ABCNEWS.com : Chat Transcript: Jeanne Boylan, FBI Sketch Artist
January 11, 2002 issue
May 18
My skill consists of an ability to listen carefully and to not discount the information a witness is providing. Often, investigators are taught to be skeptical, and I have the luxury of offering unconditional acceptance. It's not my job to be skeptical.
The witnesses and victims that I work with strongly sense the difference, and ultimately confide more, relax more, and with that relaxation comes greater access to detail in a much deeper level of memory.
This skill can be taught to investigators, but is in contradiction to the style they're accustomed to using in their interviews of suspects.
I got into this work inadvertently through having been the victim of a crime many years ago. I understand the emotional needs of someone in the position of trying to be heard by police.
I try to create a perforation between the emotion and the memory, and typically, that distinction is made through developing a trust and rapport and by taking all the time that the eyewitness needs to emote.
Many of the issues discussed in the interviews supercede the actual needs of the criminal case. But by allowing them a safe place to express themselves and by honoring their confidence, those fine details are able to come from a very deeply embedded level of memory.
How long does it normally take to come up with a sketch?
The more years that I'm involved in this work, I've found, the longer it takes. The length of time seems to correlate with the degree of accuracy.Often, in an interview, the early details provided by the eyewitness will differ from those that we arrive at hours later into the interview, and without exception, it's the later details that tend to be accurate.
What we've managed to do is to travel the distance between what eyewitnesses THINK they saw, which is often very tainted and distorted by police mug shots, photographs, and facial identification catalogs the eyewitness has been exposed to, and what they ACTUALLY saw which is encoded at a subliminal level of memory.
Often the two are vastly different from one another. But, we're able to go past that contamination in the later hours of the interview, as the trust develops, and move into more of a subliminal level of memory, which is where the accurate information tends to still be housed. It's a long process that is built upon the primary ingredient of trust.
You spoke about "good observational skills" by some of the witnesses you interviewed. Are there any tips on observation and identification you would want to give to an average citizen in an abnormal situation?
Most people have a tendency to notice characteristics that they themselves might feel a deficiency in, and if they've developed a lifelong habit of noticing that characteristic, that's typically the first point of their observation. For instance, a man who has difficulty growing thick facial hair might be particularly tuned into observing a suspect's facial hair growth. A man who's balding might be particularly attuned to the fullness of someone else's hair. There's a gender difference in how people perceive, as well. Women tend to look at character and determine their level of comfort and trust by looking into the eyes. Men tend to look at the external features; for instance, size, body weight, etc., in a very primal method of assessing threats.
To teach observational skills it's important to practice looking beyond the characteristics that you normally focus on as you observe other people, and look at combinations of shapes of faces, textures of skin, textures of hair, and compare.
Practice is the best weapon. As you learn to make yourself aware of different characteristics, not just as components of a face, but as shapes and forms and textures, you'll become more attuned to the differences and develop greater observational ability.
Good witnesses are often defined by the level of emotional investment in their observations. If they're emotionally impacted by the sight — for example, witnessing a criminal act — and they're personally affected by it, that image is likely to be much more firmly embedded in their recall. It can make the image more difficult to access because of their emotional guard, but it also gives greater probability that the embedded image will be accurate and be retained despite the level of contamination.
There are frequent discrepancies between my professional assessment of the credibility of a witness and the FBI's assessment of the credibility of a witness.
What the case turned out to be was that this person, despite his lack of formal education, was extremely intelligent. His vocabulary was that of an uneducated man, but that is no reflection upon his capability or his ability to provide a description of what he had seen. He turned out to be an extremely credible witness, and very important to the case. That example shows you how someone that I might deem to be an excellent witness can be, and often is, discounted by authorities as not being reliable. My scale of evaluation is vastly different than theirs. They may have simply not deemed the eyewitnesses as being credible or reliable, and in my opinion, the eyewitnesses I spoke to were very credible.
Which was the most difficult for you to do?
In my book, Portraits of Guilt, I tell the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was kidnapped and tortured in Guatemala. In my 23 years in this work her case was, without question, the most challenging because of her level of torture. It took a full week to work with her and produce, in a very gentle and slow process, the images of her attackers. That case required all of my abilities.
Whenever there are multiple witnesses, whether it be of a single incident or, in the Oklahoma City bombing, individual witnesses from different sightings, each description is treated as a completely separate entity. I never homogenize descriptions, because each person in each sighting perceives through their own set of filters and will relate it to things in their own lives and people that they may have seen before, and racial biases they may feel, for example.
So, even two people standing next to one another witnessing the same event will have and should have differing perceptions.
I produce a drawing for each individual sighting, as in this case, and if it's determined that they're describing the same individual, then it becomes my very difficult decision, based on my expertise, to determine which of those images is likely to be the most credible and from the most articulate witness.
There are many variables that come into play in determining which might be the most accurate, including vantage point, racial differences, visual acuity, duration of the sighting, lighting conditions, degree of emotional investment from the witness. So, as you can see, it's a very complex process in the sightings.
Under trauma, the mind has a powerful ability to absorb details. The "trick" comes in that the same emotion that acts to embed that information into memory also can make it more difficult to access.
Almost everyone in the audience can give precise details of that moment in their lives, but seldom can give detail to the day before those events or even the moments of those events.
When you're a victim of a traumatic incident, that same principle of observation is enacted. So, even though some people think they might not be able to provide a detailed description of their own spouse under a traumatic incident in their life, they might be able to.
If asked correctly and not shown any visual aids, it might be possible to draw from their memory even the tiniest detail about texture in the skin or lines on the face, etc. You'd be surprised at your own ability.
In a situation such as the Susan Smith case, where you are ultimately drawing a fictitious person, are there any initial oddities or inconsistencies that might suggest dishonesty. If so, do you pass those along to the investigation team?
Yes. In the Susan Smith case, I was called in to upgrade a very vague image that she had been able to produce with the visual aid system of showing pictures and facial components that is commonly used by the police.
In that case, because the police had provided Susan with the answers by having shown her photographs of facial components, they inadvertently aided her in creating an alibi because they didn't force her to rely on her own actual memory. Therefore, they didn't provide the opportunity for the clues that would disclose fabrication to ever be seen.
There are many ways to detect fabrication through neurolinguistics (body language), eye contact, the emotional response to questions, whether or not the detail provided is too little or too much for the described scenario.
Fabrication becomes apparent very quickly if you're not using these visual aid tools, and instead are relying on the actual memory. And if that were the case, then yes, I would pass that on to the investigators, but it happens very infrequently.
"Do witnesses tend to forget certain details as time passes?"
In some cases, if an eyewitness's description has been discounted by the investigators, then that image becomes more deeply and strongly embedded in his memory. In the Unabomber case, for example, I interviewed the single eyewitness in that 17-year case seven and a half years after she had seen the suspect for less than one second.
An original police sketch had been produced using the visual aid system, and her discontent with that original image stayed with her for all those years, which acted to protect her actual recall, and at seven and a half years we were able to produce an amazingly accurate rendition of what she had seen.
What would you be doing if not this line of work?
I would love to be doing anything else! This work is emotionally challenging and often very politically explosive. When I enter a case, it's after substantial damage has been to the eyewitness's memory by the visual aids that have been used by police in creating the composite. So I arrive in a high-profile position, yet my success is against all odds at that point.
It also commands a lot of travel, a very unpredictable schedule, and involvement in some of the most difficult scenarios imaginable, such as kidnappings, murders, and as is obvious, the Oklahoma City bombing.
But the payoff comes in having even a small part in helping the case come to resolution before anyone else can be injured.
I'd rather be a cart girl on a golf course.
Have you ever personally asked to participate in a specific case, and if so, why?
It's my tendency to not want to get involved, and I tell a story in the book about my repeated efforts to move away from this line of work.
It's especially difficult in child kidnapping cases when you see the agony on the parents' faces in the news not to want help do something to relieve them of their pain. So, it's a perpetual battle between doing what's right for me and doing what's right.