Veteran Helps Solve Major Crimes


Harvey Pratt nurtured a talent for art while serving in the Marine Corps. After his service, the Vietnam War veteran used that talent to become one of the nation’s preeminent forensic artists and helped solve some of its most notorious crimes.

Video by Elijah Light, DOD

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Transcript

Somebody was killing people on the streets of this Oklahoma City metro area. He had uh, he had just killed a man at the front door and shot the wife in the face as she came running down the hall. He shot her in the face. So, I was a patrolman for probably less than a year. When, uh, they knew that I was an artist, that I painted, you know, I was doing things. The captain of the police detective division said, “Harvey, do you think you could go talk to her, and draw the man that killed her husband and shot her?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I could do that.” So I did the drawing, and, uh, they had seen a car at the crime scene, and then they saw it in a neighborhood, and so they were taking that witness-description drawing through the neighborhood, and knocking on doors and talking to people. And they knocked on the door of a young girl, and she answered the door and they showed her the painting, the drawing, and she said, “It’s my husband. He’s the one that you’re looking for.” I’ve always been involved in the culture for long as I can remember. Even when I was born, before I was Harvey Pratt, I was “Vehunchkiss” [phonetic spelling], which is Cheyenne and means, “He wants to be a chief.” I sold my first painting in high school at St. Patrick’s Indian Mission, sold my very first painting. And I sold it for $90. $90 n’ 61 or ’62, that was a lot. It was almost half a month’s salary. The money factor kinda counted a little bit. Kinda made it possible, so you know that I could earn a little bit. So, I did stuff in the Marine Corps when I joined. I did the guidon for our platoon and I made PFC out of boot camp, and they sent me overseas as a member of the 3rd Marine Division military police. I’ve always been very proud of the Marine Corps and what I did in the Marine Corps and also what I did in law enforcement. I’ve done over 5,000 witness-description drawings, I’ve done about 2,000 soft-tissue reconstructions, cranial facial reconstructions, age progressions and you know, just little things like that that I stumbled across, and was doing that nobody else was doing. Next thing I know, people would call me from all over the United States. “What is the best case?” And I say, ‘They’re all best; they are all the best.’ You know, if I do something that catches somebody that that abuses or rapes children and I catch him, that’s the best. Or if I work on a case and I help catch a serial murder, that’s the best. To me, they’re all, they all have value, and not only job security, but they give me a lot of job satisfaction.

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