Faces of Evil Read online

  They explained what they had to go through to gain the respect of their male peers. Many of them told with wry amusement how, once they had shown their willingness to leap into street fights, fists flailing, they were instantly accepted by their male brethren.

  Others detailed how they learned to parry back-and-forth with rude banter to gain acceptance. Some described responding to sexual harassment, not by filing grievances—which always resulted in instant and career-long ostracism—but by “knocking him on his ass.”

  Basically, they had to prove themselves.

  Proving herself—that is what each and every one of those brave women had to do to “break and enter” into “the brotherhood” of law enforcement officers—she had to prove herself. Not just once, but over and over again.

  I kept thinking to myself as I read about them how, though it was hard for women who had stood side-by-side with their male counterparts at the police and agency academies, had ridden patrol with them, fought with them, risked their lives with them…it was for even harder for me, a civilian, to break through that same barrier.

  And not just as a civilian—that was hard enough. And not just as a woman.

  But as an artist.

  Ask most any cop what they think of artists and they’ll use words like “flake” or “weirdo” to describe their ideas of what an artist is. Add to that the fact that I was a young mother, a housewife, and the task before me when I first started to work my way into the Houston Police Department was immense.

  And if that wasn’t enough of an obstacle, there was that other delicate little matter…how to pay me.

  While it’s true that I had a burning passion to do this work and would have gladly done it for free if I’d had that luxury, the truth of the matter is that my husband and I were struggling to raise a growing family. I needed to help support that family as best I could with what talents I had to offer. At that point, I was making most of my income as a portrait artist and I was busy enough at it that I actually was able to put my child (eventually, children) in day care during the day so that I could work without interruption. There were times when all that kept us from running out of diapers and baby food was a portrait commission.

  When I got a call from the police department to do a forensic sketch, I had to drop everything, pack up fifty pounds of gear into my ten-year-old car, navigate downtown Houston traffic (paying for gas myself) and find parking (again, at my own expense). Then I sat down with a witness for what was, since I was still learning, a session that was likely to run more than two hours. Afterward I packed everything up again and hauled it home.

  Every time I had a forensic sketch to do, it took half a day from my calendar—time I could have spent at home, finishing up a portrait. (And of course, there was day care for my children to pay for.)

  I couldn’t do my work for free and, anyway, if I had done it for free, I felt I never would have gotten any respect at all. I was a professional, this was my profession and I told myself I deserved fair compensation for it.

  None of this detracts from the passion I had for my work—and still do—but working as a forensic artist created quite a problem in the beginning, because cash-strapped police departments everywhere operate on very tight budgets that are set for them by the city council and there was no budget in the HPD for an artist. For several years, I had to be paid out of petty cash.

  Also, there was the matter of…What should I charge?

  As with every other aspect of my work, I had no guidelines to follow and had to make the rules up as I went along. And that is exactly what I did. My husband was making twenty-five dollars an hour as a construction plumber. I decided that I should be able to earn at least as much, so that is what I charged. As my husband’s fees went up, so did mine. When I was finally put on a regular salary seven years after I started, I made seventy-five dollars an hour—the same thing Sid would have made if he installed a water heater.

  Since I couldn’t fight with cops or ride with them to prove myself, I decided what I needed was a series of dazzling successes, and as luck would have it, that’s exactly what happened.

  Houston was teeming with crime, but if Homicide detectives thought they were overworked with 300 to 600 murders a year, Robbery was worse. Houston was riddled with about 18,000 robberies a year. That averaged out to 1,500 a month, or fifty a day—roughly two robberies every single hour of every single day.

  Needless to say, the detectives in the Robbery division were swamped, shorthanded and eager to try anything that would give them some help, so most of my calls in the early days came from Robbery. As my friend Lieutenant Manny Zamora pointed out to me once, robbers tend to keep robbing until they are caught or killed, so composites work well at catching robbers.

  At one point there was a rash of Radio Shack hold-ups. The perpetrator was always stereotypically described as an early-twenties black male, medium to muscular build, 5′10″ tall. Yet when I sketched for three different witnesses I came up with three distinctly different men. One even had a large mole over his left eyebrow.

  A few weeks later, they ran a raid to serve a warrant on a warehouse that was found to be loaded with stolen Radio Shack stuff. They arrested five men at the site, but when they brought them in, the men refused to give their identities. (This is a common tactic to hold up the police investigation and avoid, or at least postpone, being charged with a given offense.)

  However, once I had done my work, the Robbery detectives armed themselves with copies of my three sketches, went into the holding cells, pointed to the guys who resembled my sketches and said, among other things, “You robbed the Radio Shack on Long Point Ave, and you—back there with the mole—you robbed the one on Forty-third and T.C. Jester.”

  Each of the stunned robbers, assuming the detectives must have actual photographs of them, confessed—or rather, to be specific, snitched on each other.

  Thus almost from the beginning, Robbery “caught on” to the significance of my work and called me in.

  Sometimes robbery cases spilled over into sex crimes. An old man, watering his lawn, spotted a young man driving down the street who looked like a sketch of mine he’d seen; he wrote down the car license number and called it in. Not only was the man identified as the assailant of the sexual assault victim I had interviewed for the sketch, but it turned out he was also known as the “bandana bandit.” Wearing a sort of “old west” disguise, he robbed entire church congregations, patrons of restaurants, groups at ball fields playing softball—turns out he’d perpetrated hundreds of robberies, but the only victim who’d seen his face was the one he raped.

  In another, even more high-profile case, women joggers were being assaulted and raped while frequenting a popular jogging trail in Memorial Park. There was a great outcry throughout the city for the police to catch the criminal. Luckily, one of his victims gave me a good description for a sketch, and the police set a trap.

  They outfitted Paula Franks, a beautiful, athletic female detective, with a wire device and waited in a white van near the park, keeping a watchful eye out while Paula jogged up and down the trail. Each one of the officers in the van had a copy of my sketch and before every pass down the trail, Paula took another hard look at the composite.

  After one long, fruitless day, as rain started to fall, the detectives urged Paula to come in, but she said, “No, I wanna take another pass.” Almost immediately, a man passed by her on a bicycle. Moments later, he ran up behind her, and glimpsing his face, she recognized him as the rapist. Just before he grabbed her, she shouted, “It’s that son of a bitch! NOW!”

  But as he gripped Paula in the crook of his elbow and began choking her, she realized that the rain had disrupted her radio signal. The detectives in the van could not hear her. But as she fought him, one of the detectives spotted the struggle. Instantly they all piled out of the van and onto the attacker.

  It was a particularly satisfying arrest for me.

  Another rapist, known as the “San Felipe” rapis
t, was turned in by his own father when the older man recognized his son from one of my sketches. Detectives provided corroborating evidence when the disheartened father realized that the various vehicles described by victims matched trucks and cars belonging to him that he had loaned his son at different times.

  As word of these cases spread, a number of officers were very grateful for my help and became supportive of my work. They said encouraging things about me within the department, urging other detectives to try me out. Lieutenant Don McWilliams—the officer who gave me my first opportunity—and Captain Bobby Frank Adams of Homicide, as well as Deputy Chief Charles McClelland, were three of the most encouraging. They will always have my affection and gratitude.

  Of course, from the beginning, Robbery detectives were happy to have my help and I also received tremendous support from the Juvenile Sex Crimes division. Children who have been sexually assaulted can’t give detectives the make of a car or its license tag number, have no clue as to how tall someone is or how much he weighs and so on, but children do make superb witnesses as far as describing a person’s face. I usually got very good sketches from child witnesses and Juvenile Sex Crimes was always grateful and quick to call.

  But for every detective who saw the potential in my work and encouraged me to keep at it, there were ten more who thought a woman civilian had no place in law enforcement and that any kind of art was a waste of time and money.

  One cop was particularly obstructive. Word trickled down through the grapevine that he was telling other detectives that if they wanted to use me on a case they would have to pay for me out of their own overtime fund.

  Since cops are never paid well, to make extra Christmas or vacation money they depend on overtime pay. Sometimes, during times of particularly tight budget constraints, they are told that there is no more overtime pay available. This is particularly awful for detectives working homicides, because when their shift is up, they have to turn over the case on which they are working to the next shift—an almost impossible situation. The new detectives have no way of knowing what witnesses have already told investigating officers; traumatized victims have often developed rapport with the detectives on the scene and may not want to talk to the new guys and so on.

  When an officer refused to be fair about using me, it shut down any chance I might have had to work with crime victims who could have been helped by my skills. Sometimes their cases went unsolved, because one hardheaded old so-and-so didn’t like having a woman civilian around his police division.

  Outsider.

  No matter how hard I worked or how many successes I had, I was still an outsider, still struggling for respect, still trying to prove myself.

  After two years of this, I decided that I needed—no, was starved for—some extra training to help me do better the most difficult work I’d ever done. But I also knew that I needed some criminal justice polish on my resume—something that would certify me in a legitimate way, be instantly recognized and respected by law enforcement professionals.

  And I knew just the place to get it.

  The FBI Academy.

  Now, being a housewife artist trying to prove herself to a bunch of macho male cops in the 1980s was tough but it was nothing—a merry-go-round ride at the playground—compared to trying to break through the concrete wall that was and is a major metropolitan bureaucracy.

  The first cement block I ran into came when I inquired into enrolling in the FBI Police Composite Artist Training Course at what is technically known as the National Academy at Quantico, Virginia.

  I was told that I had to have a legitimate job at a law enforcement agency.

  So I asked several times at Homicide if they would consider creating a fulltime job for me with the division, but I was told again and again that they didn’t have it in their budget. Neither did Robbery or any of the other divisions I asked. The economy was down; crime was up; city hall had fiscal problems.

  With a constant stream of portrait commissions, a toddler at home and another baby on the way, I let it ride for months that turned into years. But there was never enough work freelancing at the HPD to replace what I was earning by doing portraits. Of course, everyone wanted portraits for Christmas presents, so every December I worked night and day painting—forget little Christmasy joys like decorating, baking and shopping—I was too busy painting portraits.

  But I didn’t give up. After my daughter’s birth in 1985, I started asking again about being hired on to the department so that I could attend the FBI Academy training course in forensic art.

  Robbery sent me to Homicide and Homicide sent me to Robbery—a familiar pattern that was getting harder and harder to take as my successes mounted and more detectives began to call for my services.

  In her book, Breaking and Entering, Connie Fletcher interviewed one female officer who commented that, in the beginning, she never got eye contact from male officers. In a sense, they would look over the heads of the female officers, excluding them from the conversation.

  In my case, it was phone calls I never got. Not phone calls asking me to do sketches—follow-up phone calls, telling me that we’d had a hit, that a case had been solved, at least in part, because of one of my sketches. If I called the detectives myself to inquire, they never answered my voice mails. I had to show up at the departments where they were milling around the offices. As soon as they saw me, they would tell me we’d had a hit.

  But I had to be there.

  And of course, I didn’t have an office at the police department or even a place to stash my things, so I just had to show up from time to time and walk through the offices to find out how things were going with a particular sketch or case. Which meant making a special trip downtown…

  One day, on an elevator ride up to Robbery to see how things were going, the doors opened up onto Homicide and I thought, What the hell.

  I wandered down the halls, and as he always did when he spotted me, Captain Bobby Frank Adams called out to me. Capt. Adams has always been a favorite of mine at the HPD. Tall, angular, with a cowboy drawl and cowboy sex appeal, he is immensely popular with the detectives in his command. He told anyone who asked that he thought I was a genius, and he even told one television reporter that he thought I was “psychic.”

  I stepped into his office and, after a moment or two of small talk, I blurted out, “I need to get a job here if I’m going to be able to go to the FBI Academy. The federal government pays for it and I need the training, but they won’t take me unless I’m employed by a law enforcement agency.”

  Capt. Adams’ eyes widened, “Did you hear about that meeting I was at this morning?”

  Of course I hadn’t heard about any meeting. How would I hear about meetings? I didn’t even hear when my own cases had been solved.

  “No,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “You knew about the meeting.”

  “No.”

  “You had to.”

  “I did not.”

  By this point, we were both getting annoyed, but when he finally realized that I had no clue what he was talking about, he explained that the new Chief, Lee Brown, had called a big meeting of division heads and had told them that if they wanted to start any new programs or positions, they were to take those requests straight to Cindy Smith.

  After carefully copying down her name and phone numbers on his Rolodex, he handed me her card as if it were a velvet pouch of diamonds.

  My heart pounded. Suddenly I had the name of a faceless bureaucrat who could make or break my whole career in forensic art. I knew I couldn’t just bluster into a meeting with her unprepared.

  So I went home. As if I were studying for a final exam in college, I gathered together facts and statistics and arranged photo comparisons of my best work: mug shots of captured suspects next to my sketches. Then I planned my wardrobe—actually waiting until I’d lost the baby-weight from my daughter Tiffany’s birth so that I could fit into my nicest sui
t.

  My biggest fear was that I’d do all this, make my pitch, only to have this faceless bureaucrat nod blandly, say, “thank you,” and then do absolutely nothing while my life hung in limbo. When I was finally ready to make my pitch, I wanted an answer and I wanted it then, not six months later. If the answer was no, then at least I could appeal—to the chief or the mayor or God, if I had to, somebody—but I couldn’t just let things hang. I’d been twisting slowly in the wind for years and I was growing weary and frustrated, sick of people like the cop who said detectives would have to pay me out of their overtime.

  Just before meeting with Ms. Smith, I called up my sister Adonna, the family genius, and asked her what I could say that would force Cindy Smith to give me an answer on the spot, without necessarily sounding rude or belligerent.

  Adonna thought for a moment, then said, “Say this: What is your determination on this matter?”

  Okay. Got it.

  I called for an appointment. On the day of the meeting, gripping my papers and trying to stand as tall as my 5′5″ frame would allow, I entered a large, empty boardroom. Taking a seat, I carefully laid out examples of my many successes on the polished table, putting together as impressive an array as I could.

  Then I waited.

  And waited.

  Finally, the door opened and Ms. Smith came in. Slender, well-dressed and attractive, she gave me a tepid handshake.

  She did not sit down.

  Instead, she stood, her back turned halfway to me, her head in profile, arms folded tightly across her narrow chest and listened while sliding sideways glances at me from time to time as if I were some unpleasant reptilian creature plopped on her garden wall.

  She scarcely looked at my artwork and mug shots. Her face was impassive.

  After briefly detailing a number of my successes and mentioning the number of solved cases directly attributed to my work, which amounted to one out of every three, I ended my little presentation by saying, “Detroit, Michigan has five artists available, yet they are one-third the size of Houston. Cleveland, Ohio has three artists on hand for their detectives to use, yet they are one-fifth the size of Houston.