by Lois Gibson
One witness, an elderly man who wore thick glasses, had only caught a glimpse of a cop-killer as the man drove past the witness in his car going forty miles per hour, at night—yet the sketch was instrumental in bringing down the murderer of a young sheriff’s deputy.
I’ve done sketches with witnesses who couldn’t talk, because their throats were cut or who were drugged-up in hospitals, witnesses who were very young children, witnesses who swore they only saw the suspect from the side, witnesses who had been victimized weeks, months, sometimes even years before I was asked to sketch the perpetrator. None of them believed that working with a sketch artist would do any good.
If police detectives take the word of crime witnesses and victims who swear they did not get very good looks at perpetrators, then detectives would never call in forensic sketch artists.
But the truth is that reasonably talented, fairly well-trained forensic artists will be able, in most cases, to elicit witness descriptions and to produce composite sketches that have at least a one-in-three chance of being effective.
What most people don’t realize is that the most important aspect of compositry is not the artwork—it’s the interview. In the next chapter, I will outline proven interviewing techniques I’ve developed through the years, that can enable an aspiring forensic artist to get a head start in obtaining an excellent likeness from even the most reluctant witness.
Bottom line: Cops—please just trust your artist. No matter what the witness says about not adequately seeing the criminal, give the artist a chance.
Perhaps the sketch will not help to solve the case.
But more likely…one more criminal creep can be stopped before he or she hurts anyone else.
MYTH #8: If the sketch does not look exactly like the perpetrator, it will have been a waste of time and money.
This mind-set equates compositry to a math problem: it’s either wrong or it’s right.
However, the aim of forensic compositry can not be evaluated in simplistic terms. No forensic artist is ever going to get a rendition from a witness description that is going to be a photographic likeness—although we can sometimes come pretty darn close.
What is needed for the purposes of identification is a resemblance between the sketch and the suspect. A likeness. Not a sameness.
I can’t emphasize enough that I have done and I have seen others do some really poor likenesses that have led, directly, immediately to the identification of suspects. Remember my first “hit?” The case where the witness made me spend three hours trying to recreate the evil snarl he’d seen on the suspect’s face? It was only the third composite I had ever done and I was so convinced I had failed that I decided, then and there, that I was through with forensic art.
But as soon as the sketch was aired on TV, the suspect’s roommate called Detective Osterberg, who was handling the case, and told him that although the sketch looked just like him, the culprit was his roommate, to whom he bore a resemblance.
I look back now at my early, primitive effort and I am stunned that we got a hit on that composite at all. I was just starting out; I had no training as a forensic artist; I knew nothing about interviewing techniques. And yet the composite I did broke the case, literally, overnight.
When I did the facial reconstruction in the Angel Doe case, the recreation turned out not to look exactly like LaShondra did, but I recreated enough of her smile, using what I knew of the dental placement of teeth, that her grandmother spotted her instantly while channel-surfing TV one evening months after LaShondra had disappeared. The grandmother said that the portrait was not an exact likeness of LaShondra, but it was close enough to prompt her to call Sgt. Douglas and to insist on meeting with him that very night.
Usually, poorly-done sketches have been made by artists who have been under-utilized by police—they simply have not had enough practice. When I first started out, most of my sketches were clumsy. I didn’t start getting really good until I was allowed to do at least three sketches in a week.
However, even those early, poor sketches successfully identified about one out of every three criminals sought.
As I said, compositry is a tool for investigators to use. It can be the most valuable tool in the box or it can turn out to be not as necessary as DNA analysis or a confession, depending upon the case.
The way I see it, every carpenter has a toolbox he takes everywhere with him. He never leaves out the hammer or the screwdriver because he thinks they may not be as useful as the saw. He keeps his tools together, because he never knows when one of them might be the right one to use.
As Lt. Zamora said, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by using compositry to catch elusive criminals.
MYTH #9: If the composite isn’t done right after the crime occurred, it will be too late to get a workable sketch from the witness.
Remember, for instance, the Sara Rinehart case, in which investigators didn’t even call me until months after her murder? Or for that matter, the Elizabeth Smart case, in which her father worked with Dalene Nielson five months after Elizabeth was taken—remembering the face of a homeless man with whom he had worked for less than an afternoon a year before.
I can say this from the experience of being attacked. You don’t ever forget a face like that.
And to prove it, I have done a composite sketch of the man who raped and tried to kill me years ago. We’re including it in this book. Who knows? We might get a hit.
MYTH #10: It’s impossible to get good composite sketches from witnesses under the age of twelve.
Again, I hope I’ve laid that myth to its final rest in this book. Three of the cases covered here involved my getting incredible likenesses from young children. I could have included hundreds more. In fact, today, I work at least twenty-five cases a year from the juvenile sex crimes division of the HPD.
Some investigators worry that it might be too traumatic to ask a child witness to provide a description for a composite, but I have found just the opposite to be true. They’ve not only suffered through the assault, but they have also already been questioned by a variety of law enforcement, social services and medical personnel, not to mention parents or other well-meaning adults.
At no time, during all this questioning, have they been able to feel as if they can do something to help. But time and again, when children are offered the opportunity to contribute to investigations, they are eager to do so. Remember nine-year-old Annie Tyson who thought to tell investigators that the man who had raped and murdered her mother and set fire to her body, then raped Annie—had parted the blinds to look outside? Investigators were able to get an excellent set of fingerprints from those blinds.
I have worked with many victims of sexual assault who were young children and have gotten such good composites from them that one perpetrator, James Daniel Raiford, actually called the police and turned himself in, quote, “because I saw myself on TV.”
I’ve had kindergartners who were so excited by the likeness of the composite that they ran outside and grabbed their mothers’ hands, wanting to show them the pictures.
Just like Mary Katherine Smart and Jordan Rinehart, children know what they saw.
It’s appalling to me when I think of the forensic art talent out there that is being wasted in this most powerful and important area.
In the eleven years my friend Joy Mann has been sketching for the Chicago area, she has been asked to do a composite sketch for a juvenile sex crimes victim only five times. Two of her five sketches helped solve those crimes. In a city that size, as many as 5,000 stranger-on-stranger child rapes have been worked by police since Joy started freelancing there.
And yet, a talented forensic sketch artist who is readily available to police in that area has only done five composites—two of which led to solving the case.
When I think of how many cases she could have helped to break and how many child sexual predators out there could have been stopped because of her work—and others like her—because law
enforcement still clings to this antiquated myth about working with children…it makes me sick.
MYTH #11: Releasing a composite sketch to the media will bring in too many leads for stretched-too-thin investigators to track down.
Just as in the Elizabeth Smart case, many, many pessimistic investigators all over this country don’t call in composite artists or don’t release composite sketches to the media from fear that dozens of leads will pour in, forcing them to dedicate hundreds of man-hours chasing them all down.
What they are unable—or unwilling—to realize is that, in many cases, the leads that come in will mostly point to one perpetrator.
Once I worked a particularly horrible case in which two little girls, ages seven and eight, had been raped. The damage done to their small bodies was so severe that I had to do the drawing at their hospital bedsides. HPD detectives released the sketch without delay.
Almost immediately, the investigators began getting calls saying things like, “That’s Al, who works at Thompson’s,” or, “That guy looks like Al Darden,” or, “He sure looks like a guy I work with by the name of Al.”
One detective had been up two nights in a row, working this case, and when the calls started to come in, he made little hash marks on the side of his notepad. After a dozen or so hash marks, he said, “I guess the guy’s name is Al. I’m going to Thompson’s.”
He walked into the store, holding a copy of my sketch in front of him, and the night manager said, “What are you doing with a picture of Al?”
The detective not only got his man, but he got an iron-clad confession as well and Houston now has one less predator pervert out there on the streets as a result.
I like the way one of my detective buddies put it. He said, “Hell, give me a lead. I’ll take any lead—I don’t care if there are too many!”
MYTH #12: Only the police have the authority to order a forensic sketch and to release it to the media.
This is a dirty little secret and one I wish I did not have to reveal here, but as I’ve stated before, I am—first and foremost—a victim’s advocate.
After twenty-three years working with and for the Houston Police Department and outlying departments in Harris County, as well as other departments in Kansas and other states and the FBI, I can state without hesitation that I love my law enforcement friends like brothers and sisters. I am so proud to be considered a part of them and the work they do.
Over the years, I believe the cops I work with, by and large, have come to love me too and I know that many of them trust me and my gifts unhesitatingly. Each and every day of my life, I thank God for them.
But as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, not all law enforcement investigators have the same kind of respect for forensic art as my colleagues do. As we have seen, detectives will often either not use compositry at all in the investigation of a case or they will order a composite drawing, but refuse to release the sketch to the media.
Sometimes as we saw John Walsh and America’s Most Wanted do in the Elizabeth Smart case, it becomes necessary to step right over the heads of stubborn detectives and release the sketch yourself.
If police refuse to make the sketch available to a family, then all the family has to do is hire one of 2,000 trained forensic artists in America who might be willing to do it freelance and in some cases, for no charge or for only the most modest of fees. (In fact, I would be highly suspicious of forensic artists who may command fees in the thousands. Hire someone you can afford or someone willing to do it for free in order to draw attention to their abilities through the resulting publicity.) In fact, in the case of Elizabeth Smart, the composite drawing which actually led to the arrest of Brian David Mitchell and the release of Elizabeth Smart was done for free by Dalene Nielson, who just wanted to prove to the Salt Lake authorities that her work could help find the perpetrator.
Sometimes, even when authorities agree to use a forensic artist, they refuse to budge when new details come in. I know of one artist who would rather I not use his name (he doesn’t want to anger the police he’s trying to convince to hire him more often). But this fine artist did a good composite of the infamous Angel Resendiz serial killer. Resendiz was known as the “railroad killer,” for his habit of riding rail cars from state to state, then jumping off whenever he came across homes close to the tracks and brutally, horribly murdering its occupants. Then he’d just leap back onto the train and disappear into the night.
The first sketch done by my talented friend was completed in a hospital; the witness was so badly injured that she could not talk and the resulting sketch was rough. Later, when the witness had recovered a bit, she contacted my friend and told him that the killer had worn a pair of glasses, the frames of which were tinted a peculiar light color. She absolutely insisted upon doing the drawing again, this time in color, and my friend faithfully recreated the light-framed glasses.
But the investigators handling the woman’s case had already printed up posters using the original sketch and they stuck with their posters. When America’s Most Wanted profiled the case, my friend’s second sketch was not released.
Angel Resendiz went on to slaughter nine more people.
Turns out Resendiz had relatives living in the area where my friend had done the sketch. Had the sketch been released to the media, Resendiz could have been identified years before he finally was. (I can say this with assurance, because newspaper photos of Resendiz look almost identical to my friend’s color sketch.)
So although I would love more than anything to be a cheerleader for everything law enforcement investigators do, I am only too painfully aware that, like everyone else, detectives are human too. They make mistakes just like the rest of us.
If you are victimized and the police department in your area does not have a forensic artist, hire your own artist, get your own sketch and release it yourself to the media.
You just might find yourself becoming your own hero.
It is my passionate hope that if the cases you’ve read about in this book have not laid to rest these persistent myths about compositry, then at least this chapter will do so.
If you are a law enforcement officer who has hesitated to use the skills of a forensic artist because of one or all of the myths I’ve discussed, I hope with all my heart that, at the very least, you might consider trying this technique.
In fact, I hope you give it a try not just once, but three times.
I guarantee that at least one of those times you’ll succeed in identifying a criminal who might—without the sketch—be allowed to roam free.
Chapter Fifteen:
What You Need to Know to Become a Forensic Artist
I not only believe, but sincerely hope, that at this point more than a few people reading this book are thinking, You know, I’ve always wanted to be a forensic artist, but I have no idea how to go about breaking into the field.
There are more than a few discouragements and obstacles preventing talented people from making forays into becoming forensic artists, but I don’t believe it has to be that way.
My mission in writing this book has been, from the beginning, to get more forensic artists out there and to convince, wherever possible, more law enforcement agencies and the public of the need to hire forensic artists.
If I could accomplish these goals, I would be thrilled and if, in the process, we all catch more savage criminals and, in so doing, empower more crime survivors, then I would truly feel fulfilled.
After I spent more than twenty years working as a forensic artist, in their 2004 and 2005 volumes, the Guinness Book of World Records chose to feature me as the forensic artist whose work had helped to solve more crimes than any other forensic artist in the world.
I’d love to have more of you join me. This chapter is me, speaking to you, the aspiring forensic artist, telling you just what you need to know to make your dream come true and to help us all solve more crimes.
The first most important thing you need to know.
Though, of course, you need some artistic talent and an ability to draw faces well and quickly, this job is not about being an artist or about producing fine works of art for all to admire and hang on their walls. (Although, like me, you might do that in your spare time.)
Forensic art is about law enforcement.
Before an artist can sit down with a crime victim or witness, he or she needs to be a special kind of person, a person who can talk at length with someone who has just experienced quite possibly the worst trauma of his or her life. The artist must be able to sit with these witnesses/victims, listen to their stories, watch them break down and sob or any of many emotional reactions to trauma, elicit from them as much information as possible, do the sketch and then, when these services are needed again, do the whole thing all over as many times as the detectives call you.
In some ways, you need to be able to think like a cop and understand the kinds of things you need to know if you’re going to turn out a sketch that detectives can use, but at the same time, not be “cop-like.” By that I mean the artist can and should be more empathetic than a law enforcement officer is able to be, since his or her job description is different. (We’ll get more into that later.)
If you go into this field understanding that you have to be able to deal with traumatized people almost every day while, at the same time, going on to live a normal happy life and if you are able to realize that your own life will be so deeply enriched by how much you’ve been able to help those same witnesses/victims—then you’ve just cleared the biggest hurdle to becoming a forensic artist.
The second most important thing you need to know.
Be prepared, not only in the beginning, but each and every day of your career, to meet resistance and difficulty. Not just from skeptical law enforcement officers—which does fade as your success rate climbs—but from the witnesses and victims themselves.