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Boylan interviews the girls separately, probing their memory for clues. She does not interrogate them, but engages them in casual conversation. Her questions are always indirect.
I divert them throughout the interview and then periodically interject questions about the shapes and about textures and the information and the answers are usually there because they're not dwelling and they're not second-guessing themselves.
Another one of Boylan's secret tactics is to encourage the girls to use Play-Doh to help recall their memories of the suspect's face.
What that does is it gives her a physical anchor in the moment so that she's not again revisiting that crime. It's a simple little tool, but it's very effective. So I would say, if you were going to create that kind of a shape, would you create a shape that's longer than wide or the same length as width? And if I ask that question, even in my voice tone if I say longer than wide or the same length as width, you will understand that that voice tone is dedeha, dedeha because if I even wave my voice tone, more heavily went into the sentence than the other I can lead someone that has been through trauma.
After interviewing the girls, Boylan draws a depiction that is much more detailed than the police composite. In fact, the suspect in Boylan's portrait has a beard.
There were some very distinctive characteristics in, in the suspect's face. There was an indentation on one side of the face, and not the other, and there was a furrow in the brow, there were wrinkles in the forehead. All these single individual traits that made this, this single face identifiable supposed to be in generic gave me a pretty high level of confidence that we had a good rendition.
Looking at Jeanne's portrait for the first time, set something off, I think, deep inside everybody that looked at it. That finally, we have a face, that finally there are, are real sets of features that go together and underlie some kind of a personality.
When Jeanne Boylan's new drawing is presented to the press, she is questioned about one glaring omission.
I got this barrage of questions by the press saying, you know, what about the headband? My initial reaction was like, oh, my god, I forgot the headband, but the reality was there was no headband, it didn't surface in either interview. What that was, was a perfect example of the power of suggestion. The two little girls were shown a selection of headgear, which implies that such an item exists. If I said to you, there's an older expression "Don't think of the pink elephant", and when I said that to you, what do you think of?
Boylan's new drawing gives investigators renewed hope and the search for Polly goes into a high gear.
For the first time, we knew more or less what we were looking for and I think that it instilled us a sense of, of purpose, or re-instilled the sense of purpose to all of the various players involved who at that time tended to be the, the law enforcement, the media and, and certainly the, the massive volunteer effort as well.
There will be probably tomorrow between 200 and 300 search and rescue personnel here to assist us.
Play-Doh is a commercial modeling compound similar in texture to bread dough that has been sold as a children's toy around the world for a half century
indentation: a deep recess or notch on the edge or surface of something
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