PSU Magazine Winter 1989

Fighting crime with apencil One PSU alumna uses a pencil and sketchpad to help police capture criminals . J ean Boylan ('81, BS) draws portraits of people she never wants to meet. They are pictures of people who commit ugly crimes - murderers , rapists and muggers whose faces fill the pages of her portfolio. It is through her work as a forensic artist that Boylan meets these criminals and sketches the pictures that become tools for their capture. In interviews that frequently last two to three hours, Boylan talks with a crime victim or witness and gently calls upon their memory as she transfers the criminal's description to her sketchpad. Currently employed two days a week by the Portland Police Bureau , Boylan commutes from her Bend home to assist the bureau ' s detectives with their cases. · "Jean ' s ability to elicit a description from a victim or a witness and turn that into a drawing is amazing ," says Portland Police Detective Sue Hill. "When the perpetrator is caught and the mug shot compared to her sketch, the similarity can be unbelievable . Her drawings give us something to go on." Although Boylan has never had any formal ar< training , she says she ' s always drawn faces. "When I was little ," she recalls , ''I'd see how the moonlight made shapes on my bedroom wall and pretend to draw the shadows into faces. " In between her Portland duties, Boylan travels to law enforcement agencies throughout the country and world that request her expertise in interviewing crime victims and witnesses. Since she began this work 12 years ago , Boylan ' s clients have included the FBI, U.S . Secret Service, and police agencies from Seattle to San Diego and from Corvallis to Canton. She ' s also traveled to Honolulu, Tokyo and Beijing. PSU 16 By Jan Acker With a soft and soothing voice , Boylan traces how she got into a field that includes only two other forensic artists on the West Coast. "There seemed to be a pattern in how much people could recall depending upon how long it had been since the crime. " "When I was a student in communications in 1977 at Portland State , I heard of some 12-month grant positions at the Multnomah County Sheriff's office . The county was expecting budget cut, and the purpose of the program was to test the feasibility of civilians conducting parts of police work such as interviewing , tracking names and addresses , everything but making the arrests ," says BoyIan. "I got one of the jobs and began working on follow-up interviews with victims and witnesses of crimes. After I had been doing the interviews for awhile , I noticed that when I conducted the interviews a few days after the crime, the assailant ' s description often differed from the initial police report. "There seemed to be a pattern in how much people could recall depending on how long it had been since the crime. For example, it seemed that a rape victim could best remember her attacker's features three to five days after the rape occurred. " As her interviewing work continued , Boylan began bringing an artist ' s pad and sketching as she talked with the victim or witness. She also began including the sketches with her reports as a way to help the detective working on the case. Although she was not encouraged to continue the sketching , Boylan did. And she began to see that her drawings helped detectives solve cases. "Back when we had to keep records for budget purposes, about eight out of every l 0 cases that used one of the sketches resulted in an arrest ," says Boylan. At the same time, Boylan also began reading everything she could find on crime victims ' trauma and how it affects their memory . When the grant position ended, Boylan moved to Germany for a year and then to Hawaii. Eventually , she returned to Portland to finish her degree in Social Sciences at PSU. With the help of a Psychology department counselor, Boylan designed a program for herself that included courses in psychology , criminal justice and social sciences, all supportive of her growing interest in forensic art. She also took a handful of her drawings to the Portland Police Bureau and proposed a workstudy position within the detective division . They agreed and she worked there part time until she graduated. After completing her degree , Boylan signed on full time for the Portland bureau until a little more than a year ago when she cut back to two days a week and moved to Bend. Although the commute is 164 miles from her driveway to a downtown parking space, Boylan says that the constant exposure to the city's crime problems and the increasing demand for her freelance work influenced the decision to move to a smaller town. "I was working five days a week in