Faces of Evil Read online

I squeezed in and set up my easel. You can do this, I whispered to myself. Show ‘em what you can do. By the time they brought me the witness, a slender, small-statured man of Middle Eastern descent, I was ready.

  However, there was one tiny problem.

  He spoke Farsi and I didn’t.

  LESSON NUMBER ONE: When dealing with a non-English speaking witness, start by asking him for the words in his language that designate such things as “nose,” “eyes” and “hair.” This is a charming icebreaker and also facilitates the sketching process.

  LESSON NUMBER TWO: Have a small sketchpad and pencil ready so that, if the witness still has trouble communicating, he can draw the part of the face he wishes to describe.

  LESSON NUMBER THREE: Don’t freak out.

  No, I didn’t freak out, at least, not to the guy’s face, but I also didn’t know lessons one, two or three, either. Not then. The upshot of it all was that the witness grew so frustrated and discouraged that he finally put his hands over his face, shook his head slowly and silently looked away.

  All of which would have been devastating enough if I hadn’t had to endure the door swinging open every ten minutes and a confused detective saying, “Oh! Sorry! I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  LESSON NUMBER FOUR: Crime files are the same size as any other business-related files: 8.5” by 11”. Therefore, it’s real handy to the detective if the sketch you present to him is, well, 8.5” by 11”. Of course, I didn’t know that. I was used to using a sketchpad with the dimensions of 18” by 24”, so when I turned over that first awkward and, eventually, useless sketch—it was huge. They probably had to fold it over twice to cram it in the file.

  They paid me for my work from the coffee fund.

  After that first experience, I didn’t think things could be much worse in terms of a crime sketching session, but I was young and naive. I didn’t realize they could be much worse.

  A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a detective in Sex Crimes to come in and do a witness sketch. The victim had been picked up by a marked cab, but rather than being taken to her destination, she was instead taken to a remote location, where the cab driver repeatedly raped her. This galvanized me to get over my earlier failure and help a fellow rape victim find justice. I was thrilled to get the opportunity and lugged my stuff back down to HPD.

  The detectives showed me to an interview room in the Homicide division and soon brought in the rape victim and her best girlfriend.

  LESSON NUMBER FIVE: Never let anybody sit in on a sketch, not the cops and definitely not a best girlfriend.

  From beginning to end, that gal never shut her mouth. Running chatter continued the entire time I was setting up my equipment and thanks to her, I never was able to get any sort of description from the victim herself.

  Every time the victim said something like, “his hair was curly and dark and kind of long,” her friend piped up and claimed loudly, “but you said it was straight and short.” When the girlfriend wasn’t changing the witness’s description, she was distracting her and inhibiting the witness’s focus—actually upsetting the witness more than helping her.

  More than once I wanted to scream at the girlfriend, “SHUT UP! You weren’t there, were you? Don’t offer any opinions on anything, all right?” But of course, I didn’t.

  By the time I got back out to my car with my gear, my hair was sweat-soaked to my scalp and my spirit matched my appearance. I plopped down in the front seat of my car, leaned my head on the steering wheel and thought, What a complete waste of time.

  However upset I was by two failures in a row, it did not seem to faze the detectives.

  I will be forever grateful to those detectives who kept calling me even when my sketches led nowhere. They trusted in my talent even when I didn’t, even took time to sit down with me and offer encouragement when I was ready to give up.

  Because I wanted to give up. Many times.

  In early July, 1982, I got a call from a Detective Douglas Osterberg in Homicide. When we met I saw Osterberg was huge—6′4″ tall, with a shock of curly blonde hair. Later I learned that his appearance had earned him the nickname of “Big Bird.” I also found out later that he had once played football at Wichita State University, where I had twirled baton during my early collegiate years, before I moved to Los Angeles.

  But we didn’t know what we had in common when we first met and Osterberg was not particularly pleased when I told him that I wanted to work with the witness alone. After all, I was a civilian and he was protective of his case, but I must say he respected me enough not only to grant me my wish, but to set me up in a lieutenant’s office, which was spacious and well-lighted.

  He didn’t tell me much about the witness, other than that the man had been bicycling in Houston’s Memorial Park when he had come upon one man stabbing another man to death. Osterberg warned me that the witness was “hysterical” and “freaked out,” which was about as emotional and descriptive as Osterberg was likely to get. Ever.

  The young man who had seen the crime was in his early twenties and clearly, this was the first time he had ever witnessed a violent act. The more he described what had happened, the more upset he became. “Hysterical” was not an exaggeration.

  I decided to take some time just to soothe him and let him calm down before we went to work on the drawing.

  Eventually, he told me that he had been riding his bike in a thickly wooded section of the park, which is located in an upscale area of the community, when he heard a disturbance. Something about it caused him to slip off his bike and sneak a peak over some bushes. There he saw one man face-down on the ground and another man straddling him, his fist up in the air, clutching a large knife. As the horrified witness looked on, the attacker brought his fist with the knife down smack, over and over, into the other man’s back. In his shock, the witness made a rustling noise. The killer whirled around and looked straight at him before leaping to his feet and running away.

  The bicyclist hurried over to the victim and the one detail that kept repeating itself over and over in his horrified mind was that every time the poor man breathed, dark blood from the wounds in his back bubbled up and out in a macabre fountain.

  And then, he saw the victim had stopped breathing.

  My distraught witness scrambled down the pathway, screaming for help. To his astonishment, he stumbled upon a man who looked exactly like the killer, only he was wearing different clothes. The witness recoiled and almost screamed again, but even in his panic, he instinctively knew that this could not be the killer, since the attacker had no time to change clothes and furthermore, this man didn’t act like he’d just killed somebody. The witness asked the man to call the police.

  Now, sitting with me at the police department, the witness kept obsessing about this other man. “I know it wasn’t the killer,” he kept saying, “It couldn’t have been the killer, but I’m telling you, he looked just like him.”

  “Look,” I said finally. “Let’s not worry about that right now, okay? The thing is, this man you saw looked like the killer, so let’s just see if we can draw that look, all right? And we won’t worry about who it is. We’ll let the police take care of that.”

  “But I really didn’t see him all that long,” he kept insisting. “I can’t really describe him to you.”

  LESSON NUMBER SIX: Witnesses often say they didn’t get very good looks and can’t describe the suspects. What most crime witnesses don’t realize is that their subconscious took better snapshots of what they saw than they can consciously recall. A good forensic sketch artist can almost always get a usable sketch from the most reluctant witness.

  I know that now, of course. But I sure didn’t know it then.

  To further complicate matters, the witness insisted that I somehow capture the same expression he’d seen on the killer’s face during the moment of murder.

  LESSON NUMBER SEVEN: Don’t worry about capturing the same homicidal expression remembered by the crime victim. Most people d
on’t look like serial murderers. The people who recognize suspects by forensic sketches displayed in the newspaper or on the news are usually friends who normally don’t see that expression anyway. A standard expression is one that will most often be recognized.

  At that time, I struggled with the witness for more than three hours in a vain attempt to capture the expression he so vividly remembered.

  LESSON NUMBER EIGHT: Don’t hesitate to use visual aids. For one thing, I didn’t have an FBI Facial Identification Catalogue to help this witness. For four years, in fact, I worked without one. When you work without the catalogue to help you, the witness has to find some way to come up with descriptions that they can communicate as to how a suspect’s eyebrows or nose looks. It’s laborious, tedious and needlessly difficult. I can’t emphasize enough how much easier it is just to flip to a page of eyebrows and say, “Select a pair that most closely resembles what you remember.” It does not “contaminate” a witness’s memory. On the contrary, having a number of choices facilitates it.

  But with our witness that day, we were on our own and by the time I’d rendered a likeness that received my witness’s tepid approval, I was absolutely, completely drained. Nothing I had ever done—physically or mentally—had been more exhausting and I was convinced the sketch was terrible, one of the worst I’d ever done.

  I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.

  As I handed over the sketch to Detective Osterberg and dragged my easel out of the building, I was convinced that I was a total failure.

  I drove down Houston Avenue, turned down White Oak Street and when I came to a vacant lot, I pulled in, parked the car and burst into tears. Wailing and beating my hands on the steering wheel, I screamed, “I’m never going back there again! Never, ever again! I can’t take it anymore.”

  All I had wanted to do was catch one person, just ONE, who had committed an evil act against another person. I’d been so certain that this was something I could do, so sure of it and now here I’d worked a robbery, a rape and a murder and what had I accomplished?

  A big, fat zero.

  “Quit torturing yourself,” I sobbed. “You just wanted to catch someone who was like the guy who hurt you and you couldn’t even do that! You’re just a silly, tired housewife. Go home. Be a fulltime mommy to your baby and let the big boys catch the bad guys.”

  Snuffling, wiping my eyes, I put the car in gear and headed home, utterly and completely convinced that I was, most definitely, a total failure.

  A few days later, as I was standing at the kitchen table, trying to get Brent to sit still long enough to swallow a bite or two for lunch, the phone rang. An almost jubilant Detective Osterberg said, “You did it, girl!”

  “Did what?” I grouched. So convinced was I of my own failure at that point that it didn’t even register.

  “You helped us find the guy!”

  “What?”

  I guess Osterberg could sense that my frustration ran deep. He suggested that I come down to the HPD so that he could talk to me.

  “Is tomorrow all right?” I murmured. He said it was fine.

  As I hung up the phone I grabbed Brent, who was attempting to stand up in his high chair. I was so shocked by Osterberg’s call that I was actually afraid to believe what I had heard. I didn’t even tell Sid; in fact, I barely even accepted it myself. Could it be true that I had actually had a success?

  I didn’t know how to feel successful. I showed up the next day like a kid who’s been ordered to the principal’s office. The detective greeted me with a huge smile on his face. Then he sat me down, opened up the police report and explained what had happened.

  The morning after they had released my sketch to both newspaper and television media outlets, Osterberg had received a phone call from a man who was completely unnerved. “Listen,” he’d said urgently, “there’s a picture of me in the paper this morning. Spittin’ image.”

  Osterberg had said dryly, “Well, are you my man?”

  The distraught young man, actually yelling over the phone in his distress, assured Osterberg that no, he wasn’t the guy, but he knew who was. He went on to explain that he and his roommate bore an uncanny resemblance to one another. He and his roommate (the suspect) and a couple other guys had been at Memorial Park the day of the murder and after they’d driven home, the suspect went to bed.

  The informant was watching the 10 P.M. news when the murder was reported and the sketch displayed on the television screen. He’d been so flabbergasted by what he’d seen—basically a picture of himself as a murder suspect—that he’d stayed up until 2:30 A.M. to watch a rebroadcast of the news report.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the next morning, he’d started getting phone calls from buddies saying things like, “Hey, man, did you kill somebody in the park?”

  The whole situation had shaken him up so badly that he’d called the police himself and agreed to meet Osterberg at a coffee shop. “I couldn’t believe it,” the detective told me, “when I first saw the guy, it looked like someone had taken a photograph of your sketch.”

  Furthermore, the informant agreed to take the detectives back to his house where they found the knife and a pair of underwear the killer had used to clean the blood off the knife.

  “We brought the guy in,” said Osterberg triumphantly, “and no lie, those two could be brothers. Anyway,” he said with a huge grin, “he confessed, Lois. We got him!”

  Osterberg went on to explain that, although the suspect claimed self-defense, the killing was actually a sexual thrill-kill. The seventeen-year-old had seen a movie called Cruising, where a homosexual serial killer was stabbing his victims to death while they were performing fellatio on him. (Later, in the trial at which he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the movie was shown to the jury.) Had he not been caught for this murder, this evil young man most likely would have killed again.

  I guess Osterberg could see the self-doubt in my eyes, because he went out of his way to claim that they would not have been able to solve the case without my sketch. Though “Big Bird” isn’t much of the cheerleader type, he said in his own calm way, “You did good, girl. You did good.”

  I thanked him and, trying not to act too gushy and excited, I left. I drove down the same street I’d driven down just a few days before, when I’d sobbed and sworn to myself that I would never do this work again, that I was a total failure.

  And I realized three very important things. One, that if, as the detective said, this guy could have killed again, then I had helped to save some future victim’s life. This was an incredibly powerful realization.

  Two, I had helped to capture a sexual thrill-killer—someone who was very much like the same monster who had attacked me.

  “I got you!” I shouted and I realized that it wasn’t just this killer I had “gotten,” but in a way, the one who had tried to kill me, as well. It was an enormous, satisfying victory.

  I was no longer a victim.

  In some spiritual, visceral, emotional way, I had reached back in time and put my arms around that younger, terrified Lois. I was telling her that everything was, indeed, going to be all right. That nothing that had happened to her had been in vain. It was an incredibly powerful moment. It worked a healing on my soul and my spirit that can be described as nothing less than magical.

  And three, I realized that if a drawing that I’d done was worse, to my way of thinking, than anything I’d done in high school and yet had still somehow become a valuable investigative tool, instrumental in catching a bad guy…then this was something I could do for the rest of my life.

  This gave a heft to my work, a genuine importance, that I had never felt before. Instead of painting a landscape or a portrait that was meant to be beautiful, exciting and inspiring to the beholder, I had turned out a sketch I considered to be just pitiful, sloppy, poorly-done…and yet, the results it had produced made me feel beautiful, excited and inspired.

  As I drove down the street and into my future, a
great smile of joy stretched across my face. And I thought to myself, They can’t hide their faces with me around.

  For the next few weeks, I floated around in a whole new world, a smile on my lips, my heart afire. I was ready to jump into the fray and make my mark. The days of fear and trembling whenever the evening news came on were over. My attitude toward the bad guys I saw paraded on the news and in the papers now was more like, Just let me at ’em!

  And if it had been left up to just me, my sketchpad, an empty room and a crime witness, I could probably end my story right here. But the real world doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. In spite of my eagerness to tackle the bad guys and bring ’em down, I had a couple of little things standing in my path that I had to figure a way around first.

  Like cops.

  Chapter Five:

  Breaking and Entering

  In Breaking and Entering (Pocketbooks, 1997), a book which had a profound influence on me, Connie Fletcher interviewed more than one hundred female law enforcement officers who had broken new ground in the early days of the women’s movement. Through grit, persistence, hard work and valiant spirits, they had forged new paths for all women who would follow them in the law enforcement field. Included in the book were such trailblazers as the first woman Texas Ranger, the first woman S.W.A.T. sniper for the Los Angeles Police Department, the first woman Drug Enforcement Administration agent, the first female bomb technician on a major metropolitan force and others. Many of these women had gone on to achieve great distinction in their careers, some even climbing to the rank of Chief of Police.

  They all described how extraordinarily difficult it was for women to break into such a tradition-bound all-male bastion, how they endured sexual harassment, ostracism, loneliness and even danger—in some cases, male officers would not respond to a female officer requesting back-up. They had to put up with office walls papered with pornography, isolated and cramped quarters for changing into their uniforms (since most departments didn’t have separate locker rooms yet) and many other indignities. Again and again, female officers and agents from all branches of law enforcement used the same word to describe how they felt: “outsider.”