Exorcising Others’ Fears, an Artist Purges Her Own

Alone in the basement, Jeanne Boylan sketched into the night. She didn’t even stop to eat, afraid that if she did, she might never continue.

For more than 20 years, two faces had haunted her. In nightmares, she could still hear them taunting her, two strangers who, on a lonely country road, stole long and unforgettable hours of her life.

Even today, Boylan talks about the attack haltingly. “I just wanted to forget,” she says. “To get on with my life, not to feel they had taken anything more than that one night.”

In fact, Boylan acknowledges now, that night determined every decision about her life since. It began her journey of exploration into the workings of the human mind. And it began her transformation into who she is today, a woman with a remarkable gift, one that helps capture murderers and madmen.

*

The living room was dark and cluttered--as dark and cluttered as the 12-year-old’s mind. Defiantly she sat across the table and glared at the woman with the sketch pad. All week long they had grilled her, police, FBI, the lie-detector technician.

Now another stranger was trying to dredge her mind, to bring her back to the moment a week earlier when an intruder burst into the bedroom and dragged her friend Polly into the night.

Boylan had seen it so many times before--the anguish of eyewitnesses as they struggle to remember details their minds want to forget, the pressure from police to get those details as quickly as possible.

“At that point, no one knew if Polly Klaas was alive or dead,” Boylan said of the 12-year-old snatched from a slumber party in Petaluma, Calif., in 1993. “And locked in her memory, this child held the key to finding her.”

Boylan’s job was to unlock the image, to coax the kidnapper’s portrait from the child’s head.

She placed a lump of Play-Doh on the table. “If you were to think of a shape, what shape would it be?”

The child scowled. Hours passed. Gradually they began to talk-- about piano and soccer and boys and school. About siblings. They never mentioned features--eyes or nose or hair--or facial expressions. Just shapes and forms and textures.

Eventually the girl reached for the Play-Doh. As she talked, Boylan sketched, her mind locked with the girl’s, her hand translating the shapes and forms and textures into a face--the face of a man with coarse, wavy hair, heavy eyes and a deeply furrowed brow.

Richard Allen Davis was arrested six weeks later and charged with the murder of Polly Klaas.

“His face was a mirror image of the one Jeanne had sketched,” said Mark Mershon, the FBI agent in charge, who said the portrait contributed to the arrest. “It gave me goose bumps.”

She’s known as a facial identification specialist, but there’s really no label for what Boylan does. She crawls into the deepest corners of wounded minds. She peels away layers of confusion and pain. She guides people back to the moment when they saw something so horrific that their minds never want to go there again. And yet they do, because she makes it safe.

“I listen,” Boylan says. “I just listen, and I sketch what I hear.”

But those who know her work and have witnessed its results say she does so much more.

Boylan has sketched countless criminal profiles, helped investigators with thousands of cases: Polly Klaas, the Oklahoma City bombing, New York’s East Side rapist. And her most famous sketch of all --the haunting, hooded portrait of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.

Boylan’s picture was so accurate that Kaczynski broke his nose so he would no longer look the same.

“Jeanne has a gift,” says Marc Klaas, Polly’s father and one of Boylan’s closest friends. “And her gift is a blend of compassion and psychology and art. It is a phenomenon that you cannot teach.”

But Boylan insists, passionately, that her skill is not a gift but a method that can be taught. Drawing the face of a killer has little to do with art, she says. And it has little to do with the traditional methods of police composite artists. It has to do with understanding the human mind.

No one knows quite what to expect when Boylan sweeps onto a crime scene, tall and statuesque with her mane of golden hair and her slim black bag of tools.

Hollywood, thought Klaas when he first encountered her.

Another meddling civilian, thought FBI agent Mershon. He sent her home. Now he calls on her for the most complicated cases.

“Jeanne makes believers of us all,” Mershon says.

But it took a long time. It took a long time for Boylan herself to understand the profession she sometimes says “chose” her.

It began in the late 1970s in Portland, Ore. In her 20s and still dreaming of being a journalist, Boylan started working as a civilian aide in the police department, conducting follow-up interviews with eyewitnesses.

At the time, she knew nothing about memory, how easily it can be led in wrong directions, even with the best of intentions.

But what she saw troubled her: eyewitnesses being asked to choose noses and eyes to piece together what they thought they had seen, using images from a standard police book of 960 faces. The results were flat, two-dimensional composites of suspects who only vaguely resembled human beings.

Boylan started sketching during interviews, asking witnesses about shapes rather than specifics.

She learned a lot along the way. She learned that when people witness something under trauma, their minds often remember details vividly, like a flashbulb going off. She learned that those details are retrievable if they are protected and if they are allowed to surface gently, without additional stress.

Too often, she argues, investigators bombard witnesses with questions: Did he have a mustache, a beard, glasses? Because memory is so vulnerable to suggestion, minds get cluttered. Memories get buried. And those hastily sketched composites turn into the image they only thought they saw.

“What people see,” Boylan says, “is evidence as fragile and valuable as a fingerprint. And it should be protected with as much care.”

Some in law enforcement are wary of her methods, which can sound more psychic than sleuth. Often Boylan is called in as a last resort--long after memories have been distorted.

In the case of the Unabomber, it was seven years later.

He was America’s most wanted killer, a phantom bomber targeting computer companies, university professors and airlines. By 1994, after a 15-year spree, the Unabomber had killed three people and wounded 29.

Just once he slipped up--when a secretary at a computer company in Salt Lake City caught a glimpse of a hooded man in sunglasses placing a package under a car. A short time later it exploded, seriously injuring her boss.

The woman, whose identity was protected by the FBI, was troubled by the police composite. Again and again she told them it was not quite right.

And so, seven years later, the call went out: Let’s see what Jeanne Boylan can do.

Her portrait didn’t crack the case, but it made Boylan famous. And for a time, she pursued the fame and the glamour, welcoming the chance to be heard and to get paid. The Unabomber sketch appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Talk shows flew her in for interviews. She wrote a book. She even co-hosted “America’s Most Wanted” for a time.

It seemed like everyone wanted a piece of the “psychic artist.” And everyone wanted to know her secret.

“What I do is no great mystery,” Boylan says, a trace of frustration in her voice. “It has to do with allowing someone the freedom and the time to remember.” Mostly, she adds, “it has to do with the human heart.”

But working with human hearts can break your own.

Oklahoma City: April 1995. Bits of building mixed with babies’ blood. The smell of death. Eyewitnesses more traumatized than Boylan had ever seen.

The FBI had already arrested Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols and was seeking a third suspect, a so-called “John Doe.” Hundreds of people had called, convinced they had spotted him. Boylan’s job was to work with the most promising eyewitnesses and produce a portrait. Fast.

It was an impossible task. It wasn’t even clear that the eyewitnesses had seen the same person. And yet the world was demanding that Boylan deliver. Work your magic now, it seemed to cry. Find us the face of a killer.

“Everyone expects too much,” she sobbed over the phone to Marc Klaas, after collapsing in her hotel room in exhaustion.

Klaas can’t remember what he said to comfort her. He just remembers being there, as Boylan had been there when they buried his daughter.

“She’s a warrior,” he adds. “A hell of a warrior. Too bad she is paying such a cost.”

Boylan acknowledges the personal price. Her four-year marriage collapsed. She barely had a social life. She’s never sure how she will be paid.

Again and again she vowed to quit, to get a “real life,” to be “normal.” And then the phone would ring one more time.

“How do you say no,” she asks, “when the FBI is on the line asking you to help catch the Unabomber?”

Besides, how does she stop when she’s slowly winning converts?

People like Mershon, the FBI agent in charge of the Polly Klaas case. He was so impressed by Boylan that, a month later, he asked for her help in a kidnapping case in Antioch, Calif. The wife of a jeweler had been snatched from her home by two armed men. Before being blindfolded, her husband saw one of the kidnappers.

Remembering the lesson of the Klaas case, Mershon did things differently. He didn’t show the witness the usual book of suspects. He didn’t grill him about who he had seen.

“They guarded his memory as fiercely as a fingerprint,” Boylan said. “It made my job easy.”

The suspect was arrested four days after Boylan’s picture was released. His youthful, dimpled face was identical to her portrait. The hostage was freed, unharmed.

The East Side rapist case in New York was not so easy.

For a week in 1997, Boylan worked individually with seven of the 13 victims. Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes prosecution unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, said she had never seen anyone who could get eyewitnesses to so “willingly go back into their mind’s eye.”

Boylan’s widely circulated portrait didn’t lead to the rapist’s arrest, but it may have scared him off. There have been no attacks linked to the suspect since.

“Without the magic of Jeanne’s touch, we wouldn’t have been able to get an accurate portrait of this monster,” Fairstein said. “When he is caught, there is no doubt in my mind that he will be astounded by the likeness.”

Boylan shakes her head.

It’s not magic,” she says. “It’s just a different way of doing things.”

*

“I want houseplants,” Boylan says in her Arizona condominium, the first home she has ever owned. “And a dog.”

Her place is small and cozy. Candles flicker by the fireplace. Soft music plays in the background. Water trickles over stones on a tabletop fountain. Everything--right down to the silverware--is brand new.

Not a trace of her work or the faces that have consumed her life. Just some family photos, taken when she was growing up in Montrose, Colo.

She chose this place to get away from her past. She chose it because it’s sunny and vibrant, because there is nothing here to remind her of death. And because nobody here knows who she is. She asks that the location not be disclosed.

“My new life,” she thrills. “My simple new life . . . “

But nothing is so simple in a life that has witnessed so much. There was something Boylan had to do before she came here, something she had avoided for a long time.

For years, she never mentioned her own attack, not to family, not to friends. She was a crusader, not a victim; crusaders fight for others.

But Boylan’s crusade had taught her a lot about victims. It taught her that by confronting their tormentors--even on paper--they can purge the horror from their lives. She had seen it so many times, the visible transformation when she finally showed someone her portrait. Some wept. Some screamed. One woman, a nun who had been raped four times, burned Boylan’s portraits in a ceremonial purging of her soul.

A year ago, Boylan decided it was time to purge her own. She pulled out her 15-by-18-inch pad. She picked a No. 2 pencil. As she had done thousands of times before, she began sketching, chipping away at memory, as the cold, leering eyes slowly appeared on the page.

It was hours before her pencil stopped moving. Hours before she could bring herself to look at the faces on the pad.

She stared at them for just a few moments. She knew she would never see those faces in her mind again.