By Pam Easton, The Associated Press
HOUSTON (AP) - Crime victims don’t know it, but they influence what Lois Gibson wears to work.
Gibson, a sketch artist for the Houston Police Department, tries to puts victims at ease as they reconstruct painful images - sometimes wearing jewelry that may start a conversation.
“You have to be patient, you have to comfort. They are overwhelmed with the fear,” said Gibson, who completes more than 160 sketches each year. “If I can relax you enough, I can have you to remember your fifth-grade teacher.”
Her approach seems to work. The Houston Police Department credits Gibson in helping it to identify more than 700 suspects since she started working as a sketch artist more than 20 years ago.
Nationwide, Gibson says she is among 19 full-time police sketch artists who work in cities that include Sacramento, New York and Portland. There are about 30 certified forensic artists, but some work part time or as freelancers, said Sgt. Steve Johnson, chairman of the forensic art certification board for the International Association for Identification, a nationally-recognized certification agency based in Minnesota.
“Forensic art is not an identification tool. It is an elimination tool,” said Johnson, a part-time sketch artist with the police department in Davenport, Iowa. “What that artwork provides is a little better idea of who you are looking for.”
Michael Streed, a sketch artist in Orange County, Calif., said for a long time police detectives didn’t trust forensic art, but the “modern-day detective is more educated and willing to try new things. ... People almost expect a sketch nowadays.”
Sketches also draw the public into cases that otherwise might go unnoticed, Johnson said.
“That is really the benefit of it,” Steed said. “Now you are deputizing all these people: ‘Here he is. Now go get him.’ People truly want to help.”
But despite the interest in forensic art and expectation by the public that police departments release a sketch, many departments don’t have enough work or money to hire an artist full time, said Karen T. Taylor, an artist who worked for the Texas Department of Public Safety for almost 20 years.
“There are a lot of people who have artistic skill, who in good faith want to do a good thing in their community, but may never have the opportunity to do this,” she said.
Gibson, 54, said she realized she could put her artistic talents to use to help solve crimes after moving to Houston. Descriptions of crime suspects - height, weight, age and hair color - were often vague in the 1980s. Gibson thought with sketches police might better assist the public in recognizing suspects.
“One hundred percent of the time, when a reasonably trained artist, reasonably talented, does a sketch, it is going to at least look similar,” said Gibson, who’s done about 3,000 sketches in her career.
Gibson received an art degree from the University of Texas in 1976. She spent a few years doing fine art portraits along San Antonio’s Riverwalk before moving to Houston. She was hired full-time by the police department in 1989 after more than seven years of freelance work. Gibson said she often got paid out of detectives’ coffee fund before she got hired full-time.
Earlier this year, one of Gibson’s sketches helped lead to the arrest of a man accused of fatally shooting a woman at a gas station as she vacuumed her car.
An anonymous woman spotted a man who looked similar to the sketch and used a crayon to jot down the license plate number from his truck. The woman informed police, who later found the truck at a rest stop in Kerrville and arrested the man sleeping inside.
Beau John Maloney was charged with the woman’s murder. A .38-caliber revolver Maloney had with him was connected to the woman’s death and an earlier robbery, police said.
Some police departments use computer programs to compose sketches, but Gibson and other artists say computers can’t capture the emotion, shadowing or intricate details they can put on a page.
“Police sketches are subjective, so it is very interpretive,” Streed said.
The most important part of putting together the sketch is details culled from the witness during the interview, Gibson said.
“It needs to be the most enjoyable conversation possible considering what the witness has been through,” she said. “The Holy Grail of a great interview is to get somebody to laugh.”
Streed said he tries to reach a point with the witness where it’s almost like the victim’s eyes are guiding his hand.
“A lot of these people will come in and they will be expecting a lot because they have been hanging on to this image in their head for days, weeks and months,” he said. “It can be very cathartic.”
Many, however, continue to believe trauma causes people to forget what their attacker looked like, but Gibson said she knows from her own experience - she says she was raped at 21 while living in California - that trauma “indelibly imprints” the attacker’s image.
“There was like an energy force inside of me and you could let it be a loose cannon of hurt,” Gibson said. “But I took the feelings I had and I hitched it up to my efforts and I have all this energy to help anybody now. And all I have to do is draw faces.”