls had been battered about the head so severely that it seemed as if the men were intent on killing them. With each attack, the men seemed to be growing more and more out of control.

  I must say that so much suffering being laid at my feet hour after hour began to blur after a while, but one of the witnesses I will never forget.

  Betsy was a stunning beauty, one of those natural blondes whose cheeks flush pink, with perfect teeth and skin like a ceramic doll’s. She had that kind of soft sweetness about her that makes you want to shelter and protect her.

  I couldn’t imagine a more vulnerable prey for two such savage predators. They had run her pickup truck off the road, dragged her from the cab and beaten her into unconsciousness. She’d lain in a coma for almost two days.

  Her boyfriend brought her to the police department and she seemed stoic enough until the detective finally left us alone. But once the door had closed and I tried to talk to her, she seemed to sink into herself and silent tears began to course down her cheeks while she mewed quietly, like a tiny, injured kitten.

  Instantly I set aside my pastels, crossed the room, and touched her shoulders. It’s important that not to grab a victim of sexual assault for a hug unless they indicate to you that they want one. Some can’t stand to be touched at all, so I’ve learned to let any touch be gentle. Leaning over, I pressed my forehead against hers and said, “I’m so sorry this happened. I was attacked, too…”

  I told her, briefly, what had happened to me, and she said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you!”

  Kneeling down, I looked straight into her eyes and smiled. “I’m not!” I said. “I’ve taken my pain and I’ve turned it into this job. Now I get to catch hundreds of guys just like the one who attacked me. I’m over it, baby,” I added with a confident nod. “And don’t you worry. Some day you will be, too. It just takes time. You’ll see.”

  A timid smile peeped through the tears, but still she wept.

  “I bet you were scared to come here,” I said, moving back over to my easel, “because you thought it was going to be hard.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, don’t you worry a bit. Shoot, I’ve worked with five-year-olds. This’ll be easy. Watch and see.”

  I keep tissues mixed in with my art supplies, and I handed her some. She dabbed at her eyes and I gave her a few moments to compose herself.

  When I knew she was ready to begin, she held herself together pretty well. “Here’s a book that will help you remember.” I handed her the FBI Facial Identification Catalogue. I know of at least one high-profile forensic artist who doesn’t like to use the catalogue, thinking it contaminates the witness, but I have found this not to be true at all. Working with it is faster, more successful and—most importantly—much easier on the witness.

  Over the years, I’ve collected half a dozen of the catalogues. When a witness selects, say, a pair of eyebrows, I’ll take one of my copies of the catalogue and clip it to the left-hand side of my drawing board. While they search for another facial feature, I’ll start sketching the eyebrows they’ve chosen, using my copy of the book as a guide. Eventually, I’ll have catalogue pages clipped up and down both sides of my drawing board so that I can glance at them as I construct the face from a crime victim’s fractured memories.

  While we worked on the first sketch, Betsy would sometimes cry a little and I’d find a way to make her laugh. I asked her about her boyfriend. He was apparently a great guy who was wonderful to her and it soothed her to talk about him.

  I’ve found through the years that, when dealing with multiple attackers, people often describe first the one who scared them the least. When I turned the drawing board around to show her the first sketch, Betsy broke down and wept, but she was able to calm herself again and we moved on to the second suspect.

  We got through the second sketch quickly and I turned the easel around for her comments and changes. I could see that this was extremely difficult for her, almost unbearable, and I worked quickly to incorporate the changes, then hurried to turn the easel back around so that the drawing was no longer in her line of sight.

  Suddenly, Betsy’s face began to swell with huge purple hives. I’d seen hives before, but I’d never before in my entire career seen a witness react so horribly to seeing the face of the attacker. Soon, her face had swollen so severely that she no longer even looked like herself.

  While tears continued to stream down her reddened, bloated face, I tried to hide my alarm and comforted her as gently as I could. Pulling up a chair close—but not too close—to her, I said, “They’re going to catch him, I promise. He’s gone now and you’re safe here. And don’t you worry, you don’t have to leave until you’re ready.”

  But her face kept growing redder—the most dramatic physical manifestation of terror I have ever seen.

  “Listen, you know what’s so good about these guys being the most horrible creeps you ever saw?”

  “What?” she muttered into her tissue as she tried, in vain, to staunch the flow of tears.

  “The more terrible they are and the more often they attack, the more likely they will be caught!”

  Snuffling, hiccuping, she regarded me through the slits of eyes swollen nearly shut, and I could see that she had not thought of that before. The more destroyed a victim is, I’ve found, the more likely they are to believe that their attackers will somehow get away with it, maybe even come back for them.

  “Yeah, Betsy, these are some of the sickest guys I’ve ever heard of and I work in Houston, Texas. We had over five hundred murders last year alone. I’m telling you, these creeps will get caught and you will have the privilege of watching them go down!”

  Still, it was another twenty minutes before the hives had subsided to the point that Betsy felt comfortable enough to leave. I went to the door, cracked it open and gestured to her boyfriend, who came right away. After giving me a hug, she threw herself into his strong arms and walked out of the building with her face buried in his coat.

  After nine hours of this kind of thing, I dragged myself and my easel through the front door of my parents’ house, where Mama met me with a happy hug, followed by a toddling Tiffany, chocolate chip cookie clutched in her fat little fist. Wearily I dropped my gear onto my bed, then went into the living room and sank into the sofa, so drained I could barely hold up my head.

  Mama appeared in the d
oorway, fragrant cooking aromas wafting in the air after her. “So,” she asked with a bright smile, “how was your day?”

  I stared at her. How innocent was the safe, loving world of my parents’ home. How different from the horrors that inhabited my world.

  Could I explain it? Should I explain it?

  If you’ve ever had a cop in the family and you’ve wondered why he or she seems unwilling to talk about his or her work, well, now you know why.

  Swallowing back the tears, managing a stiff smile, I said, “Great, Mama. Just great.”

  The next day, I took all the information I had gleaned from all the witnesses and put together a true composite of the images of the two men. My sketches aired on local television news that night and were published in the paper. A local businessman offered a reward of $13,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of these two men and the composites and reward were featured on a Crime Stopper’s Wanted poster.

  One of the local television news crews asked if they could interview me on-air, and with Captain Dotson’s permission, I agreed. At the end of the interview, I pleaded with people to please turn these guys in, to call, that they could remain anonymous even after collecting the reward.

  When I got back from the TV interview, Mama greeted me with a crazy, funny, high-spirited dance. Slapping her sewing button-tin on her fanny like a tambourine, she was singing, “There’s an expert from Texas who does good sketches and now they’re puttin’ her on the eve-nin’ news!”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  That night, we watched the broadcast together and Mama and Daddy were so proud of me; they thought I was a hero. Mama even got calls from friends saying they thought I looked like her. She loved it.

  But there’s one small problem that comes with being good…something that can take a good sketch and turn it into something bad.

  Turns out those two monsters were watching, too. They saw themselves on TV. And they knew it was only a matter of time until they got caught. So they ran.

  None of us knew it at the time, of course, but even as the evening news credits were rolling across the screen, two born losers were hitting the road out of town.

  They wouldn’t stop, either, until they got to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then the true horrors began.

  On the plane home, Tiffany and I were seated up front, close to the first class cabin. She was charming as usual and, as we settled into the flight, the facade I’d worn to please my parents and hide my own distress from them began to fall away like plaster from an old ceiling.

  Without warning, I heard myself whisper, “They gotta kill someone.”

  In a flash, it came to me. These guys wanted to party while they killed someone, and they liked to egg each other on. All of the witnesses had reported that the men had appeared to be drunk, and I was sure they were doing drugs, too.

  Most likely they were aware that all of their victims had gone on to survive their attacks, I figured, and they wanted to kill, they needed to kill, and they for sure didn’t want to leave any witnesses who could provide a handy description to a sketch artist.

  All the pent-up grief I’d felt in the presence of so many shattered women, combined with the very real fear I felt for their next, unknown, victim, seemed to hit me at once and tears began to flow down my cheeks the same way they had poor Betsy’s.

  I tried to sit still, to will the tears to stop, but nothing worked. Using a cloth diaper that I kept in the diaper bag to throw over my shoulder while holding Tiffany, I kept swabbing at my face and pretending that nothing was wrong, but soon the flight attendants spotted me. One of them asked if I was okay and I said the same thing I would have said to Mama, “Sure, I’m fine.”

  But I wasn’t fine. Tiffany seemed to sense my distress, the way babies do, and she responded by squawking and fussing and generally drawing the kind of attention that you don’t want your child to get on an airplane. I thought she was sleepy and took care of her the best I could, while, the whole time, I continued to sob silently.

  After about ten minutes of this, the flight attendant emerged from the first class cabin and said, “Ma’am, why don’t you come on up here to first class?”

  I was mortified enough in coach class, struggling with a fussy baby with tears streaming down my face. The last thing I wanted to do was foist myself off on more passengers. I turned down her offer with a smile so fake she must have wondered if I was having a nervous breakdown.

  Who knows. Maybe I was. And who wouldn’t?

  She disappeared into the first class compartment, then came right back out. Leaning down close to my ear, she said, “Everyone in first class wants you to come on up. I asked, okay? Now, come on.”

  Defeated, I gathered up my baby and my stuff and wearily followed her into first class, where I grabbed one of the seats at the rear. Both seats on that side were empty, which gave me ample room to lay my baby down on a soft blanket for a nap, patting her padded behind and trying—for goodness sake!—trying to stop crying, myself.

  Finally, Tiff fell asleep. I leaned my head on the chair back, closed my eyes and tried to imagine that my brain was like a toy Etch-a-Sketch. All I had to do was turn it upside-down, give it a shake and erase the nightmare images on the screen.

  It didn’t work, really, but it was the best I could do and still hold on to my tattered sanity.

  I guess if I had to use one word to describe Robert Wayne Lambert, twenty-one years old at the time, and Scott Allen Hain, his angel-faced seventeen-year-old partner, it would be depraved.

  Lambert was an ex-con, just paroled from Alford Correctional Center in Springtown, Kansas, where he had served two years for robbery, when he met Hain, who had escaped from a Sand Springs, Kansas juvenile detention facility while on a three-hour pass.

  Lambert had been the lucky recipient of the state’s “cap law,” meaning that, since his conviction had been for a non-violent offense, when the state’s prison population reached 95 percent capacity, he was one of hundreds of inmates set free. Had he not been released, he would not have met Hain.

  I’m not saying Hain wouldn’t have committed brutal crimes on his own anyway, but there was something about the marriage of these two minds that converged into pure evil.

  Court documents show that, as early as 1983, Lambert admitted having a problem with drugs. He confessed to having used marijuana, tranquilizers and even hallucinogens. It is not known whether he was using any of these drugs with Hain during the subsequent attacks, robberies, rapes, and murders they committed, but I think we can assume that Lambert wasn’t exactly an upstanding, tax-paying, church-going citizen, either.

  Two days after my sketches of the men were circulated throughout Wichita, Kansas, they broke into the home of Charles Stanton and his girlfriend, Terry Martin, near Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  “I was asleep in my bed with my girlfriend,” Stanton later testified, “when we were awakened by somebody screaming at us.” Stanton was horror-struck to see a man—later identified as Hain—standing at the foot of the bed, with a gun pointed at his face. He was ordered to roll over onto his stomach.

  “Give us your money and your jewelry,” the man demanded.

  Terry Martin asked who the man was and he said, “Shut up, bitch, or I’ll kill you!”

  Stanton then heard “a loud crack.” He thought he’d been shot in the back of the head. He found out later that his skull had been smashed with a hammer.

  “I took a deep breath and went limp,” he said, adding that the last thing he tasted before going unconscious was blood, and the last thing he heard was a terrified Terry, her voice shaking, saying, “Where are you taking me?”

  Terry Martin was driven to a remote location near the small town of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, where the men raped her, hit her in the head with a hammer and left her for dead.

  When she regained consciousness, she stumbled across a field and crawled through a barbed-wire fence, which punctured her in the neck, before finally getting help.

 
; At the trial, months later, Terry’s boyfriend testified, but prosecutors did not call Terry Martin herself.

  She was just too traumatized.

  But it turns out that Terry Martin and her boyfriend were just a practice run for Lambert and Hain.

  A couple of weeks later, they struck again.

  At about 2:30 A.M. on October 6, 1987, the two predators were prowling around, looking for someone to rob, when they came across Randy Young, twenty-seven, and Debra Mitchell, twenty-two, sitting in a parked car behind a club.

  Both Randy and Debra worked at a Tulsa restaurant. Randy was a bartender and Debra was working her way through Oklahoma State University as a waitress. They were good friends. Sometimes they liked to go to a club after work and unwind, but they were not lovers. They just enjoyed one another’s company. Randy’s truck was parked nearby and they were sitting in Debra’s car, talking.

  The two men crawled up onto the car and forced their way inside. Hain slipped into the back seat and pressed a knife to Randy’s throat, while Lambert shoved into the front seat and aimed a gun at the petrified couple. They demanded money and both young people immediately complied, turning over all they had to Lambert and Hain.

  It amounted to around $400.

  To show their appreciation for the couple’s cooperation, the men bashed Randy Young in the head with a hammer, then bound his hands and feet with rope and hog-tied him. They stuffed him into the trunk of Debra’s car.

  Then they brutally raped and sodomized Debra.

  After clubbing her over the head with the same bloody hammer, they crammed Debra into the trunk of her car next to her injured friend who, like Debra, was not only still alive, but conscious. She was not tied up.

  Robert Lambert had once lived with his sister in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, and that’s where he and Hain had taken their last victim, Terry Martin. They returned to this same spot with Debra’s car, the two victims still locked in the trunk. Scott Hain drove. Robert Lambert followed behind in Randy Young’s red Isuzu pick-up truck.