Criminal - Pen & Paper

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

As a young woman in the 60s, Andy Austin talked her way into a job as a courtroom sketch artist in Chicago. She spent 43 years sketching everyone from disgraced governors to John Wayne Gacy, and says she only made someone look bad on purpose once. See Andy Austin's sketches, including the one she made of Phoebe, on our website http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-35-pen-paper-1-22-2016/. Her book, Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom, is available here or here.  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. Thank you. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. The murder trial of John Gacy did indeed get underway today with opening statements from the prosecution and the defense. Vivian Rosenberg is covering the trial. Security was tight at court today, and some people coming in had more than a passing interest in the case. Well, my feelings, I'd like to see them, you know, do something to him besides put him in a, you know, institution. I'd like to see him be, well, killed if I got my feelings to say. Prosecutor Robert Egan described Gacy as rational, premeditated, and evil, who killed his victims like flies when they got in his way. Carefully planned murders that

resulted in bodies and bodies and bodies, day after day after day. Defense attorney Robert Mata countered to the jury that by any standards, Gacy is insane. He sleeps with corpses in a house where bodies have been buried for years. Can that be normal? What kind of a mind is that? John Wayne Gacy's trial began on February 6th, 1980, in Cook County, Illinois. He was being tried for 33 murders. One of the first people in the courtroom was a young woman named Andy Austin, and she had one job, to get John Wayne Gacy to look her straight in the eye. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I started in 1969 and I worked in the courts for another 43 years in Illinois. And once I went to California when a Chicago real estate owner's wife was kidnapped and tied to a cactus. Andy Austin is a courtroom sketch artist.

I usually don't like covering murder cases, not because people are dead. I mean, that would certainly be a good reason. But because they're boring and they don't have the passion that, say, a bankruptcy case has. Why? Because everything's over and done with and the evidence is technical. It's about bullet trajectories and the person who is killed is obviously not there, and the murderer is not allowed to speak, so you don't know much about him. However, with John Wayne Gacy, you had a real phenomenon as a human. He was so complicated, and he, in his defense, had these witnesses, like his own mother, like his ex-wife, and they gave evidence

that showed that John Gacy was in some ways a really good guy. And that was enormously upsetting when that came after the evidence from the mothers, the mothers identifying their sons' pictures. And we had, I don't know, maybe 20 of them that took the stand for two days. They had to say that their son was dead. They had to identify pictures of the son. And then when they saw the pictures, they almost always burst into tears. Andy Austin drew everyone in the courtroom, the victim's mothers, the lawyers, the witnesses, to try to capture the mood so that Chicago's ABC News Channel 7 would have visuals for their stories every night.

And at one point, the reporter I was working with said she needed a sketch of him smiling. And I said, well, I'll do my best, but he doesn't smile all the time. And she said, well, just make it up. Just go for it. And I can't make things like that up. So I had to make John Gacy smile. So the way I did that, and I'm not totally, I'm a bit ashamed of this, but I started smiling at John Gacy and he started smiling back. And so we had this smiling thing going on and he poked his lawyers and pointed at me and I kept smiling and that's how I got a sketch of him smiling. We've been using courtroom sketch artists in this country since the Salem witch trials. Today obviously news outlets do sometimes take photos and record video in the courtroom.

Ted Bundy's trial was televised nationally in 1979. Court TV broadcast the OJ Simpson trial. In 2010, 2.3 million people live-streamed the guilty verdict against Lindsay Lohan. Most states have said media cameras are allowed in the court if the judge says it's okay. But there's a strict rule prohibiting journalists from taking photos, video, or making audio recordings of criminal proceedings in federal court. That's why the Boston Marathon bombing trial was reported with drawings. So even today, there's work for an artist like Andy Austin. It's a strange job, because no one thinks about you or the many, many decisions you're making when you draw. I was often teased, particularly by men, that I had made them too ugly. I was once told by someone who had a massage parlor in tears, please don't show my sketch,

my wife doesn't know. I was threatened by Jeff Ford, a gang leader's, by his henchmen that if I drew Jeff's wife, they would break my legs. I was jokingly threatened by a mobster that if I didn't make him handsome, he would get the entire weight of organized crime against me. I went to meet Andy Austin at her apartment on the south side of Chicago.

I grew up in Chicago and I wanted to see her drawings for myself. Chicago has always been called a great news city. It's got wonderful politicians. It's got bad crime. It's got just normal people

who get themselves in trouble. Her apartment is big and open and filled with antiques and books. You would never guess that the woman who lived here spent the majority of her life in a courtroom, except for the fact that her main hallway is filled with sketch after sketch from her career, her favorite pieces for more than four decades in frames and on display. This is interesting. This is a day of sleep. This is a typical courtroom sketch where there's more time to finish it and less pressure. And this is Narcotics Court.

Why did you like the work so much? What kept you doing it for 43 years? I mean, what was it about the courtroom that you like so much? The courtroom is an amazing place. Almost everything ends up in court. You see human nature at its worst, at its best, at its most intelligent. I don't know how I could have seen so much of the world without being in harm's way myself, except in a courtroom. And I loved the work. I loved being there. I loved being part of it. I loved drawing. It was an absolutely perfect job for me. It was the perfect job that she never saw coming. After graduating from Vassar with an English degree, she was thinking about a career in journalism. A newspaper reporter told her, everybody can write, but not many people can draw. It was a very interesting time. It was the 60s, and there was a lot of protesting and there was going to be this trial.

The charges were conspiracy to incite riot and they came from the 1968 Democratic Convention and I decided to go to that trial. Before Andy had a job as a sketch artist with ABC in Chicago, she just started showing up to trials and drawing. And one day, she was told by the marshals that she wasn't allowed to draw in the courtroom unless she was seated in the press section. Instead of leaving and going home, or just putting away her sketch pad, in what seems like a rather bold move, she started pestering the judge. I would call him. I would write him. I would try to see him.

And then somebody suggested that I write him a telegram, that it would have more force. And so I wrote him a telegram telling him that I was a journalist, which was not yet true. But I wanted to cover the trial on a freelance basis. And he let me in. I was surprised. And I got permission to go there every day and sit wherever I wanted. So when you first got there, were you, I mean, you kind of finagled your way into the press box. And you liked to draw, but how did anyone start to see your drawings? One day after court, I overheard a local reporter complaining that he wouldn't have an artist the

next day. And so I went up to this guy and I said, I don't know what I said, but I said I could do it, that they should hire me, and they did. So I got my life's career in about three seconds in the courtroom on that day. She was now a credentialed courtroom artist with a paycheck, and she'd go on to become a staple in courtrooms all over Chicago. Murder trials, mob trials, small claims court cases, which she says she liked the best, people fighting over stolen lawnmowers. That's where you find the most passion. She began drawing in ballpoint pen,

but soon the news stations were asking her for color drawings for color TV. So I just splashed watercolors in the backgrounds, which was not very successful. And over the years, I managed to learn how to work with these watercolors in the backgrounds, which was not very successful. And over the years, I managed to learn how to work with these watercolors. Though most courtroom artists, I believe, use chalk or colored pencils, which I've never liked. And so my sketches come out very different from theirs.

She showed me tons of her sketches. She started to scan some of them, and so after we talked for a while, she took me in the back office, where she has a couple of computers. Can you double-click it? There it is. What is this? One of my favorites was of John Wayne Gacy's mother. It doesn't do her justice.

She really didn't look like this. She was a really nice lady, sort of short, fat, earnest, very trying so hard to be helpful. Obviously, couldn't get her mind around the fact that her son killed people. And she adored her son. I remember her walking down the steps of the courthouse in the snow after she testified and all these guards and policemen helping her and her being so nice to them and so gracious. And I guess we were all stunned that John Wayne Gacy had this lovely mother. So you're going to be... I can do whichever way is easiest for you. Profiles are easiest. Okay, so I'm just going to go like this.

After lots of prodding, I convinced Andy to draw me. I found that starting somewhere around the nose is best because the sketch is going to go from there. Is there a difference in drawing guilty or innocent people that you can tell by the way they look on the stand or just watching them so closely? No. And I'm not sure what guilty looks like. Tense, I guess, maybe. I know people often ask if I

could make somebody look guilty and I'd show my opinion of him or something. And I just don't even know how that would happen. I don't know how to make them uglier, I guess. Yeah.

You didn't like or thought was a real jerk or bad guy. Put 10 pounds on them, I guess you could do. I only did something like that once. What did you do? And I'm kind of ashamed of it. And I wouldn't have done it to anybody important, but it was in a small courtroom, and this woman was sitting where I wanted to sit, and I asked her, I said, come on, can't you just move over an inch?

And she said no, she would not even give me an inch so I could sit down and do my work. She was just a spectator, I thought. Later they put her on the witness stand and I drew her and I thought, wow, now I get my revenge. And I didn't make her look that bad, but I didn't make her look great. She asked to see the sketch afterwards, and she had a fit, of course. And I said, all I wanted was an inch. That's a good story. Now we had the most recent governor in Illinois that was put into jail, Rod Blagojevich. Everyone thought he'd be wonderful to draw,

he's wonderful to cartoon, he has lots and lots of hair, kind of chipmunk eyes. And I had a terrible time drawing him. I almost never got his expression right. I have no idea why. They're women on the whole are more difficult to draw because you don't want to slash around on their faces

and give them wrinkles that they don't really have. Men, ugly old people are the easiest to draw. It's very hard to predict. But when you find somebody that you do like to draw, it's just, there's an enormous enjoyment involved. Sometimes they look at you in this evil way, trying to intimidate you. That can be great fun, because then you get that expression. And I'm never the first to look away.

I don't care how terrible this murder or whoever it may be is. I just look them down. I'm armed in a sense. And they're not. Andy Austin retired in 2012. She says that after so many years, she started to lose the feel for it. And anyway, more and more state judges are agreeing to allow cameras into the courtroom. As for federal court, there's a pretty robust debate going on.

Some argue that video recordings are not only educational, but they improve the public's confidence in the judicial system. Otherwise, the argument goes, we learn about the legal system by watching Law & Order. But others worry that cameras turn a trial into a spectacle, where defendants become celebrities, jurors get distracted by how they look on TV, and that emotional testimony becomes that much harder when a witness knows they're being broadcast. Okay, I think I'm done. When she finished drawing me,

I packed up my things, and we called it a day. Hey, that's great. Can I keep this? Sure. Great. It's kind of nice to think that, for now, some things still have to be done with pen and paper, by law. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me.

Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Chelsea Corinta. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And if you'd like to see the picture that Andy Austin drew of me, we've got it up on our site along with some of her other drawings. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. No one size fits all approach. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology based approach.

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