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Speaker 6: Radio, you are now listening to True Murder, The most
Speaker 6: Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that
Speaker 6: have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker BTK.
Speaker 6: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
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Speaker 6: True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening.
Speaker 7: Orange County Sergeant retired Michael W. Stred is the sketch Cop.
Speaker 7: He's one of a kind crime fighter who's frequently called
Speaker 7: into action by police departments seeking help solving their most
Speaker 7: difficult cases. For over three decades, Michael has provided signature
Speaker 7: images for the country's most notorious murders, rapes, and kidnapping kidnappings,
Speaker 7: including the kidnapping and murder of five year old Samantha Runyon,
Speaker 7: as well as the Baton Roue serial killer. The Sketch
Speaker 7: Cop has fought crime coast to coast, from Los Angeles
Speaker 7: to Baltimore, Salt Lake City to Baton Rouge. Along the way,
Speaker 7: he has papered the walls of police squad rooms with
Speaker 7: sketches of their city's most dangerous criminals. In this collection
Speaker 7: of true crime stories, Michael shares cases from his own portfolio.
Speaker 7: He describes how he connects with and empowers courageous victims
Speaker 7: and eye witnesses from all walks of life. Using their descriptions,
Speaker 7: the author creates lifelike sketches of the assailants with an
Speaker 7: accuracy that has led to quick identifications and captures. Sketch
Speaker 7: Cop Drawing a Line against Crime provides readers a glimpse
Speaker 7: at some of Michael W. Streed's career cases and the
Speaker 7: significant role he plays in the criminal justice system. The
Speaker 7: book that we are profiling this evening is Sketch Cop
Speaker 7: Drawing a Line Against Crime with my special guest, sergeant
Speaker 7: journalist and author Michael W. Streed picked up there.
Speaker 4: But I'm glad to be on. I'm glad to discuss
Speaker 4: the book with you and your guests, or I'm sorry
Speaker 4: you and your fans there.
Speaker 7: Absolutely Now let's start off, Michael. I gave people a
Speaker 7: little bit of an idea of what happens with this
Speaker 7: book and what this book is all about, but very
Speaker 7: very very little detail. So I think it's very important
Speaker 7: to the book. Why don't you give us your background yourself.
Speaker 7: You said your father was a police officer, but there
Speaker 7: was much more to it in your early environment and
Speaker 7: your background. So tell us your background and how you
Speaker 7: came to want to be a police officer, and how
Speaker 7: it came to be that you combined your love of
Speaker 7: art and combined artistry and your police background and your
Speaker 7: interest in police enforcement to be able to combine these
Speaker 7: two things into what you have appropriately called sketch cop.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I grew up in a police household as long
Speaker 4: as I can remember. My father was a police officer,
Speaker 4: eventually retired as a police chief. But being as that,
Speaker 4: we lived in the same county police and there were
Speaker 4: always police stopping by, hanging out, coming over for dinner
Speaker 4: there at the holidays. So I knew all of them.
Speaker 4: I listened to their stories, I knew their background, and
Speaker 4: so I was pretty much inundated with it. But at
Speaker 4: the same time, like most kids, I had a variety
Speaker 4: of interests, and I was really interested in art as
Speaker 4: a kid, and I just doodled and drew nothing really
Speaker 4: serious growing up. And as I got older, towards high
Speaker 4: school graduation, but what am I going to do with
Speaker 4: my life? And I thought about being an artist, and
Speaker 4: I realized that, you know, I would probably started us
Speaker 4: because unless you were really popular had some sort of
Speaker 4: niche type of art, you were going to be like
Speaker 4: everyone else. And I always wanted to stand out somehow.
Speaker 4: So I went ahead and went into police worker as
Speaker 4: a cadet just out of high school. Because every profile
Speaker 4: I took said, you know, you are helpful to people,
Speaker 4: you want to help people, and you like being outside.
Speaker 4: And that's what police work afforded me, the ability to
Speaker 4: help people be outside because had adrenaline and rushby the
Speaker 4: first one there, and the art was always there. As
Speaker 4: I went into police work, and one night I was
Speaker 4: off and was enjoying dinner at home watching television. I
Speaker 4: love to watch the news and I still do. And
Speaker 4: I happen to see a composite sketch flash on the screen.
Speaker 4: I dropped my fork. I'm like, that's it. That's that's
Speaker 4: the epiphany, that's the that's the thunderbolt, the lightning strike.
Speaker 4: This is what I want to do. This is how
Speaker 4: I combine my love for art with my desire to
Speaker 4: help people in public service. So I started training, and
Speaker 4: you know, I still love catching bad guys, and for me,
Speaker 4: you know, I like the car chase and I like
Speaker 4: chasing people down alleys and stuff and all the cops
Speaker 4: and robberts stuff. But I wanted to find a way
Speaker 4: to set myself apart from my peers and find another
Speaker 4: way to further help people and catch bad guys and
Speaker 4: catch more and catch some of the worst people. And
Speaker 4: so when I started taking courses in police sketching and
Speaker 4: learning how to sketch the bad guys and talk to
Speaker 4: people and turn their words into pay sure, you know,
Speaker 4: I learned that there was much more in terms of
Speaker 4: age progression, facial reconstruction, so many facets that I could
Speaker 4: learn that I could add to my friends, a toolbox
Speaker 4: and and again, you know, further my reach and law enforcement.
Speaker 4: So so when people came to, you know, ask me
Speaker 4: what do you do, I said, I'm a police sketch artist.
Speaker 4: And I said, they said, well, they didn't really they
Speaker 4: couldn't wrap their head around it. So I said, I'm
Speaker 4: I'm I'm a sketch cop. Like, oh, okay, you're a
Speaker 4: police officers sketches. I said, yeah, absolutely, that's that's it.
Speaker 4: And so the word kind of stuck, and the name stuck,
Speaker 4: and uh, I've used it ever since in terms of
Speaker 4: the title of the book. Uh, you know, facial compositive
Speaker 4: software products of my company sells and training and such.
Speaker 4: So it's it's sketch coop is my brand. And and
Speaker 4: that's how I describe pretty much what I do in
Speaker 4: a word.
Speaker 7: Now, I did talk to the audience a little bit
Speaker 7: about that. It was a confluence of things that had
Speaker 7: had occurred at you one of the pioneers in this
Speaker 7: digital uh facial imagery, but also you started off with
Speaker 7: pen and paper. Pencil and paper, and when people do
Speaker 7: think of police sketches, that's what we do think of.
Speaker 7: So that's what I had told the audience that we
Speaker 7: would be discussing with your book Sketch Coop, but you
Speaker 7: provide a very good example and also how all facets
Speaker 7: of law enforcement before DNA and before some of the
Speaker 7: other forensic sciences were either discredited or as has happened,
Speaker 7: have been developed. So you talk about December eleventh, nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty and you talk about getting learning a little bit
Speaker 7: about along the way, about what not to do or
Speaker 7: how to do things a little bit differently. So you
Speaker 7: were sort of thrown into the fire here with this,
Speaker 7: Dwayne McKinney. So maybe tell us a little bit about this.
Speaker 7: I think this You said this was your very first,
Speaker 7: So tell us a little bit about this case and
Speaker 7: what you learned, and tell our audience about this case
Speaker 7: and how you accomposite drawing was an integral part of
Speaker 7: this case.
Speaker 4: Sure, it was my first. I believe it was my
Speaker 4: first murder case. I always believe that if you're starting
Speaker 4: any type of craft, say you're construction first, you're building
Speaker 4: a house. I mean I'd be building birdhouses and doghouses first,
Speaker 4: and it worked my way to building houses, and that's
Speaker 4: just the way my mind works, and it was the
Speaker 4: same way with this when I first learned how to
Speaker 4: become the sketch artist. Police sketch art I was, you know,
Speaker 4: cutting my teeth so to speak on smaller cases, you know,
Speaker 4: misdemeanor type of cases and such. So when does murder happened?
Speaker 4: I was, you know, six months out of my first
Speaker 4: police sketch arts school, and you know, I was I
Speaker 4: was trained how to interview people on crime scenes during
Speaker 4: the academy. It's a very very different interview than you
Speaker 4: do as a forensic artist and even as a police investigator.
Speaker 4: And so it happened when I was working on shifts
Speaker 4: uniform and you know, I was dealing with traumatized people,
Speaker 4: and you know, I was sitting bend a big desk
Speaker 4: and then uniform, badge and gun and I was just
Speaker 4: like dripping with authority. And I didn't realize at the
Speaker 4: time because at the time, you know, it was a
Speaker 4: police sketch artist. The name important. It was all about
Speaker 4: the drawing, all about the art. So that's what I
Speaker 4: was focusing on. Even though you know, my skills are
Speaker 4: fairly raw. Then I make a draw recognizable faith, but
Speaker 4: not not the skill level I have now. But but
Speaker 4: I learned along the way that it was more about
Speaker 4: the ability to communicate with people, you know, the ability
Speaker 4: to get them to trust you very quick, and trust
Speaker 4: you with sharing their fears and their trauma and just
Speaker 4: how they were scared to death they're going to die
Speaker 4: or something that they happened to see a traumatic event
Speaker 4: like someone you know, murdered in front of them. And
Speaker 4: I realized that, you know, all the authority, the trappings
Speaker 4: of authority, whether it was like putting a large barrier
Speaker 4: between me and the person, and you know, you know,
Speaker 4: wearing you know, an offensive weapon like a gun and
Speaker 4: having a baton and stuff in that just further you know,
Speaker 4: froze people up. It was. It was much different than
Speaker 4: I do now. I've obviously I've evolved, and so when
Speaker 4: I developed this sketch, I actually developed two sketches that night.
Speaker 4: I think that the person was so upset and I
Speaker 4: didn't quite know how to help them other than the
Speaker 4: process of getting this drawing down a paper. And it
Speaker 4: did look like Dwayne McKinney, and it did look like
Speaker 4: herman jacket. The person eventually figured had done the crime.
Speaker 4: You know that it hit both marks, so to speak,
Speaker 4: and of course they were able to exonerate Dwayne McKinney
Speaker 4: after you know, eighteen years in prison. But if I've
Speaker 4: learned a lot since then, and I think that anybody
Speaker 4: who believes it's about the art, they might be partially right.
Speaker 4: But really, like I tell people, now, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I consider on draw three pictures all day. I can
Speaker 4: go to Disneyland or go on the boardwalk. But if
Speaker 4: if I, if I make the drawing all about me,
Speaker 4: and I become so heavily invested ego wise in it,
Speaker 4: then it becomes my drawing and it's and so it's
Speaker 4: not about me, it's about them. So I take great
Speaker 4: care is to take that time to build a rapport
Speaker 4: with them, to get to know them quickly, to build
Speaker 4: that bridge, and to get in and get out. Because
Speaker 4: people do have lives. You have short attention spans, and
Speaker 4: you have to get them well you can get them,
Speaker 4: so to speak, and you get one bite at the apple,
Speaker 4: so to speak, and you want to make a good one.
Speaker 4: And so I do a lot of things differently now
Speaker 4: in terms of the emphasis I place on the process
Speaker 4: and the people aspect of it more so than the
Speaker 4: artistic angle of it.
Speaker 7: Now you say the you talk about the goals of
Speaker 7: the composite as well.
Speaker 4: What is the the goal is I'm sorry, the goals
Speaker 4: that haven't make it look like the person like to
Speaker 4: resemble the person. It doesn't have to look exactly like them,
Speaker 4: but close enough to word it keys something and jump
Speaker 4: starts something. You know, someone's going to recognize an aspect
Speaker 4: of that drawing and associated with someone.
Speaker 7: Is there certain features that I noticed that It seemed
Speaker 7: that what you were trying to say was that there
Speaker 7: were certain features that were remembered by that witness. And
Speaker 7: of course you talk about the procedure, and maybe I
Speaker 7: should let you explain that procedure as well. Is how
Speaker 7: you move ahead? How do you start and how do
Speaker 7: you move ahead with the witness? I think people don't
Speaker 7: know any of the process whatsoever.
Speaker 4: Sure, it all starts with a handshake. And you know,
Speaker 4: people come into my office. You know, I go into
Speaker 4: the room where they're at and I shake their hand
Speaker 4: and make eye contact with them and introduce myself and
Speaker 4: my name is Mike Michael, and I get their name
Speaker 4: and and and I sit down and start talking to them.
Speaker 4: And the first thing I do is a developer, for
Speaker 4: I have to find some sort of common ground, some
Speaker 4: sort of commonalities, so I kind of know as much
Speaker 4: as I can about a lot of different things, so
Speaker 4: I can so I can more easily jump start those conversations.
Speaker 4: Maybe somebody comes in with, like, you know, a T
Speaker 4: shirt on, you know, some heavy metal rock band, or
Speaker 4: a mom comes in with a key chain that has
Speaker 4: pictures of her sons and the Little League uniforms and
Speaker 4: such and and and so I find things that, you know,
Speaker 4: that I can quickly associate things I know something about
Speaker 4: and start asking them about that. And I give an
Speaker 4: example in Baltimore, when I was the full time sketch
Speaker 4: artist there, I had a poster hanging in my office
Speaker 4: called the Bad Guys, and it was a caricature poster
Speaker 4: of all the different movie and TV you know, the Sopranos,
Speaker 4: the Godfather characters and such. And people would come in
Speaker 4: and they may not be able to remember who the
Speaker 4: first president United States was, but they, you know, they
Speaker 4: knew these these culture icons, the gangster so to speak,
Speaker 4: and they start asking about them and start talking about them,
Speaker 4: and we're able to talk about the movies and stuff
Speaker 4: like that, and you can see people start to relax,
Speaker 4: and after about ten minutes of talking about it, they
Speaker 4: start relaxing. Then we go in and start talking about
Speaker 4: the process, explaining and managing their expectations, what what I'm
Speaker 4: hoping to get from them and what they can offer
Speaker 4: to me. And then once they you know, once they
Speaker 4: know the ground rules so to speak, and the expectations,
Speaker 4: it's almost like you can see it's almost like an
Speaker 4: air being let out of them, and you can see
Speaker 4: them just instantly relax and then they want to try
Speaker 4: because their biggest fear when they come into police stations
Speaker 4: is this compositive is going to get the wrong person
Speaker 4: in trouble, when in fact it won't. And so then
Speaker 4: I have them, you know, talking about the crime. If
Speaker 4: it's a sexual assault crime, I have them taking up
Speaker 4: to the up to the edge so to speak, when
Speaker 4: the attack occurred, and I leave the I will leave
Speaker 4: them of having to tell me the goal details to
Speaker 4: everything else. And then I have them describe the faithfully
Speaker 4: and as much detail as they can. And then I
Speaker 4: showed them a book of facial reference pictures to reinforce
Speaker 4: what they're telling me, because in memory, the visual part,
Speaker 4: the recognition part, the ability of people to be able
Speaker 4: to show you versus tell you is always stronger because
Speaker 4: people have different educational levels. Different their ability to articulate
Speaker 4: is better in some than others. But they can all
Speaker 4: pick a picture out and show you. Once they do that,
Speaker 4: then then I sketch the picture I get much like
Speaker 4: building a house, you sketch the framework out. Then I
Speaker 4: let them view that and that's the refinement process where
Speaker 4: they get a chance to tell me no, you know,
Speaker 4: you need to change this or that's good. And once
Speaker 4: they get all done with that, then we render it
Speaker 4: in and a couple of times during the final running
Speaker 4: of process, I show them the composite just to make
Speaker 4: sure I'm not going off in the wrong direction. And
Speaker 4: then when I'm done, I give them one last get
Speaker 4: their feedback, thanks them for taking part in the process,
Speaker 4: because I want them to walk away feeling good about
Speaker 4: what they did. I want them to feel like they
Speaker 4: were able to help they feel good about it. And
Speaker 4: then I give it to the detective and give them
Speaker 4: any information I think might be relevant, and I go
Speaker 4: on to the next case and wait for the detective
Speaker 4: to let me know they caught the bad guy.
Speaker 7: Now, when we talked about the you know, there was
Speaker 7: obviously a great injustice with Dwayne McKinney, and you did
Speaker 7: learn some things the hard way with that case, but
Speaker 7: you advance very quickly because you have some success with
Speaker 7: the composite drawings that you do offer police enforcement. You
Speaker 7: can do this in a timely manner. And also that
Speaker 7: you said that there is no difference between a child
Speaker 7: or an adult, and in fact, sometimes adults are easier
Speaker 7: to deal with in terms of eliciting a detailed description
Speaker 7: that's useful for a composite sketch. Why is that?
Speaker 4: Actually, I actually I believe that children can be better
Speaker 4: witnesses in some cases. And the reason I and the
Speaker 4: reason I say that is because as we go through
Speaker 4: life is, you know, and become adults. You know, we
Speaker 4: pick up a variety of uh, you know, biases along
Speaker 4: the way, and things we like, things we don't like,
Speaker 4: and the things that color our perceptions of the truth
Speaker 4: sometimes and or things that we see. And so you know,
Speaker 4: very young children don't necessarily have that yet, you know,
Speaker 4: it's you know, out of the mouths of babes as
Speaker 4: they say, you know, kids will come up. It's it's
Speaker 4: really kind of funny because kids and elderly people have
Speaker 4: a tendency just to pop off and say stuff, and
Speaker 4: no one holds them responsible for it because it's very unbiased,
Speaker 4: it's very unfiltered. It's just straight out this is what
Speaker 4: it is. I use the example of a chair. You know,
Speaker 4: a child may able to tell you to take a
Speaker 4: three legged chair. It's okay, it's got three legs, a back,
Speaker 4: it's a brown, and it's got like a big scratch
Speaker 4: on the seat, and an adult may give you partial description.
Speaker 4: Then they may go on about how they don't like brown,
Speaker 4: they thought the chair was too uncomfortable, and they prefer
Speaker 4: fabric and wood, and they started, you know, going off
Speaker 4: on tangents and stuff. And I think sometimes the child's
Speaker 4: witness brings information it's still pure and unfiltered that I
Speaker 4: think that they shouldn't be discounted as witnesses.
Speaker 7: With all that, I just kind of introduced this while
Speaker 7: we're waiting for you to connect in that there has
Speaker 7: been so much discredit. I just had a program a
Speaker 7: couple of weeks ago in the Making of a Murderer.
Speaker 7: Making a Murderer really highlighted that with Penny Bernston that
Speaker 7: was raped on the beach and positively identified Stephen Avery,
Speaker 7: which was then totally a soonerted after eighteen years. So
Speaker 7: in light of that, I thought, this is fascinating that
Speaker 7: you were able to get a you know, a composite
Speaker 7: from a detailed description from a six year old in
Speaker 7: light of all the discrediting of that eyewitness testimony. So
Speaker 7: tell us a little bit more about go ahead.
Speaker 4: No, nokay, go ahead, I'm sorry, t tell me a
Speaker 4: little bit. Tell you a little bit about what, well.
Speaker 7: What you explained the role of memory and accuracy in
Speaker 7: what you do as well, So tell tell our audience
Speaker 7: what exactly your ideas are and what you've seen regarding
Speaker 7: memory and accuracy in making that composite sketch.
Speaker 4: Sure, I can tell you first of all that as
Speaker 4: much as people you know, demonized and marginalized eyewitness memories
Speaker 4: be mailable and distortable, that's that's correct. But people do
Speaker 4: get it right. And I think part of the problem
Speaker 4: is with with eyewitness memory is it's not so much
Speaker 4: about what people remember as much as how we are
Speaker 4: able to retrieve and how we're able to access it.
Speaker 4: Because really, as a police sketch artist, that's my job
Speaker 4: is to do memory minding, so to speak, you know,
Speaker 4: being able to take that memory and retrieve it and
Speaker 4: make it something that's going to be useful. Now, it
Speaker 4: would be very easy for me to say, you know,
Speaker 4: on the cases where I didn't get it right, so
Speaker 4: to speak, that it's it's I can blame it on
Speaker 4: the on the witness, but it's not necessarily blaming on
Speaker 4: anybody as much as the fact that you know, you
Speaker 4: have to be able to evaluate the eyewitness properly, and
Speaker 4: you have to be able to find ways of accessing
Speaker 4: it and retrieving that memory. Now, you know, we talk
Speaker 4: about protecting memory, but it's really hard because you know
Speaker 4: once that person with Hey, guys, it is Ryan.
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Speaker 4: This is a crime. They're going to witness hundreds, if
Speaker 4: not thousands of spaces between the time of the crime
Speaker 4: and the time that the police show them a lineup
Speaker 4: or the time they get in front of me. As
Speaker 4: the sketch artists, their memories are going to are already
Speaker 4: going to be distorted in varying degrees. So it's not
Speaker 4: to you know, to folks like myself to understand how
Speaker 4: to retrieve that in different techniques to use to retrieve that, Uh,
Speaker 4: is as purely as possible. And you know, sometimes you know,
Speaker 4: you get it right and you're able to hit a
Speaker 4: home run, and other times, you know, people just they
Speaker 4: just there's there's blocks, and there's trauma, there's things that
Speaker 4: prevent you from getting it out of them, from being
Speaker 4: able to share it and in and then you have
Speaker 4: to rely on other evidence at that point. Just like
Speaker 4: when somebody says, well, you know, this is this composite
Speaker 4: wrongly convicted somebody, and I say, no, it's not the
Speaker 4: composite wrongly. The composite is just a tool. It's more
Speaker 4: of a elimination tool than an identification tool. Once the
Speaker 4: composite identifies the person, I would, I would. I don't
Speaker 4: want to say that the artist is off the hook
Speaker 4: at that point, but really it's up to the detective
Speaker 4: to take that identification and gather evidence to corroborate it
Speaker 4: or exonerate that person. And sometimes under the best circumstances,
Speaker 4: the officers go through all the steps and later they
Speaker 4: find out that they were one step shorter, information came
Speaker 4: out much later that they had no control of, or
Speaker 4: they got lazier, sloppy and felt the pressure to have
Speaker 4: a conviction or arrest in shortcuts and the wrong person
Speaker 4: gets convicted.
Speaker 7: Right now, you talk about a case in the book
Speaker 7: where you a sketch that you made is taken door
Speaker 7: to door. Eventually the original father in this case denies
Speaker 7: any involvement, and then a boy yells that his uncle
Speaker 7: Tommy is involved. So tell us about this case and
Speaker 7: what this demonstrates and your role in this case.
Speaker 4: Sure, it was a home of days in sexual assault case.
Speaker 4: And this is like I tell you, kids have got
Speaker 4: no filter. I mean, they come up and they oh hey,
Speaker 4: they say the darnedest think well. In this case, a
Speaker 4: middle affluent primeer forties was home during the day. A
Speaker 4: young man knocked on her door, forces land her home,
Speaker 4: fired a gunshot through a ceiling to get her to
Speaker 4: gain compliance, and in sexually assaulted her, in stole her car.
Speaker 4: And so I went to her home and I sat
Speaker 4: on and talk to her, and at the conclusion of
Speaker 4: the sketch, it's just terrified, understandably, And she saw the
Speaker 4: sketch and started trembling and pushed it away from me
Speaker 4: and jumped up and ran in another room. And I
Speaker 4: heard her vomiting. I mean, she was she got nausey
Speaker 4: she got sick. I mean the just the visceral reaction
Speaker 4: she had, and it was so powerful that I knew
Speaker 4: that we were, you know, on the right track. It's
Speaker 4: like on television that news people will always tell hey,
Speaker 4: they cried, you know, tears are good TV. Well, in
Speaker 4: my business that people have a visceral response like that,
Speaker 4: I go, okay, we're onto something. So the detectives took
Speaker 4: it doory door. They found the car in an area
Speaker 4: just south of the city where I threw the sketch,
Speaker 4: and so they found the car. So they determined a
Speaker 4: certain radius and they started going doordoor sharing the sketch.
Speaker 4: So when they knocked in the door, a young man
Speaker 4: came to the door. He you know, the detectives said,
Speaker 4: here's a sketch and we're looking for this person. Do
Speaker 4: you know who this person might be? And he said no, no, no,
Speaker 4: I don't have no idea who could be. And as
Speaker 4: it turns out, it was his brother, and he was
Speaker 4: covering for his brother. And of course you know kids
Speaker 4: are curious. Well, kid comes by, pushes through but says, hey,
Speaker 4: what like, what's going on? Hey, that's Uncle Tommy. And
Speaker 4: so Uncle Tommy turns out to be the person at
Speaker 4: the door's brother, and they're able to identify him and
Speaker 4: arrest him, and he's a very close match for the sketch.
Speaker 7: And how do you and how do police proceed once
Speaker 7: they do have that that he looks very much like
Speaker 7: that sketch, Well, what.
Speaker 4: They do is they oftentimes will obtain a mugshot, arrest
Speaker 4: booking photo, and or a driver's license photo if they've
Speaker 4: never been arrested before, and they put it in what
Speaker 4: they call a photo array, a six pack, or a
Speaker 4: photographic lineup, depending upon what region or jurisdiction you're in. Essentially,
Speaker 4: they take six photos one of the suspects, five of
Speaker 4: other people who look similar to and they present it
Speaker 4: to the eyewitness, and once the eyewitness makes a positive identification,
Speaker 4: oftentimes that will give probable cause for officers to go
Speaker 4: out and arrest the person without a warrant, and then
Speaker 4: you know, interview them, mirandize them, interview them, collect whatever
Speaker 4: evidence they can legally without a search warrant, and sometimes
Speaker 4: that you know, things that they find during the arrest
Speaker 4: will provide probable cause for a search warrant to obtain
Speaker 4: evidence from a car or a home or even things
Speaker 4: like DNA samples or hair samples and things like that
Speaker 4: to further strengthen the identification. And I think that's where
Speaker 4: you know, we've gotten in trouble with a lot of
Speaker 4: cases before DNA because they base these arrests and convictions
Speaker 4: solely on eyewitness identification, when in reality now maybe even then,
Speaker 4: there's more and more evidence that they can use to
Speaker 4: strengthen that identification or in some cases exonerate the person
Speaker 4: right there before it even goes to trap.
Speaker 7: Now, tell us a little bit before we get into
Speaker 7: some other you know, dramatic examples in cases that you
Speaker 7: were involved with that are high profile and very very
Speaker 7: interesting cases. When did facial digital facial imagery come into play,
Speaker 7: How did it come into play, and what was its
Speaker 7: development and what how much of a role did you
Speaker 7: have in some of that development as well? Well?
Speaker 4: Years years ago, I mean when when they first started,
Speaker 4: you know, doing sketches of suspects, you know, freehand artists.
Speaker 4: You know, companies were trying to develop commercial products that
Speaker 4: they could sell to police departments, not only to be
Speaker 4: helpful and develop products that has some significant social contribution,
Speaker 4: but also to make money, to make profits, and you know,
Speaker 4: so they started making these mechanical kits. They have uh
Speaker 4: cellophane overlays with different facial features on them, and you know,
Speaker 4: people would come and they would they would pick out
Speaker 4: the noses and the eyes and such, and they would
Speaker 4: do the overlays to where it formed a fuzz puzzle.
Speaker 4: It was almost like putting it together a puzzle. And
Speaker 4: then they would you know, pay per clicking, pay per
Speaker 4: clip them together, make a xerox copy for a wanted
Speaker 4: poster or if the person a mustache and use a
Speaker 4: grease pran to draw in a mustache. It was very crude,
Speaker 4: but it worked. And then there were other mechanical assembly
Speaker 4: kiss in England as well, So England and the United
Speaker 4: States were they were doing parallel developments. The first one
Speaker 4: was the Identic kit and and the the e fit
Speaker 4: over in England, and so in the early nineties, late
Speaker 4: eighties early nineties was when you first started seeing computer
Speaker 4: software development. They would take those features and automate them.
Speaker 4: And so I got in early started working for companies
Speaker 4: as a consult in the nineteen nineties because I'd seen
Speaker 4: these products developed and I knew that it was inevitable
Speaker 4: that they were going to develop as the technology got
Speaker 4: better and impact our industry, and they would you know,
Speaker 4: they'd be putting they'd be giving the ability to create faces.
Speaker 4: They'd be taking it away from the artists and giving
Speaker 4: it to the line officers, the detectives, the support personnel,
Speaker 4: whoever could sit and talk to somebody and figure out
Speaker 4: that the technology would now become a composite artist so
Speaker 4: to speak, or police sketch artists by proxy. And so
Speaker 4: my experience with the companies was such that they were
Speaker 4: really interested in making a profit, but they didn't know
Speaker 4: anything about the product itself, or the police industry and
Speaker 4: or the process of interviewing people. It was their whole
Speaker 4: pitch was, with our software, you can develop a sketch
Speaker 4: and minutes. Mechanically you could, but the process itself they
Speaker 4: weren't expecting in terms of interviewing people. They were just
Speaker 4: not even acknowledging any sort of training aspect. So I thought, well,
Speaker 4: if this is going to impact my industry, I want
Speaker 4: to get in on it. I want to be the
Speaker 4: person driving. I want to be the conductor and the
Speaker 4: train and not the person in the cabooz so to speak.
Speaker 4: So I started working as a consultant and I started
Speaker 4: training different agencies using the software, and there was a
Speaker 4: real we hit a certain point where there's a lack
Speaker 4: of development, and so I thought, well, there was a
Speaker 4: point time I said, you know, I'm going to do
Speaker 4: it myself and I'm going to go ahead and create
Speaker 4: a product. And I created Sketch cop Base sets Facial
Speaker 4: Composite System software so I could properly dispense the training
Speaker 4: and have some influence in terms of how departments used it,
Speaker 4: how they perceived facial composites in their investigative protocols and
Speaker 4: their role as detectives. And I just figured the more
Speaker 4: faces that are out there, the more people that can
Speaker 4: do it, means more bad guys are going to jail.
Speaker 4: You know, some artists may be really invested, say, look,
Speaker 4: you know what, my pencil is better. I can do
Speaker 4: better than what the computer can do. But with the
Speaker 4: software tools we've developed in the partnerships with other digital
Speaker 4: imaging software, you can really do what a sketch artist
Speaker 4: does with a click of a mouse and an eight
Speaker 4: to sixteen hour course that we put on. And so
Speaker 4: that's what I'm doing today, and I'm working on a
Speaker 4: new book. It'll instruct officers law enforce or personality and
Speaker 4: forensic science students, how to create how to use these tools,
Speaker 4: both hardware tools and software to create digital faces. In
Speaker 4: some instances you don't have to be an artist. In
Speaker 4: other instances where you are an artist, there's software tools
Speaker 4: and painter tools and stuff you can use to quickly
Speaker 4: develop your own libraries, quickly use the stylists and the
Speaker 4: tools within the software to create sketches that look very
Speaker 4: lifelike that you can more quickly disseminate to still law
Speaker 4: course in the public.
Speaker 7: All right, interesting, Now let's talk about a specific case
Speaker 7: that you include in the book and you talk about
Speaker 7: I thought it was interesting that you say the most
Speaker 7: dangerous offenders are these young offenders. And I'll ask you
Speaker 7: why you say that, and probably will be demonstrated with
Speaker 7: this story about the pimp style hustlers in Marino Valley, California,
Speaker 7: formed in nineteen ninety three. So tell us a little
Speaker 7: bit about what's different about this gang and why you
Speaker 7: think these young offenders are the most dangerous threat and
Speaker 7: explain the story for our audience.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, Dan, we're in a digital age, and
Speaker 4: even back then it was all about video games, and
Speaker 4: even back I can remember my kids playing Grand Theft
Speaker 4: Auto and Mortal Kombat and some of the real violent games,
Speaker 4: and I understood that, you know, kids were attracted to
Speaker 4: the whole tops and robbers. You know, good guy versus
Speaker 4: bad guy in there. In these games are very violent.
Speaker 4: And my only proviso was, if you're going to play
Speaker 4: the game, that's fine. It's a game. As long as
Speaker 4: you don't act it out, we're fine. You can play it.
Speaker 4: But what happened was is a lot of kids these
Speaker 4: days and even back then, they didn't understand the line
Speaker 4: between reality and the game, so to speak. And so
Speaker 4: with all the violence that these kids are exposed to
Speaker 4: both on television, in their homes, in the video games
Speaker 4: and such, they were so desensitized the violence that once
Speaker 4: they you know, once they're out there, it was like
Speaker 4: the world was a video game. And they didn't realize
Speaker 4: that once you pulled the trigger on a gun, you
Speaker 4: can't call the bullet back. You can't punch a reset
Speaker 4: button like you can a video game or start over.
Speaker 4: And so what happens is I think that kids are
Speaker 4: probably the most dangerous predators of all because they don't
Speaker 4: they lack the inhibitions that adults have because in certain
Speaker 4: generations of adults, you know, there was consequences for misdeeds
Speaker 4: at home and when you're out in the street. In
Speaker 4: these days, I mean, I could go on a long
Speaker 4: die tribe about the effectiveness of the criminal justice system,
Speaker 4: but the bottom line is is that the kids aren't
Speaker 4: being held responsible and there's no consequences for what they do.
Speaker 4: So it makes them very dangerous because they think they're invential.
Speaker 4: Nothing's gonna happen to hm because oftentimes nothing does. So
Speaker 4: what was different about the Temp style hustlers was, you know,
Speaker 4: not unlike most gangs, there's a charismatic leader and in
Speaker 4: this case, this adult, this charismatic leader is pretty smart.
Speaker 4: He set up the gang like a multi level corporation
Speaker 4: and kids had to do certain things to earn their stripe,
Speaker 4: so to speak, and make more money. And they're talking about,
Speaker 4: you know, having iras and then taking the money from
Speaker 4: the crimes and investing it and the bank accounts and such.
Speaker 4: So it was it was very different. It was very
Speaker 4: forward thinking for a gang even back then. But if
Speaker 4: you look at you know, gang models and stuff, I
Speaker 4: mean a lot of motorcycle gangs back then we're already
Speaker 4: investing in in in clubs and and and laundering their
Speaker 4: money in honest businesses. So he was just he was
Speaker 4: just taking what he what he's seen out there on
Speaker 4: Wall Street in different you know, legal and illegal gangs
Speaker 4: and stuff like that, and putting it to work and
Speaker 4: wowing these kids and then letting them think, hey, you
Speaker 4: can make these crimes. You're gonna make a lot of money.
Speaker 4: We're gonna invest and you're gonna make you more money.
Speaker 4: And that with kids being bored and unsupervised and just
Speaker 4: craving excitement such it was a bubbling cauldron. It just
Speaker 4: exploded Marino Valley and it resulted in the in the
Speaker 4: death of this young mother.
Speaker 7: Now, how was your composite integral to this case.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, they they used one of the mcare
Speaker 4: with kids and they just you know, weren't happy with it.
Speaker 4: And I think the person did a very good job.
Speaker 4: But again it's like getting a lack of training, lack
Speaker 4: of understanding, lack of knowing the process and such got
Speaker 4: them a product that they weren't happy with. So, you know,
Speaker 4: they knew that I was in the area, did I
Speaker 4: didn't live far away and I was a law enforce officer,
Speaker 4: and they already they were familiar with my work. So
Speaker 4: they called me and said, hey, look, you know, we've
Speaker 4: got like twenty investigtors working on this thing, and we
Speaker 4: need to catch these people because you know, the community
Speaker 4: demands that they're afraid. These kids have already committed a
Speaker 4: bunch of other series of robberies and attempted carjackings and such,
Speaker 4: and so they said, you know, take a crack out
Speaker 4: and see what you can do. So I interviewed the
Speaker 4: witness and she did such a great job. I mean,
Speaker 4: she's very observant. She saw the shooting, she saw the aftermath,
Speaker 4: she went and called the police right away. She was
Speaker 4: from a police family herself, so you know, she sat
Speaker 4: around the dinner table hearing the stories and so she
Speaker 4: wasn't so I mean, she was upset by what she saw,
Speaker 4: but it wasn't like the whole police procedural aspect of
Speaker 4: what was happening during the investigation was intimidating to her.
Speaker 4: So it made it very easy to connect with her
Speaker 4: and to form that relationship and to form that partnership
Speaker 4: to work through this sketch. And as soon as the
Speaker 4: sketch hit the media and hit the news. They were
Speaker 4: getting some tips and they showed the sketch are on
Speaker 4: some use and they identified this person in the sketches,
Speaker 4: a thirteen year old kid, Nam Chris Lyons. It was eventually,
Speaker 4: you know, arrested and convicted for But I mean, I've
Speaker 4: had primes where they've where I've had a composite go
Speaker 4: out and They've identified the person in less than a minute,
Speaker 4: in like thirty seconds, And I've had cases go on
Speaker 4: cold cases gone for eight years before a result comes up.
Speaker 4: So I think the combination of a good eyewitness and
Speaker 4: and the police using the composite properly in terms of
Speaker 4: making sure got white distribution was great for having this
Speaker 4: kid quickly I did.
Speaker 7: Now you talk about sometimes it doesn't happen right away,
Speaker 7: it doesn't happen within a few minutes. You talk about
Speaker 7: October nineteen eighty six with the sexual predator loose and
Speaker 7: fifteen different sketches were made. Was Kenneth George Wade, which
Speaker 7: was forty five years old. Now, why did he remain
Speaker 7: such an elusive predator for so many years? Tell us
Speaker 7: a little bit about what you learned and what you've
Speaker 7: included in about Kenneth and George Wade.
Speaker 4: Sure he was smart. I mean he was. I mean
Speaker 4: these predators, Sarah Killer, sterio rapists, they're smart people. I
Speaker 4: mean this whole notion of a quote dumb crook. I
Speaker 4: don't think there is such a thing. I think there's
Speaker 4: caroless crooks. I think there's cocky crook. But Kenneth Wade
Speaker 4: was smart. He had an idea of where he wanted
Speaker 4: to go, what he wanted to do. He favored large
Speaker 4: apartment complexes near freeways where he could walk around and
Speaker 4: target his victism anonymously and then be on the freeway
Speaker 4: fairly quickly and be in another county quickly and elude police.
Speaker 4: And when you know, back then in the eighties, we
Speaker 4: didn't have the crime analysis tools that we have now.
Speaker 4: We didn't have people dedicated to, you know, going through
Speaker 4: crimes and collating the information and disseminating it to patrol
Speaker 4: officers and to detectives like we do now. Also, we
Speaker 4: didn't have the social media in the Internet. So if
Speaker 4: you put a composite out in Orange County, if the
Speaker 4: person lived in Riverside County like Kuntis George Wade did,
Speaker 4: no one would know it. Because he owned a business
Speaker 4: in Temecula in Riverside County. He did business in Orange
Speaker 4: County but largely lived out there. So he got in,
Speaker 4: he got out, he got away, and no one was
Speaker 4: the wiser. And then of course he went to jail
Speaker 4: between so there were some cooling off periods between his attacks.
Speaker 4: It was just the fact that law enforcement just didn't
Speaker 4: make the link because he was in that generation of
Speaker 4: the law enforcement where we would reteletypes, We would rely
Speaker 4: on going to meetings and sharing information, you know, and
Speaker 4: a lot of people fell through the cracksident and in
Speaker 4: this case it was good old fashioned police work. It
Speaker 4: was a street cop that started taking the information and saying, Okay,
Speaker 4: I know that this guy has a tendency to get
Speaker 4: in one place and at some point he'll circle background
Speaker 4: and come back in the same area again. And that's
Speaker 4: what he did. He patiently waited and Kenneth George's way
Speaker 4: would binge. It was he was like he was like,
Speaker 4: you know, testosterone has like had this in facial sexual appetite.
Speaker 4: He would he would go on sexual binges. And so
Speaker 4: he went in this one actual binge and with all
Speaker 4: the information they were able to have this detective. I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: The patrol lieutenant from Anaheim Police Department, Joe Reef, he
Speaker 4: just they had an attack in Anaheim. He knew that
Speaker 4: he'd be attacking again eventually would come back round. He
Speaker 4: just waited and his patients paid off. He waited, and
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, it's kind of George Wade again.
Speaker 4: Chase was on and he was able to capture him.
Speaker 4: And after that all the pieces fell together and a
Speaker 4: case clothes.
Speaker 7: Now, before that, Anaheim or the police had consulted with
Speaker 7: the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, and they had called this
Speaker 7: guy a ritualistic offender, didn't they.
Speaker 4: They did, And that was actually they consulted with the
Speaker 4: Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, a sergeant was trained by
Speaker 4: the FBI's the behavioral and behavioral analyst. During my research
Speaker 4: of the book, I was able to reach, you know,
Speaker 4: former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, who pretty much wrote the
Speaker 4: book on sexual predators for the FBI's He was one
Speaker 4: of the founding members of the FBI's famed, you know,
Speaker 4: behavioral Science unit. You know, the whole science of the lamp.
Speaker 4: Through John Douglas and a couple of other guys. And
Speaker 4: he you know, he said that he normally has more,
Speaker 4: he normally requires more information, but based on what I
Speaker 4: gave him, yeah, he said, he's very he's a ritualistic offender.
Speaker 4: And and the ritual came in from you know, how
Speaker 4: he treated his victims, and you know, how he treated
Speaker 4: them as if they were girlfriends. And he went through
Speaker 4: this whole process and you know, telling them what to
Speaker 4: say and how to treat him, how to act and
Speaker 4: so forth. I mean, even to the point where he
Speaker 4: committed a rape in East Anaheim. And Anaheim is a
Speaker 4: big city. Just give you your listener's context. It's the
Speaker 4: city about three hundred and firty thousand people in the
Speaker 4: center of Orange County. It's it's over sixty score miles,
Speaker 4: so it stretches. It's pretty good sized city. So she
Speaker 4: moved from the east side to the west side to
Speaker 4: get away from several miles. I mean, just so one
Speaker 4: night he breaks into her apartment of the west side.
Speaker 4: He recognizes during the encounter it's her, and his word
Speaker 4: to her was, you know what to do? You know
Speaker 4: the drill. The drill was the ritualistic behavior the whole
Speaker 4: girlfriend experienced, you know, telling me you know how good
Speaker 4: I am in bed, and how handsome I how you
Speaker 4: know how large my you know, you know how large
Speaker 4: I am? And this that and the other. I mean this,
Speaker 4: you know, referring to his Genitalian stuff like that. He
Speaker 4: wanted to feel popped up and feel like a man
Speaker 4: and just be that guy, and that was part of
Speaker 4: the rituals.
Speaker 7: He also talked about that he had three at rape
Speaker 7: attempts in one day because he really was. If he
Speaker 7: was discouraged, he would run away. If he had resistance,
Speaker 7: major resistance, he would run away. But you also talk
Speaker 7: about how, and this is important, is the escalation in
Speaker 7: the aggression and the violence and even the daring.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean think about it. I mean, here, here's
Speaker 4: a guy that is prone to walking around naked and
Speaker 4: broad daylight and nothing, wearing nothing but a hat and
Speaker 4: a pair of tennis shoes. You know, walking in front
Speaker 4: of open windows between apartment buildings is daring people to
Speaker 4: see him. And in one case, he's very passive aggressive,
Speaker 4: he would you know, he'd be fighting a way easily.
Speaker 4: And and during one attack he actually pulled a knife
Speaker 4: out and led the victim around her apartment at knife
Speaker 4: point and didn't realize until later that he stabbed her,
Speaker 4: and I mean she didn't realize till later that he
Speaker 4: that she suffered a small, stablish slight stab wound. And
Speaker 4: this is where the dichotomy came in with him as
Speaker 4: that you know, it really upset him that you know,
Speaker 4: he hurt this person, because you know, he wasn't about that.
Speaker 4: I mean, here was a guy that he reported, you
Speaker 4: know that he would at night would look in the
Speaker 4: mirror at himself and be disgusted and start screaming himself
Speaker 4: to stop raping. So he was very passive aggressive. The detective,
Speaker 4: the detective in this case, you know, she since passed away,
Speaker 4: and you know she the sant and the police are
Speaker 4: entrusted her with taking on this investigation and leading it
Speaker 4: and eventually interviewing him, and she did a phenomenal job.
Speaker 4: And then you know they normally, you know, police department
Speaker 4: only they want a sworn detective and not you know,
Speaker 4: not a civilian investigator who you know doesn't carry badge
Speaker 4: in a gun. And she did a phenomenal job in
Speaker 4: interviewing him and getting him to admit to all this.
Speaker 4: And you know, had he not been caught, who knows
Speaker 4: what might have happened because he was escalating.
Speaker 7: Yes, And speaking of escalation, you put in your book
Speaker 7: about a case in April nineteen ninety seven with a
Speaker 7: ten year old named Anthony Martinez, and you worked with
Speaker 7: a couple of youngsters to make sketches, so to make
Speaker 7: a sketch for this So tell us more about this
Speaker 7: story and the heartbreaking story of the key witness and
Speaker 7: how you got that information to be able to make
Speaker 7: this sketch. Tell us more about this case.
Speaker 4: Well, this is like every case. It's a heartbreaking case,
Speaker 4: especially involves children. And I had the privilege of meeting
Speaker 4: Anthony's mother on a couple of occasions, and I remember
Speaker 4: her telling me I was at an event with nationalist
Speaker 4: I'm from Missing the Explored Children with John Walsh from
Speaker 4: America's Lost Wanted, and I had a chance to meet
Speaker 4: her and she was telling me. She said, you know, Mike,
Speaker 4: she said Anthony and Anthony was ten years old, eight
Speaker 4: year old brother and ten year old cousins. She said,
Speaker 4: they were playing literally twenty feet outside our front door.
Speaker 4: You know, kids were playing. We were adults are inside
Speaker 4: the house. It was an effect portion of the yard
Speaker 4: in this serial sexual predator, child murderer Joseph Edward Duncan
Speaker 4: the third, he rolled up in his car and like
Speaker 4: most kids, you know a lot of these predators, they'll
Speaker 4: use the whole He helped me find my duck. He
Speaker 4: helped me find my cat. I'll give you a dollar.
Speaker 4: He did that with the kids, and Anthony was really wary,
Speaker 4: and he was he was really you know, he take
Speaker 4: good head on his shoulders by all accounts, a great kid,
Speaker 4: great intelligent, and he kind of waved the guy off
Speaker 4: and he came back around again, and in this time
Speaker 4: he peeked a couple of their interests and got him
Speaker 4: outside the protected area of the fence and he pulled
Speaker 4: a knife out and he and the suspect, you know,
Speaker 4: Joseph Edward Duncan the third, he actually tried to abduct
Speaker 4: Anthony's eight year old brother. He actually was focused on him,
Speaker 4: and Anthony jumped between the suspect and his brother to
Speaker 4: save his brother's wife. So the predator grabbed him instead
Speaker 4: and ran off through him in the car and took
Speaker 4: off with him. And to hear those kids, I mean
Speaker 4: I interviewed them when when I was called the scene,
Speaker 4: I was I think it was the day after the abduction,
Speaker 4: and I walked into this roll call room and there
Speaker 4: were police officers from every agency in that in the
Speaker 4: in that area. There they were lining the walls, they
Speaker 4: were they were there to help, and there was a
Speaker 4: news media you know circus going on in the parking lot.
Speaker 4: And you know, they had a couple of agents in
Speaker 4: with me while I was talking to the kids and
Speaker 4: I was on the floor and we're drawing and talking,
Speaker 4: developing rapport. Every two minutes, it seemed like there was
Speaker 4: another agent going to say, hey, you know, when you
Speaker 4: gonna be done with this? The news media wants that
Speaker 4: the news media wants and I and I said, look,
Speaker 4: you know what, I'm not working on their timeline for
Speaker 4: their news show. I mean, I want to be compliant
Speaker 4: and cooper because they're very important the process. The news
Speaker 4: media is a very very important part of the law
Speaker 4: enforcement team when it comes to investigations like this. And
Speaker 4: so I said, just let me do the process. And
Speaker 4: so it was very valuable in the fact that, you know,
Speaker 4: there's some information that came out to the detectives needed.
Speaker 4: But you know, just all the kids kept saying, is
Speaker 4: I just want my brother back. I mean every tune,
Speaker 4: I just want my brother back and it just can't help,
Speaker 4: but just you know, rip your heart out. And then
Speaker 4: of course, in a lot of these cases, like the
Speaker 4: Samantha Running case, the Anthony Martinez case, you know, any
Speaker 4: case where there's nothing more than an eyewitness and a
Speaker 4: sketch art gets called her. In these cases, when I've
Speaker 4: been called, you almost feel like all eyes in the
Speaker 4: rumor on you like, okay, do something because at that
Speaker 4: point they've got nothing, they've got nothing at all to
Speaker 4: work with it other than the eyewitness in you, and
Speaker 4: you want to make sure you everything right, so you
Speaker 4: come up with a good sketch so the investigation remains,
Speaker 4: you know, keeps that momentum and going in the right direction.
Speaker 4: And you know, I don't want to be the person
Speaker 4: that just like you know, just spins it off where
Speaker 4: it doesn't need to be.
Speaker 7: Now, your sketch, if I what you've said is it
Speaker 7: generated about thirty thousand leads, which is very well, it's amazing,
Speaker 7: But there also was a decision to make another There
Speaker 7: was a decision to make another composite drawing. And again
Speaker 7: tell us why and what was the one? What was
Speaker 7: I found interesting too? Is that you talk about how
Speaker 7: the witness said they had piercing blue eyes. Why is
Speaker 7: color not such a good idea with a composite drawing.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, color is not a good idea because I
Speaker 4: think that people have enough trouble remembering facial features versus
Speaker 4: texture and color. And it used to be that when
Speaker 4: you reproduce color several times, it degraded the color. Of course,
Speaker 4: now that we've got you know, these digital programs and
Speaker 4: color printers and such, that's not much of a problem.
Speaker 4: That's not even a facktor anymore. But again, people picking
Speaker 4: the right skin tone again can can throw the throw
Speaker 4: the investigation off. I mean people sometimes they'll illustrate, say,
Speaker 4: for example, they illustrate blonde hair using the color yellow. Well,
Speaker 4: that's that's that's that's comic book blonde as far as
Speaker 4: I'm concerned, And that's nothing to do with the hair color.
Speaker 4: So you people get really literal sometimes, so I just
Speaker 4: keep it black and white, very you know, gray scales.
Speaker 4: But every so often there's going to be something that
Speaker 4: stands out. I'll give you an example. And when I
Speaker 4: was the sketch arts in Baltimore for three years there
Speaker 4: there were there would be African American eyewitnesses him and say, okay,
Speaker 4: this this person is black, but he had light green eyes,
Speaker 4: and in the African American community, that is something that's
Speaker 4: going to stand out. So there were sometimes I would
Speaker 4: just go ahead and do this black and white drawing,
Speaker 4: but include you use photoshop to you know, include the
Speaker 4: correct tone of green for eyes. SA with the Anthony
Speaker 4: Martinez drawing, what it happened was is going back to
Speaker 4: the thirty thousand tips Americans must want. It was it
Speaker 4: as popular, It's most popular, as heights of popularity in
Speaker 4: terms of viewership and such and cult following. They had
Speaker 4: an artist that they'd worked with that they would bring
Speaker 4: in on cases to redo other people's work or sensationalize
Speaker 4: them for the use of their show. They wanted in
Speaker 4: on this case. They wanted to bring their own artists in,
Speaker 4: and the police agency didn't necessarily want that. They liked
Speaker 4: what they had, but they were getting tremendous pressure to
Speaker 4: bring this gallon because she had great success, and so
Speaker 4: the alternative was the FBI would just send their own
Speaker 4: artists out. Because they actually found another witness who was
Speaker 4: an adult downtown that describes somebody very similar their thinking
Speaker 4: at the time was an adult witness is better than
Speaker 4: a child's witness, which I wholly disagreed with, but I said, look,
Speaker 4: you know what, step away, take your ego out of it.
Speaker 4: It's all about finding this child killer. So if that's
Speaker 4: what they think is the best, that's what's the investigation
Speaker 4: at this point in time. Let's just go with it.
Speaker 4: So the police were able to successfully hold off the
Speaker 4: America's most wanted artists, but yet they couldn't hold off
Speaker 4: the FBI because there was a new witness. So protocol wise,
Speaker 4: that was proper to bring somebody else in, whether I
Speaker 4: agreed or not. Then when then when it was the
Speaker 4: case was thrown back to the Riverside Sheriff's Department, their
Speaker 4: hot their central Homicide and you started looking at all
Speaker 4: the evidence, all the facts, the arena, read eyewitnesses, and
Speaker 4: it went from the FBI drawing back to my drawing
Speaker 4: being the primary drawing that they felt was most reliable.
Speaker 4: So they said, you know, we want to take another
Speaker 4: run at this, but we want to really get this
Speaker 4: out in the media, put it on billboards. Everybody keeps
Speaker 4: going back to this piercing blue eyes that this guy had.
Speaker 4: So why don't we do it in color? I said,
Speaker 4: why not, Fine, we'll do it and call it. And
Speaker 4: so the idea was was to get this piercing blue
Speaker 4: eyes and everything else in terms of whether the skin
Speaker 4: tone was correct or not. I mean, at the time,
Speaker 4: the the eyewitnesses family said, look, you know, we've had
Speaker 4: enough of our son being our kids being exposed. Law
Speaker 4: enforce this investigation, are traumatized. We're done. Your artists can't
Speaker 4: reinterview them. And this is like four or five years
Speaker 4: after the case. And I get that. You know, people
Speaker 4: want to move on, they don't want they have to
Speaker 4: protect their kids. I fully endorse their decisions. So the
Speaker 4: the really light blue eyes I illustrated, and the skin
Speaker 4: tones and the color of the plaid shirt were all
Speaker 4: very literal based upon a verbal description, but no eye
Speaker 4: witness speedback saying yeah, that's that's correct. So what happened
Speaker 4: was is you know, they put it out there, nothing happened.
Speaker 4: And again, like the like the Ken's George Wade case,
Speaker 4: Justseph Edward Duncan, the third was a nomad. He wasn't
Speaker 4: from this area, so they put that composite all over
Speaker 4: the place because he was from the state of Washington
Speaker 4: and South Dakota. No one knew him here, and if
Speaker 4: they then the people that did know him here were
Speaker 4: very protective of him. Anyway, wouldn't have called the police.
Speaker 4: So it took the slaughter of that family in Idaho
Speaker 4: and the abduction of those children and his eventual capture
Speaker 4: in the interview with the police where he tipped his
Speaker 4: hand and disclosed that he was involved in the Anthony
Speaker 4: Martinez debduction emurder.
Speaker 7: That's the only reason.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know then and then when and when he
Speaker 4: did tip off his hand, at first they were thinking, wow,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe not. And they went and dug up
Speaker 4: the composite and they saw my color composites and noticed
Speaker 4: how much it resembled and they said, oh, we need
Speaker 4: to call the Riverside Sheriff's department. And so what had
Speaker 4: happened was when he bound Anthony with duct take, he
Speaker 4: left a partial fingerprint on the duct tape. But because
Speaker 4: it was in the top of his thumb. When the
Speaker 4: police roll your thumbs, they don't always they get the
Speaker 4: flat of your thumb, not always the top. So they
Speaker 4: got a search warrant to the tops of his thumbs
Speaker 4: compared them to the Layton Princes left on the duct tape.
Speaker 4: They made a positive match and now he's sitting on
Speaker 4: death row in Tara Haut, Indiana, waiting to get executed.
Speaker 7: Interesting you talk about another case in Villa Park, May
Speaker 7: nineteen ninety seven victim Jamie Pang, thirty three, former exotic dancer,
Speaker 7: gorgeous woman, housekeeper. Very strange case. Could you tell us
Speaker 7: a little bit about this? What happened?
Speaker 4: Sure, BILLI park in a small city. It sits right
Speaker 4: in the middle of the city of Warrangs, where I
Speaker 4: grew up, where I policed for over thirty years, and
Speaker 4: nothing ever happens there. I mean, it's the kind of
Speaker 4: place with at a corner gas station, grocery store. It's
Speaker 4: all big houses. The wealthy lived there. You know. I
Speaker 4: think the worst thing that happens is, you know, people
Speaker 4: on stop signs, and that's pretty much about it. And
Speaker 4: it remains that way today. And so what had happened
Speaker 4: was is uh you know. Jeannie Pang was a former
Speaker 4: exotic dancer, a beautiful young woman, mother of two children
Speaker 4: and his two two children, and her husband was a
Speaker 4: financier and entrepreneur and file cause she was living a
Speaker 4: great life tended to a Roses roller skated, great striking woman,
Speaker 4: stood up in the neighborhood, great friendly everyone, everyone liked her,
Speaker 4: Everyone loved her. And so one day there's a knock
Speaker 4: at the door in her housekeeper ants at the door
Speaker 4: and here's a man dressed in a suit, briefcase, looked professional,
Speaker 4: nice haircuts, And she invited him in her home and
Speaker 4: went upstairs to get miss Pang. And when when this
Speaker 4: Pang came down the stairs, he produced a gun and
Speaker 4: started chasing her through the house. Housekeeper ran up and
Speaker 4: door went through. Neighbor called the police, and he chased
Speaker 4: Janey upstairs. He tried to hide in a closet. He
Speaker 4: fired one bullet through the closet door, and as bad
Speaker 4: luck would have it, you know, had hit her right
Speaker 4: in the chefs and killed her. And the person fled.
Speaker 4: They called me. I came in and again it was
Speaker 4: it was a huge deal. And nothing, I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't I couldn't remember all my years working there where
Speaker 4: there was ever a homicide in bill Park. I mean
Speaker 4: Kevin Costner went to bill Park High School starting baseball there,
Speaker 4: and I mean nobody it was just this bucolic, just
Speaker 4: nice little place so you know, fifty panemonium got to
Speaker 4: sketch prety distinct hairstyle, Pemplton mustache like Clark Gable, looked
Speaker 4: like it was pasted on his face, according to the
Speaker 4: eye witness. And so they found out through their investigation
Speaker 4: that Jennie Pang's husband was involved in some litigation and
Speaker 4: actually owed his law firm about I think, you know,
Speaker 4: several thousand dollars. I don't call him, but maybe he
Speaker 4: was twenty thousand dollars, some significant figure. And the lawyers
Speaker 4: do about four grand of that twenty thousand it was
Speaker 4: paid to the firm. So when they went to the
Speaker 4: law firm with the composite, the secretary looked at the composite, So,
Speaker 4: why do you have a picture of, you know, Hugh
Speaker 4: mcconolins their lawyer, They said, why do you have a picture?
Speaker 4: Randy is what they call it, And we have plenty
Speaker 4: of pictures of him here. And so they got a
Speaker 4: driver's license photo of him and noticed how much he
Speaker 4: resembled the sketch, right down to the part in the
Speaker 4: hair and the very squared off hairstyle. And so if
Speaker 4: you threw a fake mustache on the photograph of Hugh
Speaker 4: Randy McDonald, you would see that. Yeah, he very much
Speaker 4: resembled the sketch well. Further into their investigation, he find
Speaker 4: out that he mailed some belongings home with the suicide
Speaker 4: notes to his wife and just disappeared and baked the
Speaker 4: suicide off the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge. And from
Speaker 4: there he embarked on this odyssey of hiding from the police,
Speaker 4: shaving his head, taking on assumed names, you know, looking
Speaker 4: in habituaries to take on these identities, and you know,
Speaker 4: went to Utah for a while. It was always one
Speaker 4: step ahead of the police. Whenever they thought they identified
Speaker 4: his location, he was off the door before they got there. Eventually,
Speaker 4: they were able to tap in the social security system
Speaker 4: and found out that someone that they suspected with him
Speaker 4: was receiving social Security checks, and they backtracked and found
Speaker 4: out they were being deposited in a particular bank, and
Speaker 4: they found out that a woman was making regular deposits.
Speaker 4: So they went and they followed her back to a
Speaker 4: residence in Sherman Oaks, a suburb in Los Angeles, and
Speaker 4: went into the house and found him, found him hiding
Speaker 4: and arrested and brought him back for trial. And he
Speaker 4: was acquitted and to this day it's still a mystery
Speaker 4: if in fact he was the one that killed her
Speaker 4: for somebody else. Since then, you know, obviously of course
Speaker 4: she was murdered, and then her husband he remarried and
Speaker 4: he eventually died under suspicious circumstances. That was finally attributed
Speaker 4: to an intentional overdoe. And so there lives the mystery
Speaker 4: who done it? And go apart.
Speaker 7: Now we've got time for about one more story, and
Speaker 7: again this is a very very strange story and talk
Speaker 7: about stranger abduction, which is not very common, but sometimes
Speaker 7: it seems like it's always in the news dominating. So
Speaker 7: we're talking about Samantha Runyon and again another similar to
Speaker 7: the story we talked about just a little bit before.
Speaker 7: But this story is going to be a little bit
Speaker 7: different because, as I talked to the audience waiting for you,
Speaker 7: there's some law enforcement initiatives or part of me assistance
Speaker 7: in terms of some of the software like rapid Start,
Speaker 7: and so we can talk about that. So tell us
Speaker 7: a little about this heartbreaking story about Samantha Runyon and
Speaker 7: her abduction.
Speaker 4: Sure, this is one of those cases that tests community
Speaker 4: resolved in law enforcement resolved and working together. Yes, the
Speaker 4: law enforcement agencies can be very territorial in terms of
Speaker 4: when it comes to investigations, and oftentimes it takes strong
Speaker 4: leadership to make sure that people aren't stepping all over
Speaker 4: each other and that everyone's not you know, everyone's working
Speaker 4: in sync, so to speak, and not trying to take
Speaker 4: all the credit, you know, in the prestige in terms
Speaker 4: of solving the case. And this and that wasn't the
Speaker 4: case of the Samantha Running case. And she's abducted in
Speaker 4: July of I believe it was two thousand and two.
Speaker 4: He's not playing with with her playmate six year old.
Speaker 4: You know, Mom was working, Grandma's watching her and after
Speaker 4: dinner they went and played alley way near their apartment
Speaker 4: and they were approached by this person and who abducted
Speaker 4: Samantha again using the patented have you seen my Little
Speaker 4: dog trick and I'll give you a dollar. You know
Speaker 4: that these predators are so fond of So after she
Speaker 4: was abducted, you know, the police responded and it was
Speaker 4: a huge response, as it should have been. And I
Speaker 4: didn't get to her until after midnight, and by then
Speaker 4: she talked to everybody under the sun and I don't.
Speaker 4: I'm surprised they even got a really good description from her.
Speaker 4: But once that description came out, I'm sorry. The description
Speaker 4: was broadcast and the composite was released the media. You know,
Speaker 4: tens of thousands of leads start coming in. The great
Speaker 4: thing about having the FBI come in to an investigation
Speaker 4: is while they may be better suited to do the
Speaker 4: footwork in terms of investigative fall up on terrorism cases
Speaker 4: in large financial fraud cases, typically they're not geared towards
Speaker 4: homicides and things like this, but they have a tremendous
Speaker 4: amount of resources they can bring to bear on a case.
Speaker 4: They can give you availability as their crime lab of
Speaker 4: all their different forensic experts. And in this case, they
Speaker 4: had a new software called rapid Starts. And what rapid
Speaker 4: Start would do is that it would take all the
Speaker 4: it was a relation. It was a relational database type
Speaker 4: of program where it would take all this all this
Speaker 4: tip information and collate it in terms of giving it
Speaker 4: levels of importance, tying it to other potential leads and such.
Speaker 4: It was a great organizational tool for law enforce and
Speaker 4: to be able to sift through these tips and follow
Speaker 4: them up and keep in mind, whether it's five tips
Speaker 4: or fifty thousand tips. Even if you catch the perpetrator
Speaker 4: in the in the middle of the investigation, and as
Speaker 4: a time is the time you capture him or her,
Speaker 4: you've only follow up on twenty thousand tips. You still
Speaker 4: have to finish something and follow the other thirty thousand
Speaker 4: and close them out, because what you risk is the
Speaker 4: defense attorneys saying, hey, you never fully followed this up.
Speaker 4: There's twenty thousand tips that it could have been the
Speaker 4: real suspect, and all they have to do, remember is
Speaker 4: create reasonable doubts. So rapids start was a great way
Speaker 4: to organize it, collate it, keep it, keep everything in
Speaker 4: sync in moving in one direction. And in this case,
Speaker 4: you know Sheriff Mike Current at the time was again
Speaker 4: he was a new sheriff and you know he had
Speaker 4: great leadership capabilities. Unfortunately was his judgment that got him
Speaker 4: in trouble sent to prison, but he was a great
Speaker 4: leader for that investigation. He kept the he he put
Speaker 4: a human face on it, and in the human face
Speaker 4: he put on it, in the personality and force of
Speaker 4: nature that he put to it was backed up by
Speaker 4: all this technology and software and in lab work and
Speaker 4: such because the suspect in this case, Alejandro Avola, left
Speaker 4: the treasure trove of information and evidence behind. Not only
Speaker 4: did the eyewitness get a great description of a partial
Speaker 4: license plate, the color of the car was able to
Speaker 4: describe the composite, but where they found Samantha's body, they
Speaker 4: found footprints, tire prints, you know, other types of DNA evidence.
Speaker 4: And then ultimately when they arrested him, you know, there
Speaker 4: was other evidence on him as well, you know, scratch
Speaker 4: marks where she was fighting for her life. It's such
Speaker 4: assaulting her and you know, you know, tear you know, tearstains.
Speaker 4: You know they found in his car with her DNA
Speaker 4: on it, you know, child corners computer, the tennis shoes left,
Speaker 4: the shoe prints, the tires left, the tire prints, the
Speaker 4: shoe box, the receipt, I mean, it just his cell
Speaker 4: phone information, you know, and it was just the case
Speaker 4: is wrapped up in five days. It was phenomenal. It
Speaker 4: was it was it was in all the years in
Speaker 4: law enforcement. It was probably one of the biggest, most
Speaker 4: massive man hunts. It was the best organized in terms
Speaker 4: of everyone coming together for a common purpose, common goal.
Speaker 4: The family was strong. The family's co oper with law enforcemance.
Speaker 4: Everybody did everything they had to do to bring this
Speaker 4: little girl Homa. Unfortunately it wasn't enough.
Speaker 7: You talk about the massive response from law enforcement. You
Speaker 7: talk about four hundred investigators assigned, three hundred sheriff deputies
Speaker 7: and one hundred FBI and then other officers from other agencies.
Speaker 7: This is national news. George Bush ways in and contacts
Speaker 7: personally Attorney General Ashcroft to look into this. So this
Speaker 7: is how big a case. John and Reeve Walsh's organization
Speaker 7: and National Center for Missing Exploitee Children is involved. So
Speaker 7: you can't get any more high profile. You bring the FBI,
Speaker 7: brings in doctor Park, Deets from Law and Order Fame
Speaker 7: to come in who had interviewed Dahmer and John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 7: Trying to get a grasp of this because it didn't
Speaker 7: get solved right away. And the reward was offered one
Speaker 7: hundred grand one hundred and fifty grand. I think it
Speaker 7: went up to two hundred grand. What's interesting in your book,
Speaker 7: you provide comparative sketches with the perpetrators and many many
Speaker 7: are very uncanny, and this one is one of those
Speaker 7: very very uncanny resemblance to the to the killer himself. Yeah,
Speaker 7: very very amazing case in that all the people that
Speaker 7: were trying, like you say, to try to find this
Speaker 7: girl in the in the you know, slim hope that
Speaker 7: she was still alive, and then afterwards to capture this
Speaker 7: perpetrator and bring them to justice, you know.
Speaker 4: And and and that's what it's all about to me.
Speaker 4: I mean, I you know, I spent over half my
Speaker 4: lifetime in law enforce and finding ways to catch crooks
Speaker 4: because I figured that the best way to protect people
Speaker 4: was to be able to find and arrest the bad guys.
Speaker 4: And this was just another way for me for me
Speaker 4: to do it. And I think that sometimes that you know,
Speaker 4: victims get overlooked, and I think this was a you know,
Speaker 4: you know, my book was a great way to you know,
Speaker 4: honor somewhat of her life story and to be able
Speaker 4: to describe a very human process several that we go
Speaker 4: through in terms of memory, in terms of you know,
Speaker 4: the sketch artis involvement in how we interact with all
Speaker 4: the other experts. I remember one time a woman asked me,
Speaker 4: she said that you must get board sitting here in
Speaker 4: your office drawing all day, because like when I was
Speaker 4: at Baltimore. I do, like, you know, ten fifteen drawings
Speaker 4: a week and just this insane amount of crime. I said,
Speaker 4: you know, it's not about the drawing. For me, it's
Speaker 4: about the people who walk through my door and their
Speaker 4: amazing stories of survival, their their tenacity, you know, the
Speaker 4: things that they go through and they overcome, and just
Speaker 4: their life story and their backgrounds themselves. It's just fascinating
Speaker 4: and I'm just humbled to be a part of of
Speaker 4: all this, and it's it's just it's a career I
Speaker 4: still am involved with. And yeah, sometimes I'm online and
Speaker 4: on the phone interviewing eyewitnesses, and other times I'm there
Speaker 4: in person. I mean, I find I use any way
Speaker 4: I can find, you know, you know, legally and technologically
Speaker 4: to to to help police departs, help victims, and and
Speaker 4: try to further my reach into a law enforce to
Speaker 4: be able to catch these bad guys. And I'm not
Speaker 4: the only one. There's others out there doing it. I mean,
Speaker 4: there's there's you know, you see composites out there all
Speaker 4: the time, and people people all often ask, you know,
Speaker 4: you know, how do you do this? And I thought,
Speaker 4: you know, the only way to probably effectively explain it
Speaker 4: is to write a book about it.
Speaker 7: Sure, you know, now you talk you talk about your
Speaker 7: software company, which in conjunction has a training aspect to it,
Speaker 7: because you say they you know, they both go together
Speaker 7: hand at hand. And you also talked about your workload
Speaker 7: we're talking about back from the eighties to currently. So
Speaker 7: tell us about the importance, tell us about the need,
Speaker 7: and tell us about maybe just to give us an
Speaker 7: idea of the numbers, because if you're doing that many
Speaker 7: composite drawings in a week, the idea that you have
Speaker 7: something that assists makes that those composite drawings quicker, maybe
Speaker 7: easier or more available to people less inclined to be
Speaker 7: artists first and police officer, and yet police officers first
Speaker 7: rather than artists first. So tell us about this need,
Speaker 7: the importance, and what kind of numbers are we're talking about,
Speaker 7: and a little bit about your company in the training
Speaker 7: and preparation for this occupation.
Speaker 4: Sure, first of all, the number I can tell you
Speaker 4: that I just counted up the other day. Actually, in
Speaker 4: the last four years, I've produced over four hundred compositive
Speaker 4: sketches on cases ranging from homicide, sexual assault, non fatal shooting.
Speaker 4: You know, attempted abductions and such, so over four hundred
Speaker 4: in a four year period, I was averaging over one
Speaker 4: hundred a year. I was probably one of the busiest
Speaker 4: composite sketch artist in the United States. I was. I
Speaker 4: was pretty much doing the same amount of work that
Speaker 4: artists at NYPD and Houston Police Department was doing. I
Speaker 4: was doing it is much or more on average on
Speaker 4: you on a yearly average, So I've been pretty busy.
Speaker 4: I think that there's I think there's an importance for it.
Speaker 4: I think that you know, outside of DNA, you know,
Speaker 4: you're you know, DNA has kind of taken the center stage,
Speaker 4: as it should because it's it's a very very good technology,
Speaker 4: very good crime fighting tool. But I think what's happening
Speaker 4: with composites now is I think with the proliferation of
Speaker 4: cameras in terms of surveillance cameras to fix the buildings,
Speaker 4: uh and you know, people's cell phones and banks and
Speaker 4: seven elevens, and you can be ince sort things like
Speaker 4: that that officers or detective fields, there's less of a
Speaker 4: need to do compositive sketches, which I don't necessarily agree with.
Speaker 4: I think that there's instances where these bank cameras and
Speaker 4: other cameras catch a person's likeness very well, so there's
Speaker 4: no need to do a sketch. But sometimes the image
Speaker 4: is still blurry and take them from an angle that
Speaker 4: nobody would be able to iv them, but detectives still
Speaker 4: rely on them, so I try to encourage them to,
Speaker 4: you know, put a composite from an eyewitness subscription next
Speaker 4: to that surveillance photo, and not only are people going
Speaker 4: to recognize the face, but they're probably going to recognize
Speaker 4: the person's posture, distinct their clothing or wearing, the way
Speaker 4: they stand or whatever. It's a very powerful combination. Well,
Speaker 4: I think that's fuck anything else. I think every so
Speaker 4: often you have to go back and remarket and show
Speaker 4: the value of these things because you know, police retire,
Speaker 4: they get promoted, and new people come in. They don't
Speaker 4: always pass on the information too them. So my goal
Speaker 4: again and writing the book and setting up the company,
Speaker 4: is to remind the texts and people listening to people
Speaker 4: in you know, entering forensic science careers. But if you
Speaker 4: can't draw, you can still make a positive contribution by
Speaker 4: encouraging your agency to buy a facial composite software a
Speaker 4: hopefully mind sketch cup, they said, and then engage in
Speaker 4: some sort of training. And I think that it's important
Speaker 4: for law enforcement agencies to have this option. So if
Speaker 4: they don't have an artist on hand, they have people
Speaker 4: trained to use the software, because no one can predict
Speaker 4: when these horrible crimes are going to happen, and there's
Speaker 4: these child subductions have shown. When all you've got is
Speaker 4: an eyewitness and an important heinous crime like this, you
Speaker 4: don't want to be digging around looking for a local
Speaker 4: artist or who might be drawing, or who might be
Speaker 4: retired or whatever. You want to have your own in
Speaker 4: house person, your own tool availble to say, hey, you
Speaker 4: know what, bust out the software, let's sit out this
Speaker 4: eyewitness and let's get a sketch up. And so that's
Speaker 4: what my company does, is that you know, not only
Speaker 4: do I consult on cases myself and provide remote drawings.
Speaker 4: I actually have some contacting from Romania. It was a
Speaker 4: victim to crime, wind me link and put them online
Speaker 4: on the computer and draw compositive which I can do.
Speaker 4: I do composits on a regular basis for police departments
Speaker 4: back east, you know, through a remote hookup and I
Speaker 4: roll the local agencies in southern California. But if they
Speaker 4: don't need me and they want software as a solution,
Speaker 4: then I'm glad to hold trainings online in person, sell
Speaker 4: them to software support it, and give them what they
Speaker 4: need so they can turn out some really good faces
Speaker 4: and catch some really serious criminals.
Speaker 7: Right, very interesting. You know, the thing is with sketch
Speaker 7: cop too, And then maybe it sounds like a little
Speaker 7: bit like what we went through is you know, the
Speaker 7: process of sketching. But mostly your book is really about
Speaker 7: these dramatic cases that you were involved with, and so
Speaker 7: I think we touched on a couple of them, but
Speaker 7: for those that we were listening, there are some fascinating
Speaker 7: stories that were again the perpetrator wasn't caught for a
Speaker 7: few years, but the development of the sketch and then
Speaker 7: the importance of that sketch, sometimes not immediately but then
Speaker 7: later on is very dramatic and expressed in these some
Speaker 7: of these stories that you have in your book so
Speaker 7: very very interesting. I wanted to ask just one last
Speaker 7: question in that it seems that at least just from me,
Speaker 7: is that some of the witnesses, even though they were traumatized,
Speaker 7: even though they were young, led to these detailed descriptions,
Speaker 7: that you were able to make this composite drawing and
Speaker 7: successfully be able to make an arrest or a conviction
Speaker 7: as a result. Is part of or am I just
Speaker 7: looking at this wrong part of it? In that a
Speaker 7: person can memory or can remember certain specific details like
Speaker 7: a nose, or you mentioned a hairstyle, distinctive hairstyle, or
Speaker 7: how important are those details like eyes and mouth features
Speaker 7: and how a mustache would say was described as in
Speaker 7: your book a certain way, so you drew it that way?
Speaker 7: How important are some of those features later in not
Speaker 7: so much the accuracy in that the composite looks exactly
Speaker 7: the same, but that those specific details like eyes and ears,
Speaker 7: those pronounced features that we would have and we would
Speaker 7: see more importantly, I would think, is that part of
Speaker 7: the value of the composite more so than the accuracy
Speaker 7: of that composite.
Speaker 4: I think it tends to add to the uniqueness of it.
Speaker 4: And when I say that is I always ask people
Speaker 4: at the outset, is there anything distinctive about this person
Speaker 4: that would set them apart from a similar looking person
Speaker 4: on the streets, And sometimes they'll say, yeah, the person
Speaker 4: in like really big eyes, you know, and that may
Speaker 4: be the starting point for us. So if we you know,
Speaker 4: get nothing else but the big eyes correct, then then
Speaker 4: that's a distinctive feature. You know, maybe that the person, yeah,
Speaker 4: is really large ears like typically people I'll ask him
Speaker 4: is I always like to laugh if it's a sixty
Speaker 4: four thousand dollars question, what do his ears look like?
Speaker 4: And I didn't really notice the ear, But yet they
Speaker 4: can tell you that, you know, the person had you know,
Speaker 4: a certain hairstyle or you know, some people will tell
Speaker 4: you they were looking away and they didn't see certain things.
Speaker 4: But it's trying to get them to focus on the
Speaker 4: face in their mind before they looked away to catch
Speaker 4: these things. But I try to pick on something that's
Speaker 4: going to be you know, distinctive to them that they
Speaker 4: remember to capitalize on. There's an anchor point to build
Speaker 4: around the rest of the sketch arounds. Yes, we've established
Speaker 4: a we've established a court down starting up, but we
Speaker 4: can to establish the court that can draw a good composite.
Speaker 4: I just can't tell time really well, so you know,
Speaker 4: during the different time zone. So again I apologize to
Speaker 4: your listeners and yourself for burning up about you know,
Speaker 4: nine or ten minutes of your show waiting for me
Speaker 4: to call. But the cool thing about this is that
Speaker 4: you know from this book for your listeners out there,
Speaker 4: that this will evolve into taking some of those cases
Speaker 4: and expanding on them becoming their own books. So if
Speaker 4: they were really interested in that particular case, the chances
Speaker 4: are it's going to develop into its own books someday.
Speaker 7: Since yes, yes, and yes, because they're standalone, they're fascinating
Speaker 7: cases that would make you know, four or five books
Speaker 7: out of this book in terms of telling the entire story,
Speaker 7: which you obviously have access to as well. I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much for coming on and talking
Speaker 7: about this, Michael. For those that might want to say
Speaker 7: contact to you or find out more about your work,
Speaker 7: I know this is a Wild Blue Press release, a
Speaker 7: publisher that Steve Jackson and company and with a great
Speaker 7: great other great authors as company on this publishing company
Speaker 7: as well. So tell us a little bit about that
Speaker 7: and where people might be able to contact you ask
Speaker 7: questions to do Facebook. Do you have a website? Tell
Speaker 7: us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Dan, wild Blue, Wild Blue Press as my publisher,
Speaker 4: and you mentioned Steve Jackson. He's been a great mentor
Speaker 4: and everyone of that company has been very supportive and
Speaker 4: I'm just privileged to be part of their stable of
Speaker 4: stellar and star true crime authors. And so that being said,
Speaker 4: you know, I have an author's page thereon and you
Speaker 4: can access my book or purchase my book on their website,
Speaker 4: or you can go to Amazon for you know, to
Speaker 4: access a kindle form and in paperback form. I do
Speaker 4: have a website, SketchCop dot com www dot SketchCop dot com,
Speaker 4: and I'm also on Twitter at sketch Coops. I'm also
Speaker 4: on Facebook Michael W.
Speaker 7: S three.
Speaker 4: The sketch Coop is my public page, and you can
Speaker 4: also find me on on LinkedIn. I'm hoping, I'm hoping
Speaker 4: that I'm flirting with the starting up an Instagram account
Speaker 4: so I can start, you know, posting drawings every day
Speaker 4: and different, you know, interesting things that you know, visual
Speaker 4: things will stimulate people. But uh, you know, keeping up
Speaker 4: three social media sites a website is a task, a
Speaker 4: job into of itself. So but people are free to
Speaker 4: contact me, of course on my email address Michael at
Speaker 4: sketch cop dot com and just go to the website
Speaker 4: and you know, buy the book obviously, and I'll be
Speaker 4: happy to answer any questions people have of me. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, follow me. I'm really good about getting back
Speaker 4: to people. That's part of this whole thing. I love
Speaker 4: the the fan interaction. I really enjoy, you know, getting
Speaker 4: messages from people, and people are interested in the job itself,
Speaker 4: interested in my career, the cases. You know, how do
Speaker 4: you become a sketch artist? You know, what have you done?
Speaker 4: And it's just you know, I'll I'll go wherever they
Speaker 4: want me to go. I just you know, I want
Speaker 4: to get two personal my shoe size or white size
Speaker 4: and things like that. But you know, the things in
Speaker 4: terms of other things, in terms of crimes and stuff,
Speaker 4: I'm an open book and I welcome their inquiry.
Speaker 7: Well, I want to thank you very much Mike for
Speaker 7: coming on and talking about SketchCop. It's a very very
Speaker 7: fascinating book and filled chock full of amazing cases, but
Speaker 7: also just this very very unique perspective that you bring
Speaker 7: this law enforcement and of course to this program true murder,
Speaker 7: just a completely different perspective, very very fascinating. I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much, and you have a great evening,
Speaker 7: and hope to get to talk to you real soon.
Speaker 7: Thank you, thank you Dan
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you very much for bye, good night,