An investigator and special correspondent to America's Most Wanted describes her dramatic experiences as a crime-solver, detailing her revolutionary approach to transforming victims' and eyewitnesses' fragmentary memories into accurate suspect portraits and recounts the violent--and unsolved--crime that transformed her own life.
Portraits of Guilt has all the ingredients that fascinate and enthrall: there are tales of kidnapping, terrorism, and death, portraits of innocent victims, and manhunts for dangerous criminals. Add in the psychology of trauma, a crumbling marriage, and the fact that all the stories are true, and you have a book that's both edifying and mesmerizing. Once opened, it's nearly impossible to set back down.
Jeanne Boylan draws sketches of killers, and her talent is so rare that she's been called in on most every high-profile manhunt in the last couple of decades, from the Unabomber and the Polly Klaas kidnapping to the Susan Smith child drownings, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the murder of Ennis Cosby. What makes her unique has little to do with her artistic talent, however, and everything to do with her understanding of trauma and her interview technique. She talks to crime victims for hours, interspersing nonleading questions into easygoing conversations, teasing out true memories of the perpetrator's face and producing a picture that looks much more like the sought-after party than the usual police sketch. She reaches under the layers of pain and past the tainting photographs the police have shown to get at the pure image of the face that was seared into the brain of the witness at the moment of trauma.
Honest, sensitive, and engaging, Boylan narrates her own story--how she got started, why she feels driven to accept every case the FBI launches her way, the slow disintegration of her marriage, and the parallel progress of her career and personal growth. The focus of her book is not on herself, however, but on the cases she helped solve and the people she helped heal. Her sketches helped catch the man who kidnapped Polly Klaas; put behind bars the man who killed Justin Jones; and save the life of Ruth Mayer (the kidnappers had dug her grave and were about to kill her when they saw on the news how accurate the sketch was and released her). Boylan is slowly (very slowly) influencing the way police departments interview crime victims. And now she has written a first book that will glue you to your seat, lost in the world she so knowingly portrays. --Stephanie Gold
