An Eye Witness Case Study

This is  not necessarily a composite success but an answer to a question I received recently about eye witnesses.  It's true that some eye witness accounts can be skewed and unrelieable but there are many things to help people lock in a memory.

I was asked to work with a victim who had been attacked.  She was living in an apartment alone and was probably being cased by a sexual predator.

He had taken off the screen windows of her apartment and forced open a sliding window.  He confronted her while she lay in bed and commanded her to "Shut up and roll over."  while he brandished a crowbar.  She screamed where upon he hit her on the head with the crowbar and fled after doing so.

The detective on the case had got leads on a possible suspect and arranged for the victim to look at a photo line-up.  This included a photo of the suspect that was on file from a mug shot taken  a month after the incident.  She was not able to pick him out of the line-up.

The detective, undaunted found out there was an earlier booking photo of the suspect closer to the time of the incident.   A month of starchy jail food had not been able to have their affect on his facial features yet.   

He showed a line-up of photos with this image and she was able to pick him out from the group of six photos and then later was able to do the same with a stand-up line-up in jail.  

A detective's perseverence was able to convict this suspect and give the victim a little peace of mind.

I don't know how I would be able to remember a face in the middle of the night, awakened from sleep, in the dark with someone ordering me with the threat of a crowbar but I think she did pretty well remembering his thin eye brows, average nose and prominent chin.  His eyes are a little bigger in the composite probably because of his state of excitement during the incident.  

Another Composite / Sexual Assault

Okay, so I'm "copping" out by posting another piece from the past because I don't have anything completed to post today.

This man attacked a woman while she walked alone along a relatively desolate street in a neighboring city. He tackled her from behind, threw her into a clump of bushes to sexually assault her.

What I always have is deep admiration for a victim willing to force herself to revisit that event in order to help the police catch the guy and prevent him from doing the same to others. It is not a pleasant experience and we both are emotionally drained after the session.

As you may or may not know there are people who chose not to help with a composite. I found that the most reluctant were not sexual assault victims but bank robbery tellers. For some reason tellers were most reluctant to sit and provide a description when cameras had failed during the hold-up. Most cited that they were afraid of retaliation [ which never occurred during my 26 years experience] and trauma from the incident.