Faces of Evil Page 11

  “At the very least,” I concluded, “Houston should have one.”

  My passion for my work, the driving desire I’d had ever since my attack to make my life matter, infused every word. I was breathless by the time I was finished, my cheeks hot with anticipation. Normally, I have a very confident demeanor—especially where my work is concerned—but this woman’s cold indifference unsettled me.

  And with good reason. Abruptly turning her back square to me, she headed for the door, saying only, “We’re finished here.”

  I had no idea what I had done or said that had offended her, or why she seemed to dislike me. But this was my greatest fear and I could not stand by and let it happen.

  I sprang to my feet and hurried over to trap her before she could leave the room. Looking her straight in the eye for the first time, I said, “What is your determination on this matter?”

  Clearly, my reaction had caught her off-guard. She could no longer dismiss me like a fly beneath the swatter. I could see her mind racing behind her imperious expression. Finally, in an arrogant tone, she said, “Just because there is a position created does not mean that you’ll get it!”

  WHAT?

  I could not believe what I had just heard. For five years I had worked so hard trying to break through the barrier of the HPD, using my talents, gifts and my own life tragedy to help crime victims, all alone with no one to mentor or help me, and she had the unmitigated gall to even suggest that they might, at long last, create the position I had begged for…and hire someone else to fill it?

  “No!” I cried. “I’m the only one doing this work! There’s no confusion about that! I’m the only one—”

  By this time, Ms. Smith had brushed past me and walked out the door. My last words echoed down the hall to her receding back, “—the only one in this whole area who’s doing this work!”

  By the time I reached to gather up my papers, my hands were shaking, no, I was shaking, from head to foot. In my entire career—my entire life—I had never encountered such rudeness, not even from those male cops who didn’t want me around.

  The rudeness, though, I could handle. I was a big girl, after all. But the thought that I had done all this work and agonized for so long just to have my golden opportunity handed over to someone else made me sick.

  But there was nothing else I could do that day.

  I went home, occupied myself with my babies and tried not to obsess about it. After two endless days, Ms. Smith called me to say that an officer would create a “study of the situation” and get back to me.

  Weeks crept past. I took care of my children, painted portraits, answered calls from the HPD, tried to hold on to my fragile sanity.

  Finally, I got a call from a female police officer who said that the city council had agreed to create a “line of funds” that would be dedicated to my freelance fees when I did composites. It wasn’t a job with health insurance and benefits, but it was enough.

  Enough to get me into the FBI Academy.

  Although when I applied I was told there would be at least a three-year wait to gain admittance to the forensic art course, I tried to have confidence. After all, I felt by this time I’d had enough experience and enough success to know my drawings were at least as good as other artists’ and better than most. Despite their words about delay, I was accepted almost immediately.

  I was excited to have this opportunity; the FBI represents the best of the best, not just in this country, but in the world… but to tell you the truth, one of the things that excited me most was the chance to run away from home for a couple of weeks.

  After all, my son was four years old and my baby girl eighteen months. I’d been in a frenzy of non-stop activity from the time my son was an infant, between running back and forth to the HPD, trying to prove myself and build a reputation at the department, painting portraits portraits portraits for extra money, keeping my marriage strong and caring for two toddlers. Now, though it was hard to leave them, I knew I had to. I loved my children and husband more than life itself, but if I was to be the police artist I wanted to be I needed this.

  And to make it sweeter, here I was going to get to climb on a plane and fly off to this Wonderful Land of Oz—a place where, all day long, I’d be surrounded by grown-ups; and not just that, but grown-ups who did the same thing I did!

  I was elated to think that for once—for the first time, actually—I’d be spending time with other forensic artists.

  For the very first time, I would not be alone.

  I was so eager to learn and to share experiences and just to soak up the atmosphere of my chosen profession without having to explain to someone what I did, or how I did it, or why. I wouldn’t have to sugar-coat it the way I did with my civilian friends (hiding the more gruesome and heart-wrenching details of some of my cases) and I wouldn’t have to hold back, trying not to be too pushy, the way I usually did with my cop colleagues. (With every difficult case, I always wanted to help, but was afraid that if I imposed myself on the investigation, they would think I was trying to tell them how to do their jobs—or worse, was indulging in the worst sort of ambulance-chasing. So I usually hung back and waited for them to ask me, which could be terribly frustrating sometimes.)

  This was a chance just to be myself, surrounded by people who understood completely. Even my beloved husband really did not fully comprehend the kinds of things I saw and heard each day at the police department and our closest friends were, well, civilians. And at this point, though I was still technically a civilian myself, the truth is I didn’t feel like one. But at the same time, I was still not buddy-buddy with the cops who called me in to do drawings, either; we didn’t socialize, or invite one another over to each other’s cookouts.

  So it was a lonely, in-between kind of feeling in those days, before I went to work fulltime at the HPD, and I was really looking forward to the camaraderie I hoped to find among the other police artists.

  I flew into Washington, D.C. and a large bus picked up all the attendees. There were eighteen of us. It was December, 1986 and it was snowing.

  We arrived at the Academy, which was laid out much like a college campus. Classrooms were separated from the two seven-floor dorm towers by what were affectionately known as “gerbil tubes”—rounded plexiglass corridors between brick buildings that resemble a maze in a gerbil cage.

  In many ways, the dormitory rooms at the FBI Academy were pretty much made for men. The ceilings were high and the furniture had been crafted with six-foot males in mind. The built-in drawers were so high that I could barely see over them—and that’s where the mirror was located. The only mirror. On university campuses, most women’s dorm rooms have a full-length mirror on the back of the door. Not here. (Apparently, men don’t have to check and make sure their slips aren’t showing and their pantyhose don’t have a run.)

  No bathtub, either. Only showers. Two rooms housed four people, who all shared a single bathroom and shower.

  Female attendees said never to leave your curtains open, because across the way, male trainees were learning all about high-tech zoom photography. The gossip was they had amassed quite a little collection of photographs from the women’s dorms.

  We didn’t know if it was true or not, but nonetheless, we all dressed well away from the windows.

  The dining hall was legendary—the feds really knew how to feed you. Every meal was an all-you-can-eat cafeteria-style spread, complete with an ice cream machine in the middle of the room with every kind of topping imaginable. If you preferred, you could pile the ice cream onto your slice of pie or cake—a dangerous temptation for those of us who were only going to be there for two weeks, but those who were staying for a full thirteen-week course in law enforcement worked those calories off big-time. It really was “Oz,” because there was a grueling obstacle course (featured in the opening scenes of the movie Silence of the Lambs) that was known as the “Yellow Brick Road.” All attendees of the long course had to complete it—even if they were in their f
ifties. There was also an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a weight room, a sauna and a hot tub for relaxing after a workout.

  Then, of course, there was “The Boardroom” where everyone went at night after a hard day at the Emerald City and where beer and simple mixed drinks were served until about 10:30 P.M. (what my daddy used to call “preacher son’s time”). You could take the elevator from your dormitory floor straight to the Boardroom.

  On the weekends we all went into D.C. to see the sights, the museums, monuments and landmarks of our democracy.

  But it was in class that I really blossomed. Any instruction at the National Academy is top-of-the-line; experts in every discipline are brought in to share their expertise. We watched as an anthropologist put on a demonstration in skull reconstruction. A photo-retouch person gave us an airbrush demonstration. A forensic artist who’d been highly effective in the business for some time provided some suggestions for success. We also learned child age-progression.

  One of the most useful skills I picked up was the ability to do a full-frontal drawing of someone’s face that you’ve only see in profile. This is extremely valuable, since so many witnesses say, “I only saw him in profile,” or, “I just caught a glimpse of the top of his head,” or whatever. All of us who attended the forensic art course at Quantico learned to extrapolate a full face from a partial, side-only photo.

  Another very valuable skill I learned was how to use visual aids, such as the FBI Facial Identification Catalogue. Developed in the early 1960s by forensic artists in what is now known by the unwieldy name of the Investigative and Prosecutive Graphics Unit of the FBI, the catalogue is divided into facial features such as eyes, nose, lips, and brows, but the examples shown (many of which are taken from mug shots) divide each feature into more specific categories, such as “flared nostrils,” “squinting eyes,” and “protruding ears.” There are around 180 examples of each facial feature. Each feature has its own number and other features on the face are blanked out.

  This is especially great to use when you are working with children, who may lack the verbal skills to describe a feature of a person’s face, but who can instantly recognize it when they see it. Learning to use this catalog was a particular joy to me, because I’d labored along without visual aids like it for nearly five years. Getting information for an accurate sketch was difficult and time-consuming for me, exhausting for the witnesses and not nearly as effective as using the catalogue. Gaining this aid made my work much, much easier.

  I adored our instructor, Horace Heafner. He said later that he remembered me, because I had “unusual intensity.”

  If he only knew.

  I think one reason the instructor took to me was that I was the only one in the class who had done thousands of portrait-sketches in places like the River Walk, Six Flags and city malls. So I was by far the fastest artist there. He liked that.

  “Okay, class,” he’d say, “Draw a hook nose.”

  Then he’d mosey over to my desk and say, “Lois, are you done yet?”

  Usually, I was.

  But there was one more thing that set me apart from the rest of the class, and it was not a good thing: I was the only one there who did not have a fulltime job working as a forensic artist for a police department. To make matters worse, the others in the class—all of whom were being paid to be there by their departments—came from much smaller cities than Houston.

  Everyone in the class was so mystified that I did not have a job with the HPD that, at one point, they actually had a class discussion about it. As we talked they opined on such topics as how much my salary should be.

  Little did they know the sacrifice I was making just to be there. It was December and for the full two-week time period of the course, I was unable to paint portraits. Therefore, while everyone else at least maintained their salaries during the schooling, I lost more than $800 in income.

  By the time I packed my bags for home, I had made up my mind that, come hell or high water, I was going to find a way to be hired on fulltime by the Houston Police Department, but it took more than my decision to get the task done.

  I returned home to find that every aspect of my work had improved—except my status. I did more and more cases for the department. In fact, I had a number of high-profile successes. In one case, I even managed to get a successful composite from a five-year-old witness and we were able to put away a dangerous pedophile.

  Whenever the police telephoned me, I dropped everything to do the case. One night, well past midnight a detective called. A Fort Bend County sheriff’s deputy had been killed by a burglar. For forty-five minutes, I drove through the woods to get to the location where the witness, an elderly man who wore thick glasses, was waiting. The old man swore adamantly that though the suspect was more than thirty feet away, in a car going at least forty miles per hour, he had seen the man. When I finished the sketch, the deputies rushed out with it and as I was loading my gear into my old car, I saw an HPD helicopter lift off. They were flying my sketch to the media for the quickest possible release. (Meanwhile I had to find my way back home through the woods at three in the morning.)

  Not long afterwards, they got a hit on the composite and caught the cop-killer.

  Through the months that followed, I kept asking again and again to be hired fulltime; again and again, I was told that there was no money in the budget. But by then, I was working so often as a forensic artist that I was finally making a living at it.

  Still, since I didn’t work “fulltime,” I was considered to be a “vendor.” Vendors are companies who sell office supplies or vending machine supplies or whatever, to places like the police department and then bill the city. Houston often took months to pay its vendors, who had to absorb the delay as the cost of doing business.

  But I wasn’t a large company and I was struggling to survive for months at a time while I waited for checks from the HPD. Because I had to wait so long to be paid by the police department, I continued doing portraits, while at the same time raising two pre-schoolers.

  By Christmas of 1988, the Houston Police Department owed me $11,350.

  Broke, desperate, overworked, exhausted and a little bit crazy by then, I decided to drive down to the police department and see if somebody somewhere could, at the very least, advance me a couple of hundred bucks. I packed up examples of my most successful sketches into a portfolio, prepared my worn-out speech, dropped the kids off at the sitter’s and headed downtown.

  On the way, I was astonished to glance up and see red lights blinking in my rear-view mirror.

  Inside my head, I was screaming. I can’t believe I’m going to get a ticket NOW! It was too much and, when the officer walked up to my window, I burst into tears, bawling.

  He asked for my driver’s license and through my sobs, I broke out laughing.

  This was a bit much for the young officer. His body tensed and his hand inched ever so slightly toward his gun. In the kind of voice one uses with those who are hysterical, he said, “Ma’am, do I need to get a mental health professional for you?”

  Slowly turning my head toward him, I looked him full in the eye and said calmly, “You owe me eleven thousand, three hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Now he knew I was crazy.

  Raising his hands as if to ward off a blow, he cried, “Now, wait a minute! I don’t owe you eleven—”

  “Not you!” I yelled, as tears once again streamed down my face. “The police department! I am your art squad! I do all your composites! I’ve got the invoices right here, and all the work I’ve already done!”

  He paused. “You’re the one who does those?”

  Scrambling through the stuff on the seat behind me, I grabbed up an example. “Look at this sketch of the man who killed Deputy Heiman.” Yanking up a receipt, I waved it in his face. “Look, here’s the invoice. I did the sketch in February; it is nearly Christmas and I still haven’t been paid!”

  I could see him relax, even smile. “Damn those downtown bureaucrats,”
he said with sympathy. “They do take forever to pay.” He asked if he could see my portfolio and I showed it to him.

  We wound up having a lovely visit. I didn’t get a ticket that day…but I also didn’t get the money owed me until after Christmas and I didn’t get hired fulltime.

  During the next year I met with the newly-appointed Chief of Police Lee Brown. My presentation to the Chief was almost the same one I’d given Cindy Smith years before. I was becoming further frustrated when Chief Brown suddenly interrupted me as I was giving statistics about all the other police departments in the world who employ sketch artists, my success rate, blah-blah and he said, “Have you ever thought about a fulltime position?”

  I stared at him. Blinked. Wondered if I was losing my mind for real this time.

  “Uh, well, sir, yes I have. I’ve been asking about it for years. I was always told that we didn’t have the money in the budget.”

  “Who told you?” he demanded. He wanted heads to roll.

  So did I, but I didn’t want to decapitate most every division head in the department, so I just mumbled, “Er…everybody…sir.”

  And then, almost before I could say, We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto, I found myself with an office, a salary, health insurance, benefits, and, best of all, legitimacy.

  I started work at the Houston Police Department as fulltime staff on September 18, 1989. But it wasn’t the office, the fulltime hours or the pay that made me feel—-finally—accepted as “one of the boys” at the PD.

  It was one of those moments that feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem refers to as a click moment—that instant when a personal truth hits home for you and changes your life.

  I was standing by the copy machine in Homicide one random, wearying day, next to a detective who had just been given a case where a man had been murdered in a restaurant in front of a number of witnesses.