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Chapter Four:

“Total Failure”

“Houston Police Department. How may I direct your call?”

“Um...hi. My name is Lois Gibson. I’m an artist, and I can draw faces really well, just from descriptions, and I was wondering...”

“You need to call the television stations. They set up courtroom artists.”

“No, no. I’m not a courtroom artist. I mean...I’m offering to draw faces of suspects from witness descriptions.”

“You need another department. Why don’t you try Homicide? Their number is...”

“Thank you.”

“Homicide.”

“Hi. My name is Lois Gibson. I’m an artist and I can draw faces really well, just from descriptions and I was wondering...”

“Well...hmmm...I’m not sure who you should speak with about that. Have you tried Robbery?”

“Okay. Would you mind giving me the number?”

“Sure. It’s...”

“Thanks.”

“Robbery.”

“Um, hello. My name is Lois Gibson and I’m an artist who can draw faces really well. I could do drawings of suspects from witness descrip—”

“You need to call Homicide.”

And so it went. Basically, nobody seemed to know what to do with me and so everyone wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible. Most said they had never heard of using an artist. One detective with whom I spoke said they did use an artist but couldn’t describe what he or she did and didn’t want to let me speak to the person. The thought of spending money on anything that they did not regard as essential was considered a ridiculous waste of scarce and valuable resources.

And hiring some flaky woman artist to come draw criminals was, to their way of thinking, absolutely not essential.

I was sure they were missing out. Following my emotional meltdown in my friend Diane’s house and my drawing of the gas station attendant, I was glued to the evening news, night after night.

Rapes, murders, kidnappings, robberies and assaults flashed across my television screen with nauseating repetition. Houston was now one of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation. There were more homicides than there were days in that year. Every night I watched and waited to see if any of the news outlets would display a forensic sketch of the suspect, but they never did.

Over and over again, monotone-voiced newscasters reeled off 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 me a favor.

And he said, “No, no! You’re looking at it all wrong! You see, you are doing them a favor, just by going up to their door!”

“I am?” That sounded doubtful to me.

“Well, let me ask you something. Are those good cookies?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “They’re real good. They taste better than any cookies I ever had!”

“All right. They’re great cookies. Let me ask you this. Do they have to pay for the cookies right then?”

I shook my head. “We take their order and they don’t have to pay until we deliver the cookies.”

“Uh, huh.” Nodding, he glanced over at me and asked slyly, “Do they have to pick up the cookies?”

“No!” I cried. “We take the cookies right to them, to their door.”

“That sounds pretty good. Do you think these people might buy cookies anyway, say, at the grocery store?”

I agreed that yes, most people did buy cookies at the grocery.

Taking me by my little arms, he said, “Honey, I want you to remember this for the rest of your life. Don’t think that these people are doing you a favor just because they buy these cookies from you. Remember, they would be buying cookies anyway and these are delicious cookies. They don’t even have to pay for them right away and you will deliver them right to their door! You see, you are doing them a favor, aren’t you? Now, here is what I want you to say when you go up to someone’s door.”

I leaned closer.

“Say, This is your lucky day!”

He told me that I should use that approach for everything from a job interview to getting ahead in life.

I did just that and I sold more cookies than any other rookie Girl Scout in Kansas City.

Now, sitting in my rocker, watching my active infant son scramble and scoot around on the floor (trying to find a way to bust out of the joint, no doubt), I thought about what my dad had said. I decided that I needed to change my approach. I needed to convince the police department that this was, indeed, their lucky day.

So I made another call to them.

“Robbery,” I said firmly.

This time they put me through.

“Hello. My name is Lois Gibson. I am a portrait artist and I can draw the faces of suspects from witness descriptions,” I rushed on. “I’d like to offer—”

“Well...”

“I’ll bring all my gear down to HPD myself. I’ll set it up in your office. All you have to do is send somebody down to the jail, look at someone there, then come back and describe the person to me.”

“Hey,” interrupted one detective before I could finish my rehearsed speech, “We’ll fix you up with a guard and you can go down to the jail yourself and draw all the perverts you want!”

I heard him laughing as I hung up.

Sometimes I sat in my rocker, stared up at the ceiling, cried and talked to God. I told Him that I understood, now, why I had been attacked and that I knew what my purpose was on this planet and how I could use such a terrible thing for good, to help others. And I prayed for His help in breaking through the hard shell of a major metropolitan bureaucracy. But there were a lot of times when it just seemed impossible.

Every day, when I put Brent down for his long afternoon nap, I got on the phone and went through my rehearsed speech.

“If my drawing is good,” I said as persuasively as possible to a reluctant cop, “then think what a wonderful thing that would be to help with your investigations. And if I’m no good, then hey, I’m just a housewife, right? You guys are armed, after all. I’ll leave. What have you got to lose?”

One day, I launched wearily into my act, to a lieutenant. And when I was done, the policeman said, “You need to call Lieutenant Don McWilliams.”

Okay. Fine. I’ll call the damn detective, I thought and redialed the police department, hoping the big sarcastic sigh I was heaving couldn’t be heard over the phone.

Finally I had the name of the right person.

“Lieutenant McWilliams,” I said. “Hi. My name is Lois Gibson. I’m a practiced portrait artist and I am positive I can draw a good resemblance from a description given by a witness who has seen a face,” I recited. “I can prove it to you. I’ll bring my gear down to your office. You send somebody over to the jail and have them look at anyone they want. Have them come back and describe one of the inmates to me and I guarantee you I can draw the guy just from their description.”

And without hesitation, Lt. McWilliams said, “Well, come on down, girl! Let’s see you do it!”

I almost dropped the phone. I wasn’t even sure I had heard correctly. Had he just said come on down, like some kind of game show announcer?

I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t say anything for a moment or two.

Lt. McWilliams went on to set up a date and time and when I offered to drive there myself, he said, “Nah, no problem, I’ll send someone to come pick you up.”

And just like that, I got my first opportunity to perform.

I was nervous on the sunny afternoon when I handed the baby over to Momma Nadine and got ready to leave for the Houston Police Department. I was just so ready to show what I could do. After all, I’d been doing it in my head for more than two years and not only that, but with Sid’s help, during that time I had been practicing on unwitting “suspects,” drawing their portraits using only Sid’s description—and that didn’t even count the thousands of quick portraits I’d done with watercolors and pastels along the River Walk and in malls all over Texas.

I was ready, I told myself. I could do it. All I had to do was convince a bunch of hard-nosed cops that they needed me and that this was their lucky day.

Officer Howard White picked me up and helped me load my cumbersome easel and my drawing supplies into the squad car. He was funny, entertaining and personable on the drive to the police department. He acted as if he did this sort of thing every day and it helped me to feel as if it was something I did every day, too.

The Robbery Division was housed in a 1950s-era building that was spartan but serviceable and Lt. Don McWilliams worked in a small office. When I first met McWilliams—whom I’ve since come to love and refer to, like everyone else who knows him, as “Mac”—he reminded me of the actor Wilford Brimley in his younger days. He had large, powerful legs, a firm handshake and a soft-spoken, homey demeanor. There wasn’t a great deal of room to set up my easel in his office, but I was not deterred. I made myself a little corner studio adjacent to the open doorway.

Years later and still grateful, I asked Lt. McWilliams what had motivated him to take a chance on an unknown like me—a female artist.

His answer was pure cop: “Aww, my captain didn’t want to deal with you. He told me to let you come on in just so we could get rid of you.”

We laugh about that even now.