I have the contact pics in my contacts and have them in the stock messaging app via facebook contact sync app. This worked fine on my Epic with ICS CM9.
yeah it has something to do with facebook. so all i did was edit my contacts and have their google picture set as their default pics. not all my friends had a google pic tho so i had to link a pic of them with their gmail contact. yeah its an extra step and some people might not want to do all that in the age of automation, but i dont mind. i have no problem taking extra time to make something look right. and now i have pics for all my contacts on handcent...