Houston Chronicle
“Round Rock artist puts a face on crime”
It began with the Beatles. The year was 1964, and the Liverpudlian accents of the Fab Four sounded in 4/4 time from countless transistor radios across America.
With those tunes in her head, the 11-year-old girl with the big, serious eyes lovingly sketched four faces in blue ball point on an elementary school notebook.
But it was only the faces that interested her -- John, Paul, George and Ringo from the neck up, no thin black ties, no striped suits, no pegged pants or Beatle boots.
Other faces would follow, faces of the famous, the infamous and the unknown, faces of victims and fiends. For the past four decades Karen T. Taylor has remained fascinated with faces and the art of drawing them.
That absorption has led Taylor to a unique position in a little-known profession, a marriage of art and science called "forensic art," the process of drawing composite sketches of criminals and reconstructing the facial features of the dead. Its practitioners are few -- no more than 30 certified professionals in the United States and fewer than a dozen of those employed full time -- but among them Taylor is considered exceptional, an artist with an uncanny ability to reproduce faces of people she's never seen.
"She's the queen," says Steve Johnson, chairman of the Forensic Art Certification Board of the International Association of Identification. "There's just no one like Karen Taylor."
She's a woman with a strange gift that carries a mixed blessing. Taylor's career has been one of intense drama, a calling that comes with its own horrors and its own rewards, few of them monetary. Time and again she's been forced to stare into the darkest abyss of human cruelty. Simultaneously she's felt the satisfaction of knowing that her sketches resulted in arrests and convictions, or the identification of the unknown dead.
And, while her work may be largely confined to a rogue's gallery, it's been seen by millions.
Today, Taylor is a portrait artist and sculptor, retired after 18 years with the Texas Department of Public Safety. From her home in Round Rock she reigns as something of a diva among forensic artists, possibly the only one who has mastered the art of composite sketching as well as two methods of facial reconstruction and "aging" (the process of projecting a person's countenance at various stages of maturity).
She's the author of Forensic Art and Illustration, a massive text that is considered the bible of her profession. She's taught seminars and lectured to police agencies around the world. Her work has been featured frequently on America's Most Wanted, Unsolved Mysteries, the Discovery Channel and, recently, on the CBS crime drama CSI.
Most often, however, Taylor's sketches have appeared in the news media, black-on-white charcoal renderings of generally unpleasant countenances accompanied by the story of some crime. Often those sketches have produced results.
Just as often investigators have stared in amazement at the resemblance between Taylor's drawings and the mug shot of some suspect.
hat talent was still raw material in 1964, when Taylor sat in a Fort Worth elementary school classroom and randomly sketched the Beatles. The shy child of working-class parents, she didn't consider anything about herself to be amazing.
"I didn't think I was good enough to be an artist," she says. "I had a wonderful art teacher in high school and he really inspired me, but I still didn't know what I wanted to do with it.
"After I left high school, I registered as a home-ec major at UT, took art classes, but I thought I'd probably go into fashion design.
"And I didn't entirely fit into the art scene. It was the '70s and the days of abstract art, and I was always into realism. I liked the old masters and their ability to make something look exactly like that object does in reality."
Almost 170 credit hours later -- still with no degree -- Taylor left the University of Texas School of Fine Arts to go backpacking through Europe. Once there, she found herself in London, at Madame Tussaud's wax museum, where she was engrossed by a demonstration of their techniques.
"I was so impressed that I applied for a job," she says. "They told me to show them three examples of my sculpture. Of course, I wasn't carrying any around Europe with me, so I went out and bought some clay, and over the weekend, I came up with three busts.
"It's a good thing I'm fast. They hired me."
For the next three years, Taylor worked on commission for Tussaud's, turning out the incredibly lifelike statues of celebrities that the museum is famous for and learning things she would apply later.
"It was a wonderful time," she says. "I'd work on a piece and get paid, then take off for someplace in Europe and blow the money, then come back and do another one. Because I worked for Tussaud's I had an entree to the British Museum. I could check out their exhibits and study them. I got to study actual drawings by Michelangelo there."
By 1981, however, Taylor was homesick and ready to return to Texas and a steady job. After a few stints at menial employment, she applied at the DPS and was hired to do illustrations for posters and road signs.
"I did the `Drive 55' posters and others for a while," she says. "Then, one day a Texas Ranger came by and said he'd heard that I was good at drawing faces and he wondered if I'd do a composite for him."
The crime was a hit-and-run homicide of a child. The witness was an 8-year-old girl who had seen her 6-year-old cousin struck and dragged by a car whose driver stopped long enough to determine that the child was dead, then sped away.
"This little girl was surrounded by all these huge Rangers with guns, and she was scared to death," says Taylor. "My instincts kicked in, and I knew I had to get her by herself. I took her to a room by ourselves and just talked to her for a while. It took about two hours, but I finally put her at ease.
"The driver had stopped and looked right at her, and she was exactly the right height to see directly into the car. She gave me a great description of the man, and I did the sketch. Then, just as I was about to leave, she asked me, `Are we gonna draw the lady too?' "
Taylor's sketches of the couple appeared in newspapers and on television the following day. The couple, having seen their likenesses and frightened by their accuracy, turned themselves in.
"That's when I began to realize that I had what I call `it,' for lack of a better term," says Taylor. "It's a sort of ability to group things into perspective, like the features of the face."
Soon Taylor was being asked to draw more sketches and speak to more victims. She began honing her skills as an interviewer and developed a professional distance from the trauma she so often dealt with, but she could never completely remove herself from it.
"It's always important to get the composite out there before the public as rapidly as possible," says Taylor. "So, in many cases, I was the first one these victims spoke with. They're traumatized, they've lost the sense of control of their own life, and it's painful to see."
In one of her early cases Taylor recalls police escorting her to a small home in rural West Texas. There she found a woman who had been abducted from the convenience store she managed, raped at the point of a shotgun, then beaten in the face with the weapon.
"She wouldn't talk to the police or even her husband," says Taylor. "She'd gotten out of the hospital and gone straight home and closed herself in the back bedroom.
"When I opened the door, the room was almost completely dark. She'd draped a blanket over the window. When my eyes became accustomed, I finally saw her. She had wrapped herself in a sheet and was crouched in the corner, drawn up in a fetal position.
"I talked to her. I told her how much I admired her for trying to do something about what had been done to her, and I finally convinced her to sit on the bed, but she wouldn't let me turn the lights on. I crouched down on the floor by the window and told her I was going to raise the blanket just a little so I could see to sketch, and she let me do that.
"She was describing him to me, and I glanced up at her face and I knew why she had the lights off. What he had done to her was monstrous. Her face was just ruined.
"I had to keep my face turned from hers after that so she wouldn't see me crying."
The rapist in that case was caught, largely as a result of that sketch, and Taylor felt the flush of success. Still, the memory of that darkened room and the battered face brings tears today, as does the case of a rape victim attacked with a straight razor.
"She was the most physically damaged victim I'd ever seen," says Taylor. "He'd slashed her repeatedly across the face. One eye was gone and her nose was missing, and the rest was just mangled.
"She was a nurse. She knew what had been done to her, and I'll never forget when she told me: `I just don't want to be the kind of person who goes in a grocery store and makes little kids frightened.' "
Pathos notwithstanding, Taylor continued in her new position. It was her niche, a place where her talent and lifelong fascination with the human face fit perfectly. She began studying subjects that applied to her new job -- facial anatomy and musculature -- and learned techniques of reconstruction from Betty Pat Gatliff, an Oklahoma forensic sculptor. Gatliff, considered a pioneer in the field, had developed the skill while working for the Federal Aviation Administration as part of an effort to identify plane-crash victims.
In the process, the artist works from a victim's skull to reconstruct the facial tissue in clay to create a facsimile of the person. And skulls began to accumulate in Taylor's office.
"We used to kid about her around the office," says Ed Richards, a former DPS profiler and Taylor's supervisor at that agency. "Some of those skulls were pretty rank."
The odor of death, the somewhat macabre atmosphere of her office -- even the maggots -- rarely bothered Taylor. "I didn't mind the yucky stuff so much," she says. "Those people were beyond pain."
Her results were impressive. In one notable case Taylor used her own two-dimensional technique to reconstruct the face of a body found dumped on a brush pile in 1996 in Wise County, north of Fort Worth. Initial pathology reports had shown the person to be a woman between the ages of 20 and 30, but she could not be matched to any known missing person, and investigators had been unable to determine her identity for more than two years.
Taylor's sketch depicted a much younger person and, shortly after it was disseminated to law enforcement agencies, Oklahoma sheriff's investigator Tim Luman recognized it.
"I looked at that drawing, and it was April Dawn Lacy," says Luman. "I knew it immediately. You could almost lay it over her photo.
"And April was only 14 years old."
The Lacy case, thought to be one of a series of seemingly related serial murders of women in Oklahoma and Texas, has yet to be solved. Nonetheless, Lacy was identified and buried as a direct result of Taylor's work.
Luman still shakes his head in disbelief at the accuracy of that sketch. The part in the hair and the form in which it frames the face, the eyes, cheeks, lips, even the ears are April Dawn Lacy's.
It's an accuracy that sometimes surprises even Taylor.
"You develop a feel for this art," she says. "And, sometimes, you just get lucky and hit it. With ears, for instance. I know where they go because of the holes in the skull, but they're cartilage. Like the nose, they don't last long after death, and their size and shape is something of a guess."
There was little guesswork involved in Taylor's composite sketch of Daniel Lee Corwin. Corwin, who would become the state's first defendant tried and given the death penalty under the multiple-victims statute, murdered at least three women and assaulted several others.
Long before many had heard of Corwin or the three women he raped and murdered, however, Taylor was sketching his picture. She did so from the hospital bed of a young woman who couldn't speak.
That was in 1988, when Taylor was called to a hospital room where a coed from Texas A&M University was recovering from a brutal assault.
The young woman had been abducted from the campus as she was going to feed her horse. Her attacker then drove her to a secluded area where he raped her, tied her to a tree, stabbed her six times in the heart and slit her throat before leaving.
Miraculously the young woman freed herself, staggered to a highway and flagged down a passing driver. She was taken to the hospital, where her first request was for someone to feed her horse -- and her second was for a sketch artist.
"But she couldn't talk," says Taylor. "He had cut her throat and almost killed her, but she was determined to help me make a sketch of him. She's one of the most determined people I ever met. So I sort of sat up on the edge of the bed beside her, and she would point to my sketch and write little short phrases and mouth the words, and I would read her lips. I ended up half in bed with her, but she remembered his face, and we got the sketch done."
That sketch was so frighteningly precise that Richards, Taylor's former supervisor, remembers it today.
"She even got it down to the pens in his pocket," says Richards. "I remember Corwin was working for some guy who had a cabinet shop. This guy saw Karen's sketch in the paper the next day and called immediately."
Corwin was arrested and convicted of the assault on the coed. He admitted the previous murders while in prison and was subsequently convicted of capital murder and executed in 1998.
And Taylor's successes kept mounting. Often, she points out, her drawings resulted in identification in conjunction with other evidence developed by police. In many cases she does not know the outcome of a particular sketch. One, however, she recalls vividly.
"It was an Austin rape case, sometime in 1999," she says. "I was talking to the victim and we'd gotten a pretty good picture, but she kept telling me, `He looked dumber. Make him look dumber.' So I sort of opened the mouth and showed these upper teeth, and she started saying, `That's it. That's it.' "
The resulting sketch, depicting a vacant-eyed imbecile wearing a backward baseball cap, hung in the Austin Police Department for some time, where it was the subject of a number of jokes. Then, recalls police detective Fowler Brown, Robert Parmer was arrested for car theft.
"The guys in auto theft took one look at Parmer and nailed him as our suspect," says Brown. "Karen Taylor had absolutely captured that expression."
Parmer is now serving a 42-year-sentence for rape.
As years passed, the endless stream of victims and their pain began to tell on Taylor. By the early 1990s the DPS had built an office and lab for her, and parts of it were designed specifically around victims and their emotions.
"Quite often the sketch is the first time the victim's confronted their attacker since the crime," says Taylor. "It's unbelievably traumatic for them and, unfortunately, one of the common responses when they see it is that they vomit.
"It happened so often that I had them install a sink in the office, conveniently close to the desk where I did interviews.
"Dealing with that sort of pain affects you after a while. You see what these criminals do to people. I often wondered how some police investigators manage to control themselves when they've finally caught one of these individuals -- how they keep themselves from just strangling them on the spot.
"I'm afraid that's what I'd do."
So, in 1999, the same year she was named one of 100 "Texas Women of the Century," Taylor retired from the DPS. She had kept herself busy with outside projects for years: contributing to the popular exhibit Whodunit for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Natural History in 1990, aiding in an anthropological study of American Indians at Rowan University in New Jersey, reconstructing the face from an 800-year-old skull for a documentary on The Mysterious Hanging Coffins of China and creating an idealized face for a study on concepts of beauty by a Harvard professor.
Recently, she added a new pursuit, doing portraits and busts of people she calls "the good guys."
"I did the bad guys for years, and I wanted to do something else -- busts of people I admire for one reason or another. Not just celebrities, but people I've known who have contributed something."
She recently completed her first, a bust of George Taft, a forensic scientist she considers a mentor. She intends to create one of Gatliff and has plans for others.
She also is collaborating with Austin historian Gary M. Lavergne on a book about her career.
"I think I'm sort of a fluke," says Taylor. "I've been lucky enough to find a place where my talent just happened to fit. And it's been wonderfully rewarding.
"I'll never give up forensic art. I still teach and I still take cases on commission, but not as a steady diet. If I never have to interview another rape victim or someone who's watched their loved one die, it'll be all right with me."
Taylor now lives quietly in a pleasant brick home in Round Rock with her husband, DPS Commander David M. Griffith. Toward the center of that home is a small room that serves as a studio and, there, mounted on a sculpture stand on a work table, is a tiny mound of clay that, on close inspection, shows the early stages of the sculpture of an infant's head.
"It's the daughter of a friend of mine," says Taylor. "She's 6 months old and just beautiful, and I wanted to do a bust of her. But, you know, when I work on that sweet little head, I think about the last one I did that size.
"It was an infant who'd been murdered."
Evan Moore is a Chronicle reporter at large, based in North Texas. Steve Ueckert is a Chronicle photographer.
Written By
EVAN MOORE