Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom

In 1969 artist Andy Austin pitched herself as a substitute for an ABC TV courtroom sketch artist who didn’t show up to cover the Chicago 7 trial, thus beginning her career of more than 40 years of covering some of the city’s and the nation’s most notorious trials—all documented in this compilation. Rule 53 dictates no cameras allowed in the courtroom, so mobsters, politicians, spies, terrorists, gang members, and serial killers on trial leave their mark on history through the artist's renderings. This engaging memoir and firsthand account of how the drama of the courtroom stage really unfolds will delight history and true crime buffs, court watchers, and anyone fascinated by the nuances of character only an artist can capture.

No Cameras Allowed

In the late 1960s, new to Chicago and bored with the still life subjects she painted in her home studio, artist Andy Austin began wandering the city in search of surprises from life as it is really lived. Chicago delivered--with the color and drama of volatile times and larger-than-life subjects. The streets were alive with noisy demonstrations, against the war in Vietnam, and in support of issues ranging from civil rights to raises for schoolteachers. Austin sketched picket lines and protests and sometimes joined them, soaking up every detail with crystalline clarity. When she turned her skills to court drawing, her stunning ability to capture pivotal moments and revealing human interactions gave Chicagoans an unparalleled you-are-there view of trials and personalities that made headlines.

Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom is a vivid memoir by one of the country's best visual chroniclers of courtroom proceedings. Austin's gift for seeing essential details offers intimate glimpses of defendants like the Chicago 7 radicals, the Black Panthers and the El Rukns, serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and a parade of mobsters. In prose as deft and insightful as her sketches, she shares her portraits of the lawyers, judges, politicians, and others involved in cases she observed, salutes friends and colleagues, and shares personal experiences that influenced her unique perspective on local history in the making.

Artist Andy Austin has been present at many of the most exciting and important trials in Chicago courtrooms over the last 40 years, drawing for the public the historic scenes that Rule 53 prevents cameras from documenting. She has honed the keen observational skills and humanistic eye that enliven her penetrating sketches over a lifetime of arts, adventure, travel, and extensive reading. Though long admired for her talent of capturing the world of the courtroom in images, it is now clear that her gift extends to the written word as well.

Andy Austin was born in Boston to an artistic father bred of puritans and sea captains and a mother from Chicago who attempted to be a proper hostess, including the night Salvador Dali showed up for dinner with a dead bird on his head. When she was thirteen, her family moved to Florida so her father could photograph polo ponies and society women. Having previously attended only private, all-girls schools, Andy found her two years at a large, co-ed public high school in Florida made a deep impression on her. After graduating from Shipley, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, Andy went on to Vassar College, where she majored in English and minored in philosophy (she took no art classes). She was accepted into Berkeley where she intended to do graduate work in Latin American studies, but after wandering around Europe for a summer, she was inspired to stay in Italy and studied (though she says that's too strong a word) art in Florence at the Accademia di Belle Arti. She enrolled in the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when she returned to the United States.

That autumn she met her first husband, a Harvard Law School student. She gave birth to their son at the end of her second year in art school. They moved after that to Washington, DC, where her husband worked in the Justice Department while Andy stayed home and tried to paint. When the Berlin Wall was built, her husband's reserve unit was called up and suddenly their family was moved to Oklahoma for a year at Fort Sill. When he was discharged, they moved to Vienna, where he wrote music and studied conducting and she was a hausfrau. When they moved back to Chicago, her husband was hired as a music teacher at the Latin School just before Andy gave birth to their daughter. In 1969, when their son was nine and their daughter five, Andy was hired by ABC News to cover the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and has worked for the local television station ever since, her prolific career the subject of this book.

In 1994 Andy married Ted Cohen, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. They have traveled all over the world (Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Poland, England, Scotland, France, Spain, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and Israel), often for philosophy conferences. She always draws at the lectures and, as she does, finds herself blissfully happy because she's provided what she loves most--new faces to explore accompanied by an interesting soundtrack.