Faces of Evil Read online

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said in my usual non-threatening way. “You’ve probably already got the case solved, but from media reports, it sounds to me as if you have plenty of witnesses to this crime and if you need or want one…I could probably do a sketch for you.”

  I backed away, so used to not intruding on their turf, when Capt. Bobby Adams suddenly walked up to me and drawled, “What’re you being so shy about, Lois?”

  I explained that I didn’t want it to look as if I was telling an investigator how to do his job or acting like he couldn’t do it without my help, or anything…

  Putting one arm around my shoulders, Capt. Adams turned to the room at large and in a very loud voice, announced, “Ms. Gibson has the right to ask any detective anything she wants about any case they’re working! You guys listen up, all right. She’s well worth the time and trouble. She can ask anything! UNDERSTAND?”

  Giving me a squeeze, he looked me in the eye and, in a softer tone, said, “I meant that, Lois.” And he walked off, as if he was in the business of changing lives every day.

  Until then, I had felt so alone and thought there was nobody who could do anything that would have made me feel, for lack of a better word, respected.

  From then on, I was home.

  At least, in a figurative sense. In more literal terms, I was still very far away from my childhood home, my loving parents and family back in Kansas. Since the summer of 1987, I had regretted that while my children were in their sweetest baby years (Brent was four and Tiffany eighteen months), my parents were missing all of it. I was missing them, too.

  At that point Sid and I were only able to scrape together the money for all four of us to fly home once a year and it broke my heart that my mama, especially, who loved babies more than anything else in the world, could so seldom hold my children in her arms.

  When I finally got my fulltime job and the respect of my peers, the only other thing I wanted in the world was to be able to fly home to Kansas for a visit, so I could show off my darling baby girl to my folks. Tiffany was our own private version of Shirley Temple, complete with cheeks like cotton candy, eyes the color of the sky and curly blond hair. Unlike her hyperactive big brother, she loved nothing better than to be cuddled and cooed, which meant that she and Mama were made for each other.

  So I hatched a scheme to approach the Wichita, Kansas police department and see if I could trade my skills for a free plane ticket home.

  Having set up the appointment, I got the plane ticket so I could visit with my folks, but little did I know I would also get one nightmarish day, crammed with horrors.

  Chapter Six:

  WANTED: Dead or Alive

  When I got to Wichita and Tiffany was safe in the arms of her grandparents, I went to my meeting with all the Wichita Police Department’s detectives, their supervisors and Captain John Dotson, head of investigations. The PD was located along with other city government buildings in a shiny glass and steel building in the center of town—much more modern than the forty-year-old Houston Police building.

  I made a quick presentation of my sketches, detailing cases in which witnesses as young as five years old had provided descriptions, demonstrating how the sketches had helped to solve the crimes. In the beginning, they were very skeptical, but as they passed around the composite/mug shot comparisons, I could see that they were impressed. I decided to quit while I was ahead. (Cops are trained to be decisive; you don’t want to ramble on too long or they’ll start to wonder if you’re a snake-oil salesman.)

  My proposal was simple. After explaining that most of my family still lived in the area and I wanted to be able to see them more often, I added, “For the price of a round-trip flight, I will work on your case. You will not have to pick me up at the airport, put me up in a motel or feed me. My family will gladly do all that.” I went on to mention that my usual rate for freelancing cases was around $225 and added, “Since that’s about the price of a flight, you’ll get the going rate.”

  Ever mindful of tight budgets, the captain asked whether, if they flew me up for a murder, for instance, I could work on some rapes while I was there.

  “Absolutely,” I said. The question didn’t surprise or offend me. Nobody understood bureaucratic spending restraints better than I did.

  The officers seemed receptive, but not particularly enthusiastic. While they treated me with courtesy and respect, I still came away from the meeting feeling frustrated.

  I didn’t think they were ever going to call.

  But it only took the length of a summer for those same detectives to feel their backs up against the wall, willing to try anything, even fly a flaky woman artist up from Texas to do a sketch, if it would help crack a collection of sexual assault cases that had left them frustrated and deeply disturbed as June bled into July and July into August.

  When I answered the captain’s call that September, I was trying to keep one eye on Tiffers (our little girl’s family nickname), who was determined to run, not walk. In a resolute attempt to keep up with her race-around big brother, she’d sort of fling her body forward a few steps, topple to the ground, chew herself out in baby talk, then stagger up and do it again. She had so many cuts and bruises on her soft little body from ramming into furniture that I sometimes worried that she resembled a victim of child abuse. But she would not be deterred from her goal. I admit, I was pretty proud of her hardheaded willpower, though of course, I have absolutely no idea where she came by such a trait!

  Back then, phones still had cords, which put me at a distinct disadvantage as I tried to prevent Tiffers from plowing into the corner of a coffee table and keep her in my line of sight while, at the same time, concentrating on what the captain was saying.

  I’ve mentioned before the schism between my private, home life and my work life, but there have been few instances where it has been more apparent than this case, from the captain’s first words on.

  “Mrs. Gibson, I wonder if your offer is still good to fly up here and help us out,” Captain Dotson said, almost apologetically, because he knew it had been three months since I’d heard from the Wichita PD.

  “Certainly,” I said, as Tiffers plopped down onto her diaper-padded butt, giggled, then rolled over to get up again.

  “Well, we’ve been hit very hard by a two-man rapist team. Their favorite thing to do is beat their victims over the head with a claw hammer and their violence is escalating.”

  Tiffers, our family clown, made a face at her brother, who was trying to watch cartoons, and his laughter rang out over the captain’s grim words.

  “One of the latest victims,” the captain was saying, “was bludgeoned into unconsciousness and her abdomen was slit open…”

  Brent was playing peek-a-boo with Tiffers and she shrieked in delight…

  “…They pulled out eighteen inches of her intestines and then left her…”

  Still giggling, Tiffers waddled toward her brother…

  “…But somehow, the victim not only survived, but she got to her feet and walked a quarter of a mile to get help. She was even turned away at one house and kept going to the next one until somebody took pity on her. Just wadded up her guts as she walked along and bundled them into her coat…”

  “Tiffy! Move! I can’t see Scooby Doo!”

  “The media is eating us alive on this one…”

  “Stop it, butthead! Get out of the way! Owwwww…”

  Shrieks of laughter turned to screams of outrage as Brent shoved his sister and she clamped her teeth onto his arm. Over the squalls of both my children, I listened as the captain asked how soon I could come to Wichita and insisted on meeting me at the airport.

  In a daze, shaken by the viciousness of the crime described by the captain, I hung up the phone and numbly separated my two battling children, then sat back onto the carpet, wrapped my arms tightly around my little girl, and buried my face in her tender, sweet-smelling hair.

  It soothed us both, but it could not stop the nightmare images
in my head of what had happened up in Kansas to some other mother’s daughter.

  By this time, I had learned how to pack my easel. When folded up, it makes a “T” shape of about four feet in length. A female FBI agent had suggested that the easel could be packed in a double rifle case, where, cushioned in several layers of cardboard, it would just fit with an inch to spare. Drawing supplies I packed in with my underwear, to keep them from being crushed. The drawing boards and paper acted as a press between clothing I didn’t want to get wrinkled.

  Since infants could fly free, I didn’t want to pass up another opportunity to take Tiffers along for a visit to her grandparents. (Brent was a terrible flyer, acting as if he was being stung by ants the whole way, struggling to be allowed to run up and down the aisles, so he stayed home with his daddy on that trip.) All Tiffers needed was her pacifier and the doting attention of flight attendants and passengers who thought she looked like an angel, so the flight went very smoothly.

  I guess Captain Dotson had insisted on picking me up at the airport because of the level of anxiety that this case had provoked. He was waiting for me at the end of the ramp. Classically tall, dark, and handsome, he seemed so relieved to see me that I wondered if he’d worried that I might not show at all.

  On the drive to Mama and Daddy’s house, he explained that they’d been using one of those Identikit sketches but had had very little response and no useful leads with it.

  It reminded me of something Lt. Don McWilliams had remarked scornfully to me one time about Identikit sketches, “Damn things look like stick figures.”

  At my parents’ modest yellow wood-frame house with brown trim near downtown, we were both greeted like royalty. My plump little mama’s permed brown hair just showed a sprinkling of gray at the time, which only made her dark brown eyes shine. Her face alight with joy, she whisked the baby out of my arms. Daddy was then 62, but he looked ten years younger because he was fit and tan from working construction. (I always thought he resembled the actor Sean Connery.)

  Pumping the captain’s hand like the born salesman he was, Daddy engaged the captain in animated conversation, then took my luggage into the house, leaving us standing outside at the foot of the front porch steps so that we could make our arrangements for the following day.

  Captain Dotson informed me that he had several different witnesses lined up. He seemed to worry that I might be overwhelmed, so I assured him that, whatever came, I could handle it. We set up a time and shook on it.

  After the captain left, I enjoyed a lovely visit with my folks, who clearly delighted in their granddaughter, and the world of slashed-open women seemed very far away.

  The next day, a uniformed officer picked me up for the ride to the police department. It’s not that he was disrespectful, but he was clearly doubtful of my ability to be of any help to the detectives. He made a point of letting me know that the first victim had utterly refused to speak with investigators.

  “I don’t see how you could get anything useful outta her,” he insisted. “She’s not speakin’ to anybody about anything. I don’t even know why they called her in.”

  Unspoken in the remark was the follow-up, And I damn sure don’t know why they called YOU in.

  I was unfazed. By this time, I’d heard it all from cops. Frankly, I was itching to get away from them and be alone with the witness, whoever she was. Thankfully, the drive was short.

  However, when investigating officers filled me in on the case of the first victim with whom I would be working, I was dismayed to learn that it was much worse than I had imagined. Not only had she refused to talk to the detectives, but she had adamantly refused even to admit that she had been attacked!

  The only reason they knew for sure that she had been assaulted was that she’d been forced to call an ambulance and the hospital had notified detectives of what the paramedics had found at the house—an overturned refrigerator, broken lamps, chairs flung about, evidence of vomiting in three separate places—obviously, a violent struggle had taken place in this home. The extent of the woman’s injuries had borne that out. Her clothing had been ripped, there was evidence of sexual assault and, even more telling… she’d been hit in the head with a hammer.

  Since this assault had taken place following six others with similar crime patterns, the detectives were certain that this woman had been attacked by the same two men who had raped and beaten the other women, even though she steadfastly refused to admit it.

  And yet, even though there were other witnesses waiting to see me, the detectives had chosen to give me the hardest one first. Why? Was it some kind of test, to see if I could handle it? Did they hope that a sympathetic woman might get more out of her than they had? Or were they subconsciously hoping that I would fail, so that then they wouldn’t have to feel so bad?

  To this day, I couldn’t say why the investigators sent in this brutally traumatized woman to describe attackers she refused to admit had actually done the attacking. It was the eighties after all. But the captain had called me in and they’d paid for my plane ticket, so I have to assume that they were hopeful that I could be of some help, somehow. Obviously, nothing else had worked.

  As resolute as Tiffers learning to walk, I gathered up my easel and supplies and followed the detective into a room they’d set aside for me. He introduced me to the witness, Sarah, and almost immediately, I had a powerful, instinctive urge to be alone with this woman.

  It’s not that the detective had been in any way unkind to either me or this shattered victim—not at all—but there was something I saw in her hollowed-out eyes.

  Something I recognized.

  Have you ever flipped through a book on body language? Ever seen the illustration of somebody who does not want to talk? It could have been a photograph of her.

  Dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, she stood stiffly, her arms barred across her chest like a shield, her head ducked down, mouth set in a grim frown. Her hair was unkempt, gathered loosely in a rubber band, as if she hadn’t even bothered to brush it.

  I knew, because I’d been there.

  This is all very nice, sir, I found myself thinking. Now please get out.

  Finally, he went out of the room and shut the door behind him.

  I kept my distance from her, the way you do a trapped wild animal that does not want to be approached. I had placed my easel so that I was facing her and she could see only the back of my drawing board. There is a reason for this. For one thing, I don’t want witnesses to be distracted by what I’m doing, nor do I want them to be upset by the face that’s taking shape in front of them. Also, by sitting opposite them I’m giving them space. As I remember so vividly from my own attack, usually the last thing someone wants after being assaulted is to be crowded or touched. Victims need to be able to breathe. They need to be able to think.

  In my lap I put a piece of hard pressed board that makes a sort of desk, and on top of that I arranged my materials: a dark colored towel scrunched up like a nest and, in a pile, small pieces of pastels in shades of raw and burnt umber, black, white and everything in between.

  There are some artists in my business who criticize me for using pastels in my forensic sketches, as if I’m somehow outdated, hopelessly behind the times. This is ridiculous. The reason I use pastels rather than pencils or charcoals is because it gives the faces three dimensions rather than that flat quality that makes some sketches I’ve seen look like all the others.

  In as soft a voice as I could manage, I said, “The reason I do this work is that I was attacked in my home by a guy who tried to kill me for fun.”

  At that, every rigid muscle in her body seemed to droop with relief.

  “I don’t know exactly how anyone feels,” I continued, “but I think I might have an idea how you might feel right now. I’m not a cop. And after I was attacked, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it for more than six years. In fact, I didn’t even admit it to myself.”

  With that, Sarah’s eyes brimmed with tears and she
immediately began to tell me what had happened. From what I gathered, her attack had been somewhat different from the others because she had been the only victim attacked in her own home.

  “We live in the country,” she said softly. “Our house is set back, like, two hundred feet from the road. My husband had left for work and I was alone in the house. The mailbox is located down on the road, and every day I like…”

  She hesitated.

  I waited.

  Clearing her throat, she went on. “I liked to walk down to get the mail. The dogs would go with me and we’d have a fine little walk. On the way back to the house, they started barking and ran off. I figured they were chasing a rabbit and didn’t think anything of it.”

  I nodded, but was careful not to interrupt her. She was lancing a wound and it was important that she drain out all the pus before we could ever hope to get a sketch. The words gushed out of her.

  “I took the mail into the house and had just laid it down on the kitchen table when I heard, like, an explosion. It was…”

  Her voice broke.

  “When I turned around, I saw these two men who had just broken down my door—that’s what the explosion was. One was blonde and one had brown hair. That’s all I saw before they hit me with something and I blacked out.”

  This time, the pause was longer. I knew the worst was yet to come.

  “When I came to…um…when I woke up? I was lying spread-eagle on the floor, and one of the men was tearing my jeans off. The other guy went over to the fridge, and he found a…”

  She cleared her throat. “A carrot. He found a carrot. And then…”

  I stifled a shudder.

  “…and then, he took that carrot and he stuck it inside me, all the way to the end. And I screamed and… and he took the carrot out of me and he jammed it down my throat…”

  That had been the first time Sarah had vomited, violently.

  “I tried to fight them, I really did, but I couldn’t move. One of them grabbed a lamp and hit me over the head with it and I blacked out again.”