Rosalie Ritz | Courtroom artist, 84

Rosalie Ritz, 84, a premier courtroom artist who for four decades chronicled dozens of high-drama trials, including those of Charles Manson, Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson, died Friday of lung cancer in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Mrs. Ritz's work was seen on network TV and on the Associated Press wires, beginning with the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. Soon after, she began drawing in courtrooms. Her trial illustrations are in a special collection at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

An accomplished artist while still in her teens, she began sketching live events when she was living in Washington and got into a closed session of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

A CBS-TV producer offered to buy her sketches, and they were shown on the Edward R. Murrow news show.

Soon her services were in demand. When she moved with her family to California in 1966, she became a freelance sketch artist with KPIX, a San Francisco CBS affiliate, and the AP. The wire service sent her to Los Angeles for the trial of Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, in 1968, and she returned to the city for other trials. In 1996, the AP coaxed her out of retirement to draw the civil trial of O.J. Simpson, her last assignment.

Edwin, her husband of 61 years, died last year. She is survived by four daughters.

- AP