Forensic Artist Haunted by Faces of Victims : Crime: Her goal is to revolutionize the way law enforcement creates the likenesses on “Wanted” posters. That involves revolutionizing the way artists interview victims.

The faces haunt her. Not the criminals Jean Boylan draws every day, but the faces of the victims who guide her sketches with their painful memories.

There are times when Boylan, one of the country’s leading forensic artists, would rather hang it up and try a job that’s more, well, pleasant.

“If I’m going to continue to do this kind of work with this degree of intensity, I’m just going to have to find a way to withdraw,” Boylan said one evening from her cabin in the Oregon woods.

“It’s just too much. I’ve got to balance it with something more positive.”

But Boylan, 40, can’t stop until she achieves her goal, which is nothing short of revolutionizing how law enforcement officials create the likenesses on the “Wanted” posters that are a staple of criminal investigations.

She has lectured about her unorthodox methods in China, Japan, Russia and Central America, and visited police departments all over the country.

Everywhere she goes, she delivers the same message:

“I’m trying to find a constructive way of saying, basically, you’re doing it all wrong,” she said. “There’s a better way. My idea is to get to every agency and teach them that this is a more complex task than anybody has acknowledged.”

According to Boylan, the drawings that line post office walls, telephone poles and Laundromat bulletin boards have less to do with art than with lending an old-fashioned sympathetic ear.

“I can’t emphasize enough, this has nothing to do with art,” she said. “This is all about the interview, about the brain, how it processes memory and how trauma affects memory. The art is not the point. The point is to get accurate information. It’s about developing a place of safety, listening skills, interview skills.”

The problem with the way it is done now is that forensic artists with a minimum of training use a kit of photographs showing facial types. In asking questions about the perpetrator’s appearance--”How tall was she?” “Did he have a mustache?”--they unwittingly put visions in victims’ heads and words in their mouths. That can contaminate the victim’s memory and prompt inaccurate descriptions.

Also, in using the kit’s stock features, they lose the subtle differences that make a person’s appearance unique.

Boylan uses a more free-form interview technique characterized by open-ended questions. If a victim is upset, she brings up other, neutral topics to relax them. Bolstered by her calming manner, they are better able to rehash the painful memories that, in many cases, have been repressed or distorted.

It was while she was working with the Multnomah Sheriff’s Department as a civilian investigator in 1977 that Boylan noticed something was wrong with the process used to make composites. The drawings the department’s artists were producing looked nothing like the people eventually arrested, and the victims’ descriptions of their attackers changed radically over time.

She decided to find out why.

She studied psychology, counseling and criminology at Oregon State University. Her focus was post-traumatic stress syndrome, coping mechanisms for sexually traumatized victims and how information is encoded in the memory.

She learned that the emotional trauma of being assaulted taints the memory. She discovered, for example, that victims tend to remember their attackers as larger than they are. And she found out that the memory is least accurate immediately after a crime and best two to three days later.

When she graduated in 1981, she signed on with the Portland Police Department. What followed was a succession of rape, murder and robbery cases.

Boylan has drawn more than 7,000 composite sketches during a 16-year career. She’s been involved in such notorious cases as the kidnaping and killing of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma, Calif., and 10-year-old Cassidy Senter and 9-year-old Angie Housman in St. Louis County, Mo.

Her sketches also have been instrumental in the hunt for suspects in the slaying of Manhattan Beach, Calif., police officer Martin Ganz; a San Fernando Valley serial child molester;, the Green River serial killer in Washington state; and other killers in Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Toronto.

When her drawings began to yield arrests in previously unsolved cases, Boylan’s reputation grew. When Polly Klaas was abducted from her bedroom, the FBI asked for her because “we’d heard she was the best,” said FBI Special Agent Rick Smith of the San Francisco office.

She didn’t disappoint them, according to James Nelson of the FBI’s St. Louis office, who worked with her on the Senter and Housman cases. He was so impressed that he mentioned her to the higher-ups in the FBI’s Washington headquarters. They’re interested in her ideas, he said.

“She has done probably the best work I’ve ever seen,” Nelson said. “I think her concept is a definite improvement.”