← How to Be Anything
How to Be Anything
7. How to Be a Forensic Artist
00:17:31
A conversation with sketch artist Melissa Cooper
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- [00:01]
Capella University Announcer
Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu.
- [00:33]
Acast Announcer
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show that we recommend.
- [00:42]
Eden Scher
I'm Eden Scher.
- [00:43]
Brock Ciarlelli
And I'm Brock Ciarle.
- [00:44]
Eden Scher
We played best friends on the Middle.
- [00:46]
Brock Ciarlelli
And became best friends in real life.
- [00:47]
Eden Scher
We're here to rewatch the Middle with all of you.
- [00:50]
Brock Ciarlelli
Each week we'll recap an episode with behind the scenes stories, guest interviews, and what we think now, many years later.
- [00:55]
Eden Scher
There's a lot to dive into. So let's get to middling.
- [01:06]
Acast Announcer
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
- [01:16]
Emily McCrary
Just a heads up, this episode contains mention of sexual assault, child death and stillbirth. And some talk about crime scenes. Cooper is a forensic artist in California's Bay Area. Forensic artists make composite sketches of criminal suspects, age progression, images of missing persons, and renderings of people who are found dead but have yet to be identified. Melissa's first job in forensic art was with the Santa Monica Police Department in 2007 when someone came into the station to report a crime or serve as a witness to a crime. After giving statements to the police, they would sit down with Melissa.
- [02:03]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
First thing I do is I make sure they're okay. Like I need them to be comfortable. I'm there to be almost the opposite of a police officer. I'm not gonna be questioning them a thousand times about what happened and I'm definitely not gonna be in any kind of uniform. I'm just, I'm there to be almost like the opposite of what they probably have been dealing with the past several hours. I don't start anything until we're able to almost just have a friendly conversation. So I just ask you a series of questions and if you don't remember or anything like that, or if all you can think of is, you know, a generic nose, it's okay to say that. Or if you just simply don't remember at all, just like, please say that there's people pleasers out there who like, they feel bad if they, you know, if I ask them about a nose or something and they don't Remember, they won't make it up because they want to be able to give you an answer. Things like that. I want to just make clear that, you know, that's okay if you don't know what that nose is. That's my job to figure out. They put a lot of pressure on themselves in the beginning, and they're already going through so much. And so I'm just trying to take it off of them and make them understand that it's like all the weight right now is on me entirely, and, like. And it's okay for them to just shove all that weight on me, you know, it's just kind of getting them comfortable and just ready to move forward.
- [03:13]
Emily McCrary
To help a witness describe the person they saw, Melissa asks them to recount what happened from the beginning in detail. But this is the tough part. She says she doesn't exactly like asking people to relive horrible moments. But if she's going to extract details about a perpetrator, that witness or that victim has to mentally return to the event. When she's ready to start sketching, Melissa asks what feature stood out to them the most. There's one case in particular she remembers very well.
- [03:44]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
It was a sexual assault case. The whole interview itself was just. Was really emotional. The room was just, like, thick and just emotion. And the whole interview itself was just, like, a delicate situation. And I could tell how. I don't know, she was having a hard time. She just, like, very slowly and, like, kind of apprehensively would answer. She didn't show a sign of confidence. Not as if she was, like, making things up, but just more like she was just probably just battling all these, you know, things that had happened to her. It was a very early case of mine, and one of the questions that was always the most satisfying to me is, like, what's the one feature that stood out the most? Because that's when, you know, like, okay, I'm gonna put a lot of, like, details in this one part, you know, or I'm gonna get a lot more information in this one part. And I'm just, like, sitting there, a pencil in hand, waiting, and she's just thinking about it, and she's taking a deep breath, and. And we're, like, looking around. She said, his smell. And, like. And she even made this face while she looked at it, like. Or while she said that, like, as if she, like, is smelling him at that moment. My first reaction was, like, oh, crap. What do I do? I can't draw that. It took a bit for Me to realize, like, oh, my gosh, wait a minute. She's there. Like, like, she's literally there. And then from then on, like, it just flowed. She was able to, like, really confidently say, oh, no, like, the eyes were like this and not like this and give, like, way more confident feedback. And she almost seemed more alive. So even though I definitely put her in that place, even though she was so full of emotions before, that those emotions turned into a source of, like, power in a way. So she's getting back some kind of power that he took by being able to, you know, get that information out there and then, like, even see it tangibly on paper. That was a such a good lesson, and I'm grateful for it from the beginning. I mean, it just shows how much psychology is, like, brought into this field. I mean, the worst part is I know that I'm bringing them back there. I'm forcing them back into the last place that they want to be. And, like, their mind, everything about them is probably, like, you know, doing everything to get away from it and even repress it, which is why usually we want them as quick as possible.
- [05:54]
Emily McCrary
So do you ever know what became of that case?
- [05:56]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
Oh, yeah. They got the guy. I feel like it was within a day or two. It was fast. The detectives were very happy. I think we all were very happy about that.
- [06:07]
Emily McCrary
This is how to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs. I'm Emily McCrary. Are there features that people tend to remember most clearly? Like, do people remember noses or eyes?
- [06:23]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
They might not know that they know how to describe a nose. But then I start at, like, kind of at the largest, more encompassing questions, like, tell me about the nose. And then I go in further, like, what about the tip? What about, like, was it flared? Or, you know, what about the bridge? I'll bring in more of the features of the nose to refine it.
- [06:44]
Emily McCrary
Melissa says that someone's perception of a face is often relative to their own.
- [06:49]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
For example, a large nose. I have to automatically look at their face. What if they have a big nose? And so I have to do this quietly, you know, because it's like, what are they comparing this to? At this point, I have to just kind of guess. If they happen to have a larger nose and they say average, I might go a little bit larger than average because it's like, right now, it literally is like, just a preliminary sketch. So there could be changes.
- [07:16]
Emily McCrary
For the first draft of a composite sketch, Melissa works alone, creating an image based on what the witness tells her. Then she shows the sketch to the witness, and the two of them work together, refining the features or tweaking them slightly until the witness says she's captured it. Forensic artists are also asked to do age progressions. This typically happens when someone has disappeared, often many years ago, and the police need to release a hypothetical image of what they might look like today.
- [07:46]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
You try to collect every information possible, like, if they use drugs, do they smoke, what race they work, because some age differently. See if there possibly is any family photos, because then you could use that. Especially if they have, like, an older sibling, then that's usually helpful. Probably most of the time there's nothing, and then all you have is the photo.
- [08:05]
Emily McCrary
The eyes age first, she says. Then the smile lines around the mouth appear. Smokers get those little vertical wrinkles at the top of the lip. All of this she factors into her sketches. Melissa left the Santa Monica PD in 2010, though she still works with law enforcement agencies across the country as a freelancer. Melissa gets all kinds of wild emails, People asking her to sketch aliens who have contacted them. One person wrote and said they'd seen Satan and wanted her to create a sketch. She does not respond to those. Melissa's been invited to go on daytime talk shows, too, and sketch dreams people have had or visions they've seen or mythical creatures.
- [08:47]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
I was always taught and like, my mentors always told me, like, always remember, like, what you're doing your job for. Like, you might get some crazy requests, and that sounds fancy. There's this, like, ethics to your job. There's, like, some kind of, like, you know, respect to it.
- [09:03]
Emily McCrary
Sometimes those ethical questions aren't so easily answered. Melissa gets requests from the public asking her to imagine their loved ones, often children who have died.
- [09:14]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
I get, like, request after request of, like, of parents asking me to do photos of their babies that died. And, like, it could be just a baby that died or even to the point of, like, a stillborn. And number one, it's like, it's completely impossible. They don't. They haven't established any identifying features that young. And number two, I try to do it to help people. And like, I. To me, I feel like that I don't see the help in that. And. But then at the same time, it's like, well, that's just me. Like, who am I to say that that's not going to help them? So there's times where I've done it, but I. I definitely. I give them a huge warning saying, I can do this if you, like, think it's going to help you, but just, you know, like, it's not based at all off of your baby. This is out of all the, like, thousands and thousands of possibilities that you and your wife could have created. Like, I'm just gonna basically create one of those possibilities. Pretty much every time I've given them that offer or that response, they go with it. They, they want it. Sometimes there won't even be that young. They'll just say, oh, my kid died whenever, like four. They would have been 10 this year. Their birthday is coming up and I want to give a gift to my wife. That one is, you know, that one I can do. But even still, like, there's that whole am I helping or am I hurting? It's a tough line. I don't know.
- [10:37]
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- [11:08]
Brock Ciarlelli
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- [11:42]
Emily McCrary
When law enforcement needs help from the public identifying a person who's died, Melissa is tasked with creating a post mortem sketch. This often happens when the police have exhausted all of their leads.
- [11:54]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
It's usually either going to be based off of photos or off of a skull, depending on the situation. And most of these cases are most likely they're cold cases because it usually means they've gone through so much, every single piece of evidence forever to even get to the point where they think that they need me because there's so many tools out there. So I'm almost like the last, like hope for them.
- [12:21]
Emily McCrary
In 2007, the US Department of Justice created the National Missing and Unidentified persons system, or NamUs. It's a virtual warehouse of information about missing, unidentified and unclaimed people information like the names of missing persons and the circumstances under which they disappear, disappeared, and details about human remains that have been found and not yet identified. Sketches of unidentified people, like the ones Melissa makes often end up here. Anyone can search the NAMUS database, and the idea is that law enforcement agencies across the United States and the public can work together to solve some of these cases. Since its creation, NAMUS has assisted in the resolution of more than 45,000. To create a postmortem sketch of an unidentified person. Melissa often has very little information to work with. She might be working from photos of the victim taken at the crime scene untouched, or photos taken later in the morgue when the victim has been cleaned up a bit. Sometimes all she has to work with is a skull.
- [13:25]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
If it came down to, like, a choice between a decomposed body that still had tissue on it or a skull, I would choose a skull. And I wish, like, they made this a law to, like, never get rid of a skull of an open case. Like, it has so much information, and those tell me a lot more about someone's face, because the tissue, especially as it's decomposing, in addition to whatever injuries it had sustained, it gets. It gets really tricky about deciphering what is really going on sometimes. So a skull is not going to lie to you. It's is right there, and it tells you exactly, like, where things were situated. For example, like, there's tear ducts that we have right here, and that's going to go in our skull. So that tells you exactly where the eye is going to be going into. And so there's your key point right there. The eye is going to be situated perfectly in the orbital canal.
- [14:23]
Emily McCrary
With a skull, you can work backwards. She says it's the architecture of the face, and it's ruled by ratios and proportions, and its features are situated always in relation to one another. Were you an artistic kid? Was that something that you did growing up?
- [14:40]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
Yeah, I mean, that's all I did growing up was like, I would just grade school onwards, like, through high school. I would go home from school and just draw faces. No idea why. Like, there was no reason to it. Leave it to my mom. She has boxes of, like, my sketchbooks. I just. I would just fill them up and just go through them. I would even, like, rip features out of magazines and. And even, like, do composites, mix them together and create faces that I preferred to draw. I was obsessed with facial features. I just knew I was always obsessed with facial features. And I would kind of laugh Whenever my mind went towards being a forensic artist, just because it just seemed so unlikely. After maybe years of, like, it just kind of popping in my head, I finally just, like, did a quick search, and then there happened to be a course that was being held by Gil Zamora at San Jose. And I was in the Bay Area at the time, and so I was like, you know, I'll just take this course and just see what happens. At least it'll get it out of my head, you know.
- [15:40]
Emily McCrary
Gil Zamora is a forensic artist who teaches in the Justice Studies Department at San Jose State University. He's also written a book on gathering information from witnesses called the Mindful Interview, Retrieving Cognitive Evidence. Melissa signed up for gil's workshop back in 07, which was an intensive course about composite sketch interview methodology. Part of her instruction was an exercise that Gill calls shadow sketching, in which students observe him as he interviews an eyewitness. And they complete their own sketches without direct input from the witness.
- [16:15]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
Even though I couldn't, like, get their feedback off of, like, what I was doing, I. I just drew based off of what I. You know, what I could hear them saying. I don't know how much time later, maybe several weeks or something like that. They had caught the guy. My instructor sent me an email. He's like, hey, send me that sketch you did for that one. And then he sent me his. And he sent me the booking photo, like, so for us both to just compare us with the booking photo. And I looked at it, and I was like, oh, it looked exactly like the guy. And that was when I started taking those thoughts more seriously because I. Everything just seemed so ridiculous until I saw it actually happen. And at that point, it turned into, okay, if I don't pursue this, I'm doing a disservice. Like, I have. No, I have to try because I have this weird ability to do it. So that's when I actually took it seriously and got my foot in the door at Santa Monica Police Department. And I was lucky enough to, I don't know, be in the right spot at the right time.
- [17:18]
Emily McCrary
Do you watch crime shows? Do you watch gory movies?
- [17:23]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
I hate horror movies. No, they're too stressful for me. They stress me out. Yeah, I don't like jumpy things. I don't really watch crime shows. I'm not into true crime stuff. I. To me, I think I've heard of, like, some of those shows, like, actually helping with cases, but I think, for the most part, just feels like they're just trying to get money off of like, cold cases and. Yeah, just not really into it. Yeah, just not my thing.
- [17:52]
Emily McCrary
So how do you handle seeing. I mean, you hear terrible stories on a regular basis because you talk to witnesses or victims and you see horrible pictures because you're dealing with, you know, post mortem photos. How do you deal with that as a person?
- [18:09]
Melissa (Forensic Artist)
Seems like a lot, because I know for a fact if I'm not doing my job and if I were to see these, like, it would probably, like I would get emotional about it. But, well, if I'm doing my job, somehow I don't. I think it's because I'm. I know that something is being done. You know, so many horrible things happen to everybody, but not everybody gets heard. So I guess, like, that alone kind of, it puts me in a different mindset of like, oh, they're getting a chance, like something is being done. So at that point it's like, I guess my only focus is like, hopefully we can, you know, we can help. That's. And it just kind of goes to a more like, hopeful place, like a more positive place. Something that would affect me. Like just driving down the street, I see something, you know, or something like that. Like I'm bothered. But on the job it just, it gets put to the side. It's almost like the more I work on it and the more I even like stare this some horrible photo down, like, the better I feel about it just because, like, they're just working on it harder or I don't know how else to put it.
- [19:17]
Emily McCrary
How to Be Anything is written by me, Emily McCrary. Lily I. Johnson is our producer and Kaden Boffman is our editor. Visual design by Nika Simovich Fisher at laboud, you can see some of Melissa's sketches and learn more about the NAMUS database at our substack howtobenything.com and follow us on Instagram howtobenything. If there's a job you think we should feature, let us know@howtobeanythingpodcastmail.com.
- [19:56]
Capella University Announcer
Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu.
- [20:28]
Acast Announcer
Acast Powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show that we recommend.
- [20:37]
Eden Scher
I'm Eden Scher.
- [20:38]
Brock Ciarlelli
And I'm Brock Ciarlelli.
- [20:39]
Eden Scher
We played best friends on the Middle.
- [20:41]
Brock Ciarlelli
And became best friends in real life.
- [20:42]
Eden Scher
We're here to rewatch the Middle with all of you.
- [20:45]
Brock Ciarlelli
Each week we'll recap an episode with behind the scenes stories, guest interviews and what we think now, many years later.
- [20:50]
Eden Scher
There's a lot to dive into. So let's get to middling.
- [21:01]
Acast Announcer
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.