Assassins, bombers and other bad guys featured in art exhibit

A visitor views an exhibit of Walt Stewart's courtroom art

April 1, 2000
Web posted at: 2:10 a.m. EST (0710 GMT)

From Correspondent Don Knapp

SAN RAFAEL, California (CNN) -- Decades of courtroom drama can be relived at an unusual exhibit by artist Walt Stewart at the Marin County, California, Civic Center.

It's not the kind of art you might want to hang in the family room because it features assassins, child killers, bombers and bad guys as seen through the eyes of Stewart, a professional courtroom artist.

He and his pen filled in the stories for television and newspapers when cameras were barred from trials.

"You don't really get a chance to rework it -- sometimes your deadline is minutes after you draw the thing," Stewart said.

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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy led to Stewart's first assignment: the trial of Jack Ruby for the shooting of JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The prosecutor's closing statement made quite an impression on Stewart.

"'Whatever he did, he was entitled to be tried before a judge and jury -- just like you, Jack Ruby,'" Stewart recalled the prosecutor telling the defendant. "And he whirled and pointed at him, which was a very dramatic moment."

Stewart had a frightening experience while sketching murderer Charles Manson, when the artist and a woman reporter visited Manson in prison.

"They put Charlie in the room with us, and he kept staring at her, and the guard wasn't there, and I kept looking for the guard. And Charlie finally said, 'I haven't been this close to a woman in nine years,' and about this time the guard came back and we all breathed a sigh of relief," Stewart said.

Like a camera's high-speed shutter, Stewart's pen captured Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and the man prosecuting her for her 1975 assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford.

"He was saying Squeaky was a danger to society and she should be put away forever and ever, and Squeaky, stood up and said, 'I am not dangerous,' and blasted him with the apple," Stewart said in recalling the courtroom assault with a dangerous fruit.

Other action images caught by his pen in courtroom included a chained defendant kicking his attorney and bailiffs restraining another accused man.

"There was also a drawing I had with blood splattered all across it," he said. "They didn't tell me courtroom art was a hazardous job."

But Stewart's pen had difficulty capturing Patty Hearst's image.

Stewart sketched a memorable yet painful moment in the Oklahoma City bombing trial.

"After drawing her very badly in court, I went back to the press club where I was staying, and went to the bar and sat there, and starting drawing her at the bar and for the first time I got her right," he said.

The artist said some trials were unbearably painful, such as the Oklahoma City Bombing trial, where a surgeon told of saving a child's life.

"He had to amputate her leg to get her out from underneath the debris," Stewart remembers. "It evidently took quite a toll on him, it just was a horrible moment."

Stewart said while much of his art is seen only as fleeting images in television reports, the exhibit allows viewers to take time and look hard at the only visual record of what went on in courtrooms where cameras were barred.

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