With a simple pencil, paper and a dash of color, courtroom sketch artist Bill Hennessy brought us – and you – to places our cameras couldn’t go.
Today, journalists and the News4 family are mourning the loss of one of our own. Hennessy died Monday on his birthday, his family said. He was 67.
Hennessy was a courtroom sketch artist for more than 40 years. His work was a mainstay in broadcast and print news coverage, bringing us inside courtrooms where cameras are not allowed. He covered some of the most famous cases of the past 40 years.
“Every time I worked with him, I still marveled at how quickly he could do it, and so did all of the judges, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys. They’d come over to his sketch pad during breaks and just look in awe at what he was doing,” said Northern Virginia Bureau Chief Julie Carey.
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He was a friend and colleague to many of us. While he made his living doing sketches, Hennessy’s talents went far beyond the pencil and pad; he was a painter, sculptor and avid outdoorsman.
Former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said Hennessy was a warm, genuine person and a staple of the courthouse.
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“The judges were always keenly interested in how they were portrayed in Bill Hennessy’s sketch because they would be broadcast far and wide,” said Kirschner, who hangs one of his sketches from a 2001 trial on his office wall.
Reporters and photographers loved Hennessy for many reasons, including always delivering under the pressure of deadlines.
“He was the best at capturing the exact intensity and feeling of the courtroom from a glare to the pointing of a finger to an expression on somebody’s face,” photographer Sean Casey said. “He was able to capture that in his artwork, bring it out to me, so I could edit it into our stories, perfectly matching our reporter's words.”
Hennessy always wore a tie, even if it may have gotten in the way of his work, likely to show respect to the court.
His work took him to the Supreme Court and some high-profile cases from presidents to famous singers.
News4’s Mark Segraves said when he covered Chris Brown’s assault trial, he noticed Brown and his then-girlfriend Rihanna wore shoes worth $5,000. Segraves asked Hennessy to sketch the shoes for him and said “he didn’t complain.”
“He did it, and it turned out to be two of the most viral tweets I ever put out,” Segraves said.
Hennessy sketched thousands of subjects throughout his career, but none stood out to local reporters more than when Gregory Murphy punched his defense attorney, knocking him out cold in an Alexandria, Virginia, courtroom in October 2000.
“Bill never flinched,” said retired Circuit Court Judge Jim Clark, who was there. “Everybody else was in a panic, and he never budged. He was there, just, ‘Okay, this is something that I got to capture for the moment,’ and you wouldn’t know the chaos going on around him when he captured that extraordinary moment in time.”
