Faces of Evil

by Lois Gibson

  But if I could, I would tell Emily that the sketch didn’t catch these two creeps—she did.

  My crime scene is victims’ memories and the bravery they have in recounting traumas and helping me to recreate the faces of evil they’ve been forced—against their wills—to confront on the most terrible day of their lives, inspires me every day.

  Remember when I said people ask me if I have nightmares? And they don’t just ask me that.

  They also ask me how I can go on and do what I do, year after year.

  After all, my days are filled with tales of misery and horror, of people brutalized at the hands of destructive predators like Theodore Goynes, Chester Higginbotham, Jeffrey Williams, Donald Eugene Dutton and Kerry Ashley O’Neal—and thousands more like them.

  But if I could just let those people who ask this question spend some time with survivors like Emily and Annie Tyson and Maria Santos and so many, many more, who display almost unimaginable courage and tenacity and strength of soul when they climb back up out of the pits of hell…

  If I could just introduce them to some incredible friends of mine, like T. Walton, Clarence Douglas, Manny Zamora, Paul Deason and so many more valiant men and women out there every day of their lives, fighting the good fight to find justice and to give peace to those survivors…

  If I could put them in touch with other heroic souls who have crossed my path through the years who, in one way or the other, have also made their marks, through compassion, forgiveness and sheer strength of will; people like Heidi Guzman, Tina Shiets and one little boy who grew up and spent thirty years in search of his father’s killer…

  If they could truly see what I see every day, they would know why I do what I do and why I am so grateful to have the opportunity.

  It’s been a long time since a terrified girl named Lois Herbert cowered in her apartment after a violent attack waiting for the blood to drain out of her eyes…and it’s people like Emily, the high school drill team member who refused to give in to pain and fear and went on to perform only days after being raped, who teach me each and every day…just how far we have all come.

  Part Two:

  My Mission

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Making the Case for Forensic Art: A Dozen Bodacious Myths That Keep Some Cops Away

  On the morning of June 5, 2002, while getting ready for work, I and many others turned on our television sets to the horrible news that yet another beautiful, innocent young girl had been wrenched from her safe warm bed in the dark of night by a stranger and abducted.

  Over the course of the next year, people the world over anguished over the loss of Elizabeth Ann Smart, a beloved fourteen-year-old girl with five brothers and sisters from Salt Lake City, Utah. We learned she played the harp and dreamed of attending Julliard. The media displayed images of her shy smile, her wholesome, blond-haired, blue-eyed looks—an appearance that was mirrored in the traumatized face of her little nine-year-old sister, Mary Katherine, who had lain in bed next to Elizabeth on the night Elizabeth was kidnapped.

  Elizabeth’s devastated parents, Ed and Lois Smart, and Elizabeth’s large extended family, worked tirelessly to keep those images at the forefront of the people’s minds in the progressively less promising hope that someone, somewhere, would know something that would bring Elizabeth home. With the eager assistance of John Walsh and the staff at America’s Most Wanted, Elizabeth’s case was featured repeatedly on their popular television broadcast, even after the police investigating the case had told Ed Smart that his daughter was most likely dead and that the man they believed to have taken her had died too, taking the secret of what had happened to Elizabeth with him to his grave.

  The ups and downs of this long road are described in their book, Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope, written by the Smarts with Laura Morton (Doubleday, 2003).

  Like the rest of the country, I too was spellbound watching Elizabeth’s story unfold and like everyone else, I also shouted and wept tears of joy when she was actually found alive and returned—at long last—to her family.

  But when high-profile cases like this garner public attention, it hits me differently than most, because of that old nagging burn, that drive that propels me forward in my life, that overwhelming urge to do something to help. Naturally, the first thing I would have wanted to do after hearing about Elizabeth’s abduction was sit down with Mary Katherine as soon as possible and do a sketch of Elizabeth’s abductor.

  Unfortunately, not every law enforcement agency in this country is as sold on the use of compositry as is the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. And as I’ve related, it took me quite a while to break down the barriers even at my home department and, in all fairness to them, it took me some time to get as good at compositry as I am now.

  For instance, I can now do a complete composite sketch in an hour or less in most cases, but when I first started out, it sometimes took me as long as three hours. Like any other skill, compositry takes practice and I can only suggest to departments who are taking their first tentative stabs at the use of forensic sketches—the more an artist does it, the better and faster he or she will become.

  It’s not my intention to criticize other police investigators around the country for mistakes they may or may not have made in handling their own high-profile cases, but I do think it imperative to use what cases I think serve as illustrations of what I consider to be various myths about the use of compositry that stubbornly persist within the law enforcement community to this day.

  Remember the Sarah Rinehart case in Newton, Kansas? How little Jordan Rinehart and her friend told police repeatedly that it was not Jordan’s uncle who had murdered her mother? And yet the police kept doggedly pursuing the uncle as a prime suspect not just for months, but for years—even excluding leads that clearly pointed to a stranger who still lived within their jurisdiction.

  But when Chester Higginbotham was finally fingered as a hard suspect by Detective Sergeant T. Walton—he looked almost identical to the forensic sketch I had done using the descriptions provided by two little girls, ages five and six. If police had only listened to the children and paid attention to my sketch, it is possible that Higginbotham could have been taken into custody years before he was, which would have not only spared the Rineharts and Guzmans much pain and suffering, but very well may have saved the life of another victim, Jonetta McKown.

  Police departments routinely dismiss the statements provided by young children, even when their stories remain constant. Yet I am proud to point out that the Houston Police Department took very seriously the testimony of little Annie Tyson as to the murderer of her mother, Cynthia, calling me up in the middle of the night to come and do a sketch with this nine-year-old. Consequently, Jeffrey Lynn Williams was arrested within twenty-four hours of my doing the sketch with Annie.

  Sadly, this was not to be the case with the Salt Lake City Police Department. Just as the Newton, Kansas authorities had done before them, they refused to pay attention to Mary Katherine, who steadfastly insisted that it had not been a family member who had taken her sister. They wasted many valuable weeks chasing their belief that either Elizabeth’s father or her uncle had faked the kidnapping.

  Instead, once they finally accepted that a stranger had indeed kidnapped Elizabeth, they then concentrated on a man who had frequented her harp concerts—even though, once again, Mary Katherine insisted that this man, who was a complete stranger to the whole family—did not resemble the man who had taken Elizabeth.

  It should be mentioned here that the police actually used a sketch artist to get the likeness of the harp-concert man, but they did not listen to Mary Katherine or anybody else in the family, when the guy was not recognized. Eventually, the man was tracked down and completely cleared by police.

  After wasting more weeks.

  When the name of Richard Ricci surfaced as an ex-con who had done work on the Smart home and owned a vehicle that had once belonged t
o the Smarts, some Salt Lake investigators became obsessed with the notion that Ricci had kidnapped and probably killed Elizabeth, even though he had no history of sex abuse in his past and even though Mary Katherine—yet again—insisted that she remembered Richard Ricci, she knew Richard Ricci and it had not been Richard Ricci who had taken Elizabeth.

  Five months after Elizabeth was kidnapped, Mary Katherine suddenly remembered the name of a handyman who had been at the house for three hours one afternoon, months before and had worked on the Smart’s roof with Ed Smart.

  He called himself Immanuel.

  In all fairness to the Salt Lake authorities, they did do a computer check on Immanuel, but unfortunately, they used only one spelling of the name in the computer database: Emmanuel, which turned up no hits. So they quit there.

  According to his account in Bringing Elizabeth Home, when a sketch artist named Dalene Nielson walked into the Salt Lake Police Department and offered her services, Ed Smart not only had to beg for a sketching session with Dalene for more than a month, but when the sketch was finished, the police refused to release it to the media!

  Smart claims that the investigators explained that Immanuel was “one of fifty” homeless handymen who had worked on the Smart home during that time and that to have released the sketch to the media would have brought in too many leads that would have only confused the investigation. Instead, they quietly showed it around to homeless shelters in the Salt Lake area, with no result.

  But as I demonstrated in the drill team girl rape case and in the murder of Cynthia Tyson and in many, many other cases—what usually happens is that one name will pop up repeatedly in the leads that come in following the media release of a forensic sketch, thus giving detectives a powerful weapon to use in their investigation, helping them narrow down their efforts considerably and bring the investigation into sharp focus.

  Yet after Dalene did the sketch of Immanuel for Ed Smart, months passed while the investigation languished.

  Months.

  It wasn’t until John Walsh released the sketch on his television program, America’s Most Wanted, that a lead came in from “Immanuel’s” sister. She identified the man sketched as Brian David Mitchell, who had a history of sexual abuse of children and of abusing his ex-wife.

  Still, investigators did not take the leads seriously. They seemed fixated on their own pet theories rather than a lead generated by a sketch. The police did not put out an all points bulletin on Mitchell, who happened to be in custody in California at the time. Had they done so, he might have been caught at that time. (Salt Lake authorities interviewed the ex-wife and decided that her claims of sexual abuse of the children were only those of a bitter divorce. Had they checked, they’d have found medical records that would have provided evidence.)

  Instead, more months passed, months while that poor child was being starved, raped and brutalized by Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee.

  John Walsh ran a repeat segment and this time, Mitchell’s sons called in and ID’ed the sketch. The Smart family also uncovered evidence that revealed that Brian David Mitchell often hiked and camped in the mountains right behind their house.

  And still, police did not follow up.

  It wasn’t until a third broadcast of the sketch and repeat offerings of reward money were publicized on John Walsh’s America’s Most Wanted, that enough tips came in from viewers of the broadcast which finally led to Mitchell’s arrest.

  By a different police department, though. John David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee were arrested by the Sandy, Utah police department and Elizabeth Smart was finally rescued—nine months after her ordeal had begun.

  Although it’s very tempting for me to maintain, at this point, that if I’d done a sketch with Mary Katherine that first day, they would have found Elizabeth sooner…I just can’t make a claim like that, nor would I want to. Any number of sketch artists could have worked with Mary Katherine. Perhaps there would not have been a good result at that time. It might have taken a few months for her memories to work their way past the trauma.

  But I do think that had investigators considered her a solid eyewitness from the beginning, discounting family members and individuals she had never seen—or at the very least—if they had released Dalene’s sketch that she’d done with Ed Smart to the nationwide media and put out an all-points bulletin on Mitchell when the sketch generated his name as a suspect… then yes, I believe Elizabeth Smart would have been brought home maybe as much as four months before she actually was.

  She could have been home for Christmas with her family.

  I’m not trying to beat up on the Salt Lake City police, believe me. I consider myself part of the brotherhood of law enforcement officers and I see for myself, every day, what investigators go through and how hard they work, under unimaginable pressure, especially in high-profile cases like this one.

  All I want to do here is expose those myths that I think trip up many cops and keep them from making use of one of the most effective methods of investigation that exists today.

  It’s not about me.

  It’s about finding justice for as many crime victims as we possibly can.

  There is only one reason I do what I do and that is to catch criminals.

  The reason I wrote this book, the reason I teach courses in forensic art, the reason I give interviews to television and radio programs, newspaper and magazine reporters, the reason I get up each and every morning of my life is simple:

  I want to catch bad guys.

  But I’m only one person, one forensic artist with a fulltime job at one police department in one city in the United States.

  Over the years, I’ve kept count of the number of others out there who are like me: working fulltime at a major metropolitan police department—that is, whose duties are totally forensic art—and so far, I’ve only been able to come up with nineteen.

  According to the National Directory of Law Enforcement Administrators, which is put out by the National Public Safety Information Bureau, there are more than 39,320 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

  That is, city and county only.

  That doesn’t include state or federal law enforcement agencies.

  Nor does it take into account security providers or campus police agencies or any number of places in this country that employ people to enforce the law.

  Out of almost 40,000 law enforcement agencies, (not counting the feds, remember), I have been able to track down less than twenty fulltime forensic artists available—that is, not just called in a few times a year—to do composite drawings that will help to enable law enforcement officers to track down criminals.

  In my career many cops have told me they would most likely not have been able to solve their cases without forensic sketches. Multiply that by all the law enforcement agencies who do not have a forensic artist available and a conservative estimate would be… thousands of unsolved cases.

  Which means, thousands of bad guys who can then go on to do more bad things before they are eventually caught, usually after having committed multiple crimes, crimes that often grow progressively more serious.

  Most classes that teach forensic art—including the one provided by the F.B.I.—were not even begun until 1985. If you combine all the legitimate classes that are now available, including my own (at the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety) and you add up all the graduates of those classes over the years, there are at least 2,000 trained forensic sketch artists in the United States today.

  So it’s not that there aren’t enough people out there trained to do what I do. It’s that, even after all these years, there are still too many law enforcement officers and their agencies who continue to cling to their stubborn beliefs that the use of compositry isn’t useful. I hope to bust such myths open once and for all in these pages.

  Because the way I see it, for every cop who calls an artist anywhere in the country to do a sketch that helps to catch a bad guy—that’s one less crim
inal out there on the streets.

  One less guy like the monster who raped and tried to kill me.

  So the more artists we get out there doing what I do and the more crooks who get caught, the better our entire society will be.

  And the safer we all will be.

  I beg all of you reading this book to make it available to any law enforcement officers you may know. Urge them to read it or at least, to flip through its pages and read this chapter.

  Because if, as a result of this book, just one cop decides to reach out to one artist somewhere and have him or her provide a sketch that could help crack a case and catch a criminal… then, to me, it will be worth my efforts.

  MYTH #1: There is no need to use forensic artists because we’ve got computer software these days that’s just as good.

  This myth is the most pervasive. There is a good reason. Computer software companies can count, as I have, how many law enforcement agencies exist in this country today (and that doesn’t include the international market). If they can price their forensic sketching software so that they can make a profit of, say, fifty dollars a unit and if—through high-profile advertising in law enforcement journals and at law enforcement seminars and schools and conferences—they can convince big-city departments to purchase several programs and smaller departments that they need at least one…then the companies stand to make millions.

  Before you decide that I’m an artistic purist who fails to appreciate the finer points of computer-use, let me say that I sit on the board of directors for a company called Faceprint Global Solutions, which is trying to design a viable forensic sketching software. At my office at the Houston Police Department, I’ve got a computer on my desk. If I could find a program that worked as well at compositry as a human artist, I’d use it!

  But although I’ve tried all of the programs out there, I’ve never been able to discover one that worked as well as a good forensic artist.