Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
“No, no, no,” and sobbed.
For a long time, I could not work. My eyes were too blurred with tears; I couldn’t even see what I was doing.
I was still sitting, the chalk in my limp hand, when the South Tower collapsed.
Bawling, blowing my nose, praying, trying to compose myself, a few minutes later I heard the report about yet another plane that had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.
“The world has gone mad,” I whispered.
For a long time, I was hypnotized by the images on television, but eventually, when reporters began repeating themselves and it was clear that nobody really knew anything new, I took a deep shuddering breath and turned my attention back to the little lost child whose image I was trying to capture.
The eyes of a person have specific places that attach to the inner corners of the eye socket. Since the flesh had decomposed and disappeared and the eyeballs were gone, I could clearly see the “landmarks” that told me how wide-spaced her eyes would be. The fold above the lid would be smooth and dark, since there would be almost no fat in the pad behind and the eyelids would be visible. (Lack of body fat lets that nictitating membrane curve over the eyeball.) So I drew tiny eyelids.
Meanwhile, it seemed as if our whole country was under attack and nobody knew where these evil monsters would strike next. I even glanced out my office window, picking out taller buildings, trying to assess if my own was at risk.
Then I scoffed at my own nervousness and went back to work, back to crying, back to praying, back to watching the TV, spellbound, like everyone else.
In police work, there is a peculiar phenomenon that occurs whenever there is a child murder, especially one so gruesome and emotionally wrenching as this one. When the detectives who “catch” the case “make the scene,” meaning, they go to the crime scene before the body is removed and begin their investigation, other police personnel slowly begin to show up at the scene.
They may be office workers, supervisors and so on. What they are doing is offering mute moral support, quiet, steadfast presence. In many ways, it’s like a silent memorial to honor this most innocent of victims.
But I wasn’t at a crime scene. I was alone in my office, coping with the horrors both without and within.
The phone rang again. This time I recognized the voice of homicide Lieutenant Steve Arrington and I knew instinctively that he wasn’t trying to intrude or check up on me or bother me.
He was hurting as badly as I was at what we were seeing happen to our country and to the tiny girl.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you still work despite the horror of what’s going on in our country?”
I assured him that despite my own shock I was working.
“Lois, can you make her smile, like when she was alive?” he asked, a bit embarrassed at making such a request at this moment.
He knew and I knew that I could. The phone call wasn’t really about that and we both knew it, but I was so grateful for his support. “Sure I can,” I said softly.
“Make her pretty,” he said quietly, “like I know she was in life.”
“I will,” I said.
“I know you will,” he said. “I know you can. Help us find her, help us nail whoever did this to her and pray for our country.”
I promised that I would and we hung up. I felt as if I had been hugged. It gave me strength.
Once again, I went back to work.
In order to tell how to draw the “iris to eye opening” ratio right, I glanced at photographs I had in my office of my two children, Brent and Tiffany. They were teenagers now, but I had some pictures from when they were small children that I used as references. The iris, I found, would occupy more of the eye opening than it would in an adult, but less than in an infant. I worked out a good balance and gave the little girl nice eyelashes.
Her ravaged little face was beginning to come to life. It gave me hope. While the somber television news anchors tried to sort out what was going on in our country, I listened and kept working.
The nose, I decided, would be smooth. The bridge that I could see from the crime scene photographs was smooth and lay low to the facial plane. The outer edges of the bottom part of the nose would start about one-half to two millimeters outside of the nasal hole, which was visible through the last film of flesh that hadn’t dissolved in the water. I gave her average-sized nostril holes.
The cheeks were easy. I covered those bones with the appropriate muscles and the smooth, brown, little girl skin.
It was time to draw her smile. Her alveolar ridge—the bony arch from which the teeth protrude—was wide as I faced her, so I drew it that way. The bottom teeth were arched so wide that I felt certain she would show them along with the top teeth when she smiled, so I drew the bottom teeth just above the full bottom lip as they would appear during a happy grin.
Of course, one thing an artist has to do at this point is depict the tongue peeking through as the light hits it, along with a glistening shine, because a live person’s mouth is always wet.
The little girl was missing one tooth and the other was tilted. I needed to know a strong estimation of this child’s true age. Height and weight would not tell the true story.
So I put in a call to the forensic dentist, Dr. DeLattre, who had examined the body.
Dr. DeLattre said, “Her front teeth were all adult teeth but the back teeth were deciduous or baby teeth.”
That told me two things. One, this child was six or seven years old, not four, as Darcus had said the officers who found the dead child thought, due to her tiny, shrunken size. And two, she had not lost that front tooth naturally. It had been punched out and during the same incident, the tooth next to it had been jammed up back into the socket in a crooked way.
This was a sickening development that caught me by surprise. I’d assumed...well, it just hadn’t occurred to me that this precious child had been punched in the mouth.
I asked, “How long before she died do you think that tooth was knocked out?” Dentists can tell by how much the bone has grown shut after tooth loss.
Her voice sad, she said, “About six weeks to two months.”
Poor, sweet baby.
I decided to use the lost tooth as a sort of “gap-toothed grin” when I sketched her smile. I made her as pretty as Arrington had asked and I thought she once had been as I reflected on how much she’d been through.
After completing her smile and drawing the chin, I sat for a moment and stared at the blue plaid shirt she was wearing. It was only visible at a distance from the shot where she lay on the red plastic body bag on which she’d been placed by personnel from the medical examiner’s office. I tried to reproduce it as closely as possible, because it was another clue to her identity.
Finally, I put some shadows on her neck under her chin and fluffed up her hair a bit, as if it had just been washed.
My sunny, windowed office is located on the seventh floor of the Travis building. Ironically, this houses the Robbery division of the Houston Police Department. Robbery detectives seldom see the kinds of violence I have to deal with all the time. Their work is usually not as emotionally wrenching as it can be for homicide detectives or those who work in Juvenile Sex Crimes. Sometimes the detectives are surprised at the dreadful things I often have to deal with and even on this frightening day in which there were so many horrible sights, as I worked, some of the detectives drifted by and commiserated on the shock and horror affecting our country and the shock and horror of the photographs pinned to my board.
One of the detectives said something I’ll never forget. “They’ve checked all the area schools, looking for a child who has been missing from class and is unaccounted for or who would otherwise fit her description,” he said.