Customer Reviews

Portraits of Guilt

5 star:		(76)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a parent and an educator, I followed the Polly Klass kidnapping in the news. My son was her age... it was the unthinkable. At the time, I was not aware of Jeanne Boylan's prominent role in the ensuing case. After reading "Portraits of Guilt", I have a great appreciation for the compassion and God-given skill that brought Ms. Boylan to the forefront of the Klass case, as well as others, such as that of the Unabomer and the Oklahoma City tragedy.

This is a riveting account of one woman who has been able to gradually set in motion crime-solving procedures which will eventually make the system more efficient and effective.

If you want to consider yourself well informed about what goes on behind the headlines, you must read this book. The author was involved in the biggest crime stories of the decade, from the tragic Polly Klaas case, through the Unibomber and the Oklahoma City bombing. She brings an insiders knowledge of how law enforcement works (or doesn't work) to her book, but thats just the tip of the iceberg. Portraits of Guilt succeeds on many levels. Its a true story of a woman with a unique talent who is often forced to fight an entrenched system, and who pays a personal price for her convictions. Many people suffer when a violent crime occurs...not only the victim. I found the events surrounding the Polly Klaas investigation particularly heartbreaking and at the same time inspiring. She was there for Oklahoma City and she did the Unibomber picture that made headlines around the world and led to his eventual identification and capture. The way Ms. Boylan got her witnesses to re-live what they saw brings a strong psychological angle to the story, and challenges the "by the book" method most law enforcement agencies use. Through it all, the author never loses her courage and sense of purpose. She pays a high price for her dedication and confronts the ghosts of her own past as well. The stories about the less "high profile" cases are equally involving. An amazing story. Well written and multi-dimensional. I could not put it down.

This book is a winner! Very riveting. It tells stories of the underground world that I never knew existed. Jeanne has a terrifying yet compelling tale of the stories she has lived. I am sure she continues to live the lives and tales of her clients over and over daily. I feel like I have become a part of her as she recreates the gruesome and sad stories she has been such a large part. Her psychic ability to interview and delve into the lives of the charachters and come up with a picture is uncanny. I cannot wait to see the book as a movie!

In one of the most important true crime novels of our decade, Jeanne Boylan shares her insights into the most deadly crimes of our nation. Including the Poly Klaas kidnapping, the Unabomer, Susan's Smith's drowning of her own children, and the Oklahoma City bombing, Boylan takes the reader behind the scenes into the murky world of composite drawings.

Victimized on a rural road at the age of twenty-one, Boylan has made it her life's mission to assist witnesses in the recapturing of the image of the violator's face. Boylan works to combat the damage well-meaning artist and police agencies as they attempt to create composite drawings of suspects, usually from photos taken from mug shot books. Boylan employs an interview technique that keys into the subconscious' memory of the perpetrator, drawing the resulting descriptions freehand on a sketchpad that stays out of the victim's sight until the portrait is completed. By working from memory, rather than triggers, Boylan producing startling accurate portraits.

In addition to the stories of her professional life, Boylan reveals the maverick behind the artist. With a commitment to victims that outweighs all other considerations, Boylan honestly reveals the damage her career exacted on her marriage and personal life. Frequently, just as she and her husband headed out the door for much needed time together, a frantic call pulls her back to the world of killers and their victims.

Boylan has a gift for uncovering false testimony and mistakes in composite drawings. Challenged by a world where her remarkable beauty, sex and gifts work to her detriment when working with many local law enforcement agencies all the way up to the FBI, this forensic artist blazes her own path. A civilian who balks at red tape and follows a path uniquely her own -- a path that can reconstruct a witness' memory from years ago and result in an arrest. Concise, well written, and fascinating, PORTRAITS OF GUILT is a must read. Very highly recommended.

I had just a passing acquaintance with Jeanne Boylan when she worked in the Detectives Division of the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After leaving Portland, she took her incredible crime-fighting skills all over the country to help solve some of the biggest cases in the last several years.

It's nearly impossible not to follow her career since she is in the news frequently and has been a regular on at least one TV program. Her crime fighting weapon? A pencil.

Jeanne Boylan is more than a sketch artist; virtually every large PD has one of those. She brings to the craft a talent that is so rare, so seeming mystical, that she's been called on to assist in virtually every high-profile manhunt in the last couple of decades, such as the Unabomber, Polly Klaas kidnaping, Susan Smith child drownings, Oklahoma City bombing, and the murder of Ennis Cosby, son of the actor, Bill Cosby.

Boylan also brings to the task of "facial identification art" a unique understanding of mental trauma and an ability to probe deeply into victims' subconscious minds. Alone in a room, she talks to crime victims for hours, discussing their hobbies and interests, while interspersing questions that pry out true memories of the perpetrator's face. The end result is a sketch, a portrait, really, that looks eerily like the suspect's face.

In her new, best-selling book, Portraits of Guilt: The Woman Who Profiles the Faces of America's Deadliest Criminals, Boylan explains how she works to reach under the layers of pain, beyond the contamination done by well-meaning police officers who, in their haste to find the perpetrator, bombard the victims' memory with photographs of possible suspects. She probes deeply into the victims' psyche to find the pure image of the face that was seared into the brain, sometimes for only a few seconds, at the moment of trauma.

Boylan narrates her own story--how she got started and why she feels the need to accept every case the FBI gives her. Although she doesn't reveal in great detail how she is able to almost psychically formulate a portrait, she does make it clear how law enforcement's antiquated way usually buries the evidence, making her tough job even tougher.

As the book progresses chronologically through her cases, Boylan reveals the slow disintegration of her marriage, while simultaneously her career takes off to a level of near celebrity status.

Boylan discusses why she is compelled to continue to help police agencies and crime victims, though at times the work takes its toll on her personally. She also talks about her workshops where she teaches law enforcement about human memory, why it should be considered evidence and how it should be protected. She feels good that she is influencing the way in which police departments interview crime victims, though their acceptance is a slow process.

This is a fascinating book with lots of fresh insights into many of the most infamous cases in recent history. For example, the evidence she uncovered in the Oklahoma City bombing will leave you curious as to whether all the suspects are in custody.

I strongly recommend this book.

A well written, riveting account of real life mysteries and murders. Jeanne provides a compassionate, objective view into the inner workings of the legal system, law inforcement, and national tragedies. Very thought provoking. Great reading!

This is a book that is hard to put down. Ms Boylan's recounting of some of the most infamous crimes in recent history from her own unique perspective is fascinating, to say the least. Have you ever happened across a crime scene strung all round with 'do not cross' police tape, and wondered with morbid curiosity what was going on the other side? Ms. Boylan lifts the tape and allows us to follow her into the closed-off, tightly controlled world of criminal investigation. It is a compelling, riveting, and heartbreaking journey. There is a thread that runs through this story that knocks you flat in the end.

I've read plenty of true crime books but this is the first by a "sketch artist" and it was very educational, especially as to how her methods differ from most of the other artists. After reading this book, you'll raise an eyebrow anytime you see a sketch in your local paper.

(I have no doubt this violates your word count for customer reviews. It is a piece I did for the online site I work for. I couldn't find a more appropriate submission point. Perhaps an excerpt could be posted?)

Jeanne Boylan was sitting in the hot southern Arizona sun, a long way from her Bend home, doing her nails and getting ready for the next stop on her book tour while talking about how she came to write a best-selling book about a life she never intended to live, yet up to now has been unable to turn away from.

"I never intended to write a 'true crime book," she said. "I never would pick up a 'true crime' book, watch a cop show." She also didn't want to see her face on the cover of her book, but there she is, almost glamorous: the blond woman in black T-shirt and blue jeans, a quick hotel lobby shot when she was fighting the flu, several years ago. Her face, staring out from bookstore shelves across the nation. You can see how she won the crown of homecoming queen back in Colorado, when she dreamed of nothing but escaping over the Rockies and seeing the world - perhaps even becoming a globetrotting reporter.

But fittingly, Boylan is not alone on the cover of her book, "Portraits of Guilt," which last week had risen to No. 3 on the U.S. "reading circles" list at Amazon.com and was bouncing as high as the top 200 of the Web site's sales overall. She shares the cover with the photos and the sketches of three killers, including the Unabomber and the man who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas, surely the most heartbreaking of the cases recounted in the book.

The subtitle says it all: "The Woman Who Profiles the Faces of America's Deadliest Criminals." Call her a "facial identification specialist," but for heaven's sake DON'T call her a "police sketch artist." She's not and never will be one: "It's not the point of this work to make something artistically or aesthetically fabulous, but to make something accurate."

Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive about the book, in which Boylan, aided in the writing by fellow Bend resident Barbara Findlay Schenck, weaves the stories of the major crimes she was called in to help untangle with a sadly familiar homefront tale of how such demanding work eventually took a fatal toll on her marriage. Boylan will be back in Bend in a few days, holding a Barnes & Noble book-signing. But she's making major changes in her life.

"I am trying to get out of this work," she tells anyone who will listen. But her own written words, closing out the book's prologue, show just how tough that has been in the past: "Each time the call comes, I go. You see, I can't say no." Indeed, the book title has twin meanings: not just the legal definition of guilt, but the kind left in the wreckage of many a failed marriage and what led to it.

The book-jacket bio says Boylan "has assisted on thousands of cases for the FBI, television news divisions, and investigative agencies from Beijing to Moscow. Her pioneering method of interviewing eyewitnesses is based on years of research and study of the psychological effects of trauma on perception and memory."

It's not rocket science, to Boylan: Emotion affects memory, and the police artists' fat books of facial features - she calls it the "pick a nose" system - and the thousands of faces witnesses are given to pore over "entomb the actual image that created the trauma," in her opinion. That process doesn't produce, but actually aids in destroying evidence, as if a camera with a vital image inside has its shutter repeatedly pressed - while the film fails to advance.

Boylan talks lovingly of Bend in passages throughout the book, written while closeted with her computer in a 100-year-old, windowless adobe near the Mexican border, starting each day at 9 a.m., forcing herself to turn off the PC and go to bed at 3 a.m.

In the first scene, as an FBI agent snags her while changing planes in San Francisco, she longs for Bend's "welcomed aroma of the hot, dry air, a mixture of juniper and pine, tinged even in the high-desert summer with the faint scent of pine-fueled stoves." Soon, she is helping a secret witness - the only living person to have seen the Unabomber - undo the damage done by a contaminated sketch that had led to seven years of fruitless searching around the globe for a man who didn't exist. Through a careful, deliberate interview process that allows the old image to emerge from the mind's protected recesses, she gets the details she needs to draw a true likeness of the man who eventually would be arrested in the case.

Boylan is learning on her travels that her book is a best-seller; a stop at Powell's "City of Books" Sunday finds that it's sold out, for example. And many readers are coming up to her and telling touching stories of their own tangles with crime and its aftermath. But more than selling books, she hopes to reach the hearts and minds of a legal system that has proven stubbornly reluctant to change its ways. "There is a missing chip in my brain that thinks about commerce," she said. "I care, however, about change."

Her message to police and prosecutors: Stop treating witnesses like suspected criminals and start treating them - and their valuable memories - as key evidence that needs careful treatment and protection in order to see the light of day and bring perpetrators to justice. She is the common link between all these cases, from the Oklahoma City bombings to Susan Smith's killing of her two young children in South Carolina. She's usually called in to fix mistakes and turn things aright. Sometimes she does so in time, such as the momentous Christmas when she learned the kidnappers of a Bay Area jeweler's wife set her free in fear after their sketches were splashed across the newspapers' front pages. Sometimes, sadly, it's not in time, such as the Polly Klaas case.

Even on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Arizona, on a promotional book tour, the crime headlines of the day have her good and mad. She is furious over the case of Gary Graham, whose execution last Thursday in Texas has cast a pall in many people's eyes over Texas Gov. and presidential candidate George W. Bush. To Boylan, it's another prime example of the mistakes prosecutors often make in the realm of witness memories.

Given a last-minute chance by MSNBC, Boylan made a live six-minute plea to Bush by satellite Thursday evening, a half-hour before the execution deadline, pleading for him to delay the killing 30 days so that the evidence could be reviewed. Whether he heard her remarks or not, the plea fell on deaf ears.

Boylan was not calling Graham a saint, by any means: "He's done a lot of other things, but I don't believe he killed this man." She explained how the key witness to the Texas slaying 19 years ago was "contaminated" when she was shown hundreds of photographs in a "skewed photo laydown" with only one person "even close to the one she described." The witness pointed to Graham in a physical lineup, then told the police officer driving her home that she had recognized the man she fingered from the photo she was shown earlier - and not from the crime scene itself.

"No way this ID should stand up," Boylan said. "They killed the wrong man, but Bush did not care. Politics - what a case to close ou

This book is a real I, me, my. Very thin on the suggested subject matter. Sorry but good looking women picking loser husbands is pretty old news and really had no place in this book. I was very disappointed and am donating to my library. Maybe somebody will enjoy it more.