Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
what sounded like the same description of the same criminal: white male, 5'9" or 5'10" tall, brown hair, brown eyes...or black male, 5'10" or 5'11" tall, black hair, brown eyes...blah, blah, blah.
It blew my mind, the sheer number of crimes that were committed in full view of horrified witnesses who, no doubt, got a clear view of the suspect—not to mention rape victims who, more often than not, certainly saw the guys who were raping them.
If the police would only let me speak to the victims, I could draw those creeps—I knew it!
It was all I could do not to scream at the television—this time in sheer frustration—as I had done at Diane’s that day.
Meanwhile, one upbeat thing occurred. I moved into a one hundred-year-old duplex with sixty-foot pecan trees domed over the back yard, ceilings ten feet high, tall windows and a cast-iron bathtub with claw feet. The wood frame house was set up on blocks, like all the houses in that neighborhood, to protect it from hurricane-driven floods. Behind the house was a three-car garage that had a great little apartment upstairs.
The plumbing in the old house was state-of-the art—thirty years earlier. I’ll never forget the first fight Sid and I had. He slammed out the front door and I went to bed fuming. Early the next morning, there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” I grumbled.
“It’s me.”
Growling under my breath that he would have the nerve to wake me up so early when he knew good and well I was mad at him, I flung back the front door and there he stood, a big old grin on his handsome face, clutching in his arms...a brand-new, snowy-white toilet! He had it installed in about twenty minutes, like some kind of voodoo magic, and his ploy worked like a charm on me.
From that point on, whenever Sid and I had a fight, he fixed something. Once he installed a shower over the old claw-foot tub, complete with a ring to hold the shower curtain. The next fight we had, I wound up with a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.
Soon we got married.
I had never told Sid of my seething passion to break into the world of forensic sketching that lurked just beneath the surface. Of course I had told him, eventually, about the rape, but unfortunately, the poor guy reacted as most men in the early eighties would: he asked me what I had been wearing. He didn’t even understand his insinuation that I might have provoked the attack. He didn’t realize he was trying to “blame the victim.”
And as I said earlier, though my husband was usually sensitive, those were the prevailing attitudes at that time. Sometimes, even today, crime victims are subjected to these kinds of questions. People forget that a predator watches for an opportunity to strike at his prey and it doesn’t matter how the prey is dressed.
A predator is like a hunter, sitting up in a deer blind, seeing a doe stray into his line of fire; he doesn’t stop to think how beautiful her big brown eyes are or how gracefully she stands: he just aims his weapon and fires.
It’s the same way with predatory criminals. They’re just looking for an opportunity to strike.
When Sid asked me what I had been wearing that terrible day of my attack, I screamed at him.
“I had on my apartment!” I shrieked. “That’s what I was wearing! My home. He didn’t know what I had on when he decided to come crashing through the door and kill me!”
Sid apologized, of course. He felt awful, because he just didn’t know what to say.
I had no one at that time to help me process my still-simmering rage over the attack, no idea what to do with it and the sweet man who adored me was clueless.
We never spoke of it again.
So I kept all that emotional turmoil bubbling just beneath the surface, but by then, I’d grown skilled at living an outwardly normal, even happy life, in spite of it.
And Sid tried to help me launch the career I dreamed of. Whenever he came home and said that a new guy had started work, I asked him to describe the man for me. He did and I created a sketch. The next day, I dropped Sid off at work and waited in the car. Soon he emerged from the building with the new guy—coffee cup in hand—in tow. Then I held up the sketch and made a comparison.
Time and time again, the guy was a dead ringer.
And at night, I kept watching the news programs. But I saw only one sketch displayed and it wasn’t a sketch at all. I realized it was an Identi-Kit composite. With an Identi-Kit, the witness would begin with a generic face shape and the detective would then overlay facial features imprinted on sheets of clear acetate until a reasonably close facsimile to the witness’s description could be reached.
But those kit-faces never look real and the one I saw during that period on the evening news was no exception. The face looked flat, a clumsy depiction that bore no subtle shadings to give the face its shape and texture. It didn’t resemble a real person you might see on the street.
That’s when I knew that the Houston Police Department did not have a forensic sketch artist, even though one person with whom I spoke said that they did. What they had was a harried and hurried detective, doing the best he or she could with what was available, and it wasn’t much.
Sometimes, detectives were interviewed on the evening news concerning this crime or that. They were usually taciturn and jaded. They seemed to be always tired and discouraged and had dark circles under their eyes.
My heart went out to them. It seemed to me that they had an impossible job. The crimes kept coming, wave upon wave, and they were doing the best they could to hold back the overwhelming tide.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to help. I burned to jump into the fray. It ate at me, day and night. I knew my talents could be of some use. I knew my sketches could help them.
If I could just get someone to give me a chance.
When our son Brent was born, he came out looking like a manly little man, muscular, trim and square-chested. He was not a cuddle baby. He did not want to be held, rocked and lulled. Almost from the beginning, he fought to get up and go, as if he wanted to try his hand at rock climbing or join the Marines.
I tried to rock, to nurse, struggled to keep him from crawling out of my arms and watched the daily litany of crime goose-step across my TV screen. The politicians droned on about how something had to be done about this relentless crime wave and the newscaster offered up yet another dazzling description of the perpetrator: 5'9" or 5'10" tall, brown hair, brown eyes, etc., etc.
In one bloody twenty-four-hour period, nine murders were committed in Houston and many of the crime scenes included eyewitnesses. And yet, as always, all they had to offer the media was the same generic description.
“Momma Nadine,” my dear mother-in-law, who had come to live with us and was a wonderful help with the baby, noticed that part of the reason Brent was so restless and wouldn’t sleep through the night was because the kid was hungry. Even with supplemental bottles, I couldn’t keep him comfortable. Before the pediatrician got a clue as to what was wrong, Momma Nadine showed me how to mix up rice cereal and formula and feed it to Brent on a spoon.
Immediately, he was satisfied and slept all night from then on.
After that, I was able to get some sleep and have a little time to myself. I started giving some serious thought as to how I could break down this concrete wall that was the police department.
One day, after about twenty fruitless calls, I remembered something my daddy had said to me when I was a skinny, shy little girl about to enter the terrifying arena of selling Girl Scout cookies. I was eight years old at the time and absolutely mortified at the idea of knocking on people’s doors and trying to get them to buy cookies.
Pulling me down beside him as he sat at the breakfast table, my daddy said, “Lois, do you think that when someone buys a box of your cookies, they’re doing you a favor?”
I nodded. Shoot yeah, they were doing