Gene O’Donnell thought he’d seen it all during his 32 years as an FBI forensic artist.
He’d sketched skells, spies and even would-be presidential assassins — but this assignment was a first.
“OK, let me see if I understand: You have no body and no report of a murder?” he quizzed the field agent requesting his services.
“Right,” the agent said. “Gene, have you ever had to interview a psychic?”
“No, but something tells me I’m about to,” O’Donnell replied.
The skull had so much to say — the direction of the eye sockets told me he had sad eyes. Skeletal remains have a lot to say.
- FBI sketch artist Gene O'Donnell on the decomposed body found in Camden, NJ
The psychic — whose identity the retired G-man protects to this day — was valued by the agency, which credited her for solving two cases. So it was no wonder she was taken seriously, the 61-year-old O’Donnell explains in his unpublished memoir, obtained by The Post.
Still, her visions sounded as if she’d watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” one time too many.
“Images of a man have been appearing to her suddenly from behind the shower curtain when she opens it or when she looks out the window or anytime she least expects it,” the agent told O’Donnell.
“She also sees murky images of a young blond female as well. She believes that the young lady has been murdered and is bringing visions of her killer to her. The male vision frightens her.”
He visited the soothsayer at her Wyoming home — she naturally greeted him by saying “I saw you coming” — and guided him through a sketch of a shaggy-haired suspect.
Just a week later, a sheriff at a Wyoming police department told the FBI that they had a man already in jail on a rape charge who was a perfect match.
“[The suspect] just smiled at the sheriff with a smirk. He must have known that there could be no witnesses to the murder who could have described him,” said O’Donnell.
But without a body — or anything else — it was a dead end.
“Officially, I don’t believe that the FBI has ever really admitted to using psychics, but I can assure you that they do. Rarely, but every once in a while, the real FBI looks more like Mulder and Scully’s FBI,” says O’Donnell, referring to “The X-Files.”
Makes sense, considering that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson — who played TV’s Fox Mulder and Dana Scully — were among the celebs who paid a visit to O’Donnell’s ghastly basement office at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, with its “several types and colors of mold” growing on the government-issued drop ceiling.
“This stuff is really cool,” Richard Dean Anderson of “MacGyver” once gushed during a visit.
“Not as cool as the MacGyver episode when you were locked in a barn and turned a lawnmower into a helicopter and flew it out of the rooftop hay-bale window,” O’Donnell replied.
“Hey, that thing really flew!” MacGuyver told him.
O’Donnell, who retired in 2009 to his Virginia home, is shopping his just-completed book, “Faces of Crime: Memoirs of an FBI Forensic Artist.”
Originally from Reynoldsville, Pa., he studied commercial art in college but quickly turned to the FBI.
“Coming from a small town, you apply for government jobs to get a better opportunity,” he said.
One of his more famous sketches helped nab the Russian handler of spy Aldrich Ames — but says he doesn’t keep track of the arrests his drawings effected.
Sometimes he brought the dead back to life, as was the case with a man found badly decomposed in the New Jersey woods in 1993.
With only the skeletal remains as his guide, O’Donnell — along with a forensic anthropologist from the Smithsonian — helped produce a sketch that eight months later, finally identified the dead man.
“The skull had so much to say — the direction of the eye sockets told me he had sad eyes,” O’Donnell said. “Skeletal remains have a lot to say.”
A Camden County juvenile probation officer saw the sketch on TV and recognized it as Benedict Kessler, 20, who hung himself using a wire noose.
The sketch man also takes credit for taking out a terrorist mastermind or two.
In 1993, he was summoned to Kuwait, following a foiled assassination there of former President George H.W. Bush by a suicide squad using a Toyota Landcruiser as a claymore mine to fire deadly shrapnel at the president’s motorcade.
O’Donnell interviewed two of the suspects, extracting information to craft a set of sketches of senior Iraqi officials who masterminded the attack — information that helped inform a US missile strike against Iraqi Intelligence Service a few months later.
“I felt like I contributed to that whole thing,” said O’Donnell, who chalked up his success to being a great listener — not necessarily a great artist.
“I don’t get them to remember details . . . I give them enough room for them to remember without interrupting,” he said.