Kelly Lawson never saw herself working for the GBI.
The daughter of Georgia’s former longtime forensic artist, Marla Lawson, Kelly studied art in college. She never imagined she’d follow in her mother’s footsteps.
The Lawsons have helped Georgia police departments crack countless cases. Armed with charcoal pencils and clay, they’ve identified elusive murder suspects and long-dead victims with little more than skeletal remains to go on.
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
“I think I always gravitated toward artistic things because my mom was an artist for so many years,” said Kelly Lawson, who was raised in Coweta County and attended Brigham Young University. “But I honestly never expected to achieve anything with the art.”
From her studio at the GBI’s DeKalb County headquarters, she molds clay into the likenesses of victims, allowing long-lost relatives to recognize their loved ones. In addition to the sketches that line the walls of her office, Lawson uses human skulls and wigs to bring facial reconstructions to life. She collects weaves and often does her own sew-ins as she tries to recreate what a person may have looked like.
Lawson is outspoken with a bubbly personality, but learned to become a sympathetic listener from decades of watching her mother work. That demeanor, her colleagues say, helps Lawson build a rapport with witnesses.
She recently sketched a child whose remains were discovered in the Chattahoochee River. The drawing was released to the media, leading tipsters to contact law enforcement. Within hours, the young boy’s mother was taken into custody, charged with concealing her son’s death.
Credit: GBI
Credit: GBI
It was the first time Lawson had drawn a sketch based on the remains of an unidentified child.
“You just don’t see little babies like that,” she said. “It was the first one I’ve gotten in my career, and they’re just so innocent.”
Credit: KENT D. JOHNSON / AJC
Credit: KENT D. JOHNSON / AJC
She and her mother worked side-by-side for more than a year prior to Marla Lawson’s retirement in 2013 after 37 years in law enforcement. She’d spent 15 years with the Atlanta Police Department and the GBI created the sketch artist position for her after recognizing her talent. Marla knew the agency would have big shoes to fill when she hung up her tools, so she trained the best replacement she could find: her daughter.
“She just fit right in,” Marla Lawson chuckled.
Kelly Lawson said she felt a lot of pressure to be as good as her mother, whose work is included in textbooks for forensic artists.
“She was so decorated in the field that I didn’t think anybody could really follow up on what she did,” she said of her mother, who trained at the FBI Academy in the 1980s. “My mom was at the top of the game.”
Many forensic artists use computer programs, but Lawson, like her mother, prefers to do things by hand.
She uses colors in her drawings of victims and age-progression sketches, and has taken up oil painting to improve her skills. It isn’t easy piecing together what a suspect looks like, especially if a traumatized victim only caught a glimpse of an attacker. Lawson sits down with witnesses, many of whom are children, to painstakingly create the sketches.
Generally speaking, she finds men are better at remembering someone’s overall appearance, while women are better at providing details. There’s one area everyone seems to key in on.
“Most people remember the eyes, always the eyes.” she said. “They’ll tell you, ‘Oh, I’ll remember his eyes forever,’ and they’ll really focus in on that.”
‘A God-given talent’
One of fewer than two dozen full-time forensic artists across the nation, Lawson averages 180 to 250 sketches a year, most for cases in metro Atlanta or Georgia.
“She is super good,” said GBI Director Vic Reynolds, who calls her skill a “generational talent.”
Reynolds, formerly Cobb County’s district attorney, said Cobb officials told him Lawson’s sketch of the child found in the river last month was spot on. It’s something he hears from police chiefs everywhere.
“On cases that Kelly’s called into, it generally means we may not know who that person is,” Reynolds said. “For us in law enforcement, one of the most difficult things is to have a victim and not be able to identify that victim.”
Within hours of releasing one of her sketches, agencies are often inundated with leads, he said.
“It’s just a God-given talent,” he said. “I’m sure you can teach it to some extent, but you can’t teach it to that level. She just has that inherent ability and is an integral part of the investigations we do here.”
Memorable cases
Clayton County Police Detective Jennifer Langley has worked with Lawson for years.
“If she can’t make it into the office, she can do her drawings over FaceTime,” said Langley, praising how Lawson puts anxious witnesses at ease.
“She’s able to piece everything together and provide the complete picture that the victim has in their mind,” the 15-year veteran said. “It’s not intimidating for the victim to meet with her because Kelly makes it very easy for them.”
Langley, who works in the Major Felonies Unit, said Lawson’s sketches helped crack two key cases: an October 2016 home invasion that left two children dead, and a suspected serial rapist accused of attacking at least eight women over four years.
In the first, Lawson met with four surviving children to produce sketches. It was a gang-retaliation case; neither the 11-year-old girl nor the 15-year-old boy who were killed were believed to be the intended targets.
“She was able to come up with two of the suspects,” Langley said. “And those guys looked just like the drawings.”
Several people have been sentenced in the case, while four suspects await trial.
In the case of the alleged serial rapist, Lawson met with several of the victims over the years, sketching out whatever details they could remember.
“She did so many drawings in reference to him, and a lot of those drawings were different, yet very similar,” Langley said. “Once we had a suspect and I sent her the picture of him, she said, ‘That’s him.’ She knew it was him based on her conversations with the victims and what she had drawn before.”
Credit: Clayton County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Clayton County Sheriff's Office
DNA evidence led police to a suspect who is awaiting trial.
Lawson said it feels good being able to catch a criminal with a pencil, and to capture witnesses’ recollections on paper.
“It just gives them a sense of relief. There’s a therapeutic nature to it,” she said. “That’s really what I live for — helping people out with that.”
The work has its downsides, though, and it’s changed her.
“You look over your shoulder a lot more,” Lawson said.” You don’t trust people as much.”
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