Late on August 30, 1985, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block stood before reporters with a name and a photograph. For most of that summer the public had known the man the press called the Night Stalker only through a composite drawing circulated across the state. Now there was a booking photograph from an arrest for a stolen car the previous December, and United Press International put the comparison in one line: the police mug shot bore "a remarkable resemblance" to the composite. Block said investigators had thought about keeping the name to themselves so the man would not know they had it, and decided that publishing it would do more good. The photograph ran in the morning papers. Before the day was out Richard Ramirez was in custody in East Los Angeles.
That is the outcome every investigator hopes for when a sketch goes out, and it is not the usual one. A composite is a witness’s memory passed through a second person’s hand. Put the drawing beside the face of the person eventually identified and the results vary from case to case. Some drawings match closely. Some match the hair or the hat and nothing else. Some look like no one at all, and a few send detectives after the wrong man. Ramirez sits at one end of that range. Across five decades and four countries, the cases of nine others, from a Yonkers postal worker to a Silesian miner and a Mexico City wrestler, fill in the rest of it, and in each of them the drawing can be set against the real face.
In the summer of 1977 New York had a gunman, a set of letters signed "Son of Sam," and it had several faces, none of them the same. Time reported that August that 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were assigned to the case full time and that the task force at the 109th Precinct in Queens sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour. Police received at least 5,000 names. Witness sketches circulated widely, and Time noted that they did not resemble one another and had led people to name the wrong men.
The man arrested on August 10, 1977, in Yonkers was David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker. He was identified through a parking ticket written near the last shooting and through Yonkers police files on threatening letters to his neighbors, not through any drawing. On May 8, 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder and to attempted murder and other counts for the people wounded, and he received 25 years to life for each killing.
The mismatched sketches outlived the investigation. Maury Terry, a writer who took up the case soon after the arrest, pointed to witness drawings that resembled neither Berkowitz nor one another as part of his argument that others had taken part in the shootings, Time recounted in 2021 when that argument became the basis of a documentary series. Berkowitz himself later said he had not acted alone. No one else has been charged. In May 2024 the New York State Board of Parole refused him release for the 12th time, CBS News and the Associated Press reported.
Robin Samsoe was 12, lived in Huntington Beach and took ballet. She was killed in June 1979, and her death came to light near Sierra Madre on July 2. A friend gave police a detailed description of a stranger, and a composite sketch was circulated across Southern California.
The drawing reached someone who knew the face. According to the California Supreme Court’s 1984 opinion, a former probation officer of Rodney Alcala’s recognized him from it; CBS News’s 48 Hours later described the man as his former parole officer. Alcala, a UCLA graduate and photographer with a criminal record, was free on bail in a Riverside County case in June 1979. He was arrested in Monterey Park on July 24, 1979.
What the sketch did to Alcala himself became evidence. His girlfriend at the time testified that before June 20 she had urged him to change his hairstyle. He did nothing about it, the court recorded, until June 23, after the composite sketches were published, and he had his hair cut on June 26.
There were three of them. Orange County juries convicted Alcala of Robin’s murder in 1980 and again in 1986, and both judgments were reversed, the first by the California Supreme Court in 1984 and the second by the Ninth Circuit in 2003. On February 25, 2010, a third jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder, for Robin and four Los Angeles County women, Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau, and of kidnapping, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced. He was sentenced to death on March 30, 2010. In December 2012 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover, both killed in the 1970s, and in January 2013 he received 25 years to life. He died on July 24, 2021, at 77, while the automatic appeal of his California sentence was still pending.
In Poland a strong resemblance to a drawing was set aside by a piece of paper. After a crime in Piekary Śląskie in the late 1970s that a woman survived, militia investigators in Upper Silesia produced a composite from a survivor’s account: a man with thick hair in a checked coat of a style known locally as a "burdysówka," Super Express reported. They also built a mannequin dressed to match. The investigation group took the codename "Szóstka," the Six, because the attacks lay along the route of tram line 6.
In September 1979 the militia detained Joachim Knychała, a miner from Bytom, as a murder suspect. A woman who had survived one of the crimes recognized him, and he bore a strong resemblance to the composite portrait, according to a 2019 study of the case by the forensic scholar Ewa Gruza. He was released anyway. Attendance lists at the Andaluzja mine showed him at work on the dates of the attacks, and investigators accepted them as an alibi. The lists were false. As an activist in the official socialist youth union he often worked overtime, and his foreman marked him present for full shifts on days he was elsewhere, Gruza wrote, a practice Super Express described as an illegal arrangement at the mine. The militia learned this only in 1982.
Knychała was arrested in May 1982, after the death of his 17-year-old sister-in-law, Bogusława Ludyga, came to light that month. On April 19, 1984, the provincial court in Katowice sentenced him to death for five murders and seven attempted murders, with other charges. The Supreme Court upheld the judgment in October 1984, the Council of State did not grant clemency, and he was hanged at the Montelupich prison in Kraków on May 21, 1985, Gruza recorded.
The Ramirez drawing earned its reputation. The man in the booking photograph was described by police as 25, six feet one and 155 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and badly stained teeth, and UPI reported that the photograph resembled the composite that had circulated statewide. The identification itself came from a fingerprint, not the drawing, but once the name and the photograph were joined to a face the public already half knew, it took only hours for that face to be recognized.
In September 1989 a Los Angeles jury convicted Ramirez on all 43 counts tried, among them 12 counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, together with 30 other felony counts, and he was sentenced to death that November. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on August 7, 2006. He died on June 7, 2013, at 53, of complications of lymphoma, still under sentence of death, UPI and CBS San Francisco reported.
One of the best-known composites in American criminal history shows almost nothing of the man it describes. On February 20, 1987, a bombing in Salt Lake City injured Gary Wright, who ran a computer business there. A store employee had seen a man nearby, and her account helped a sketch artist produce the composite, the FBI says. The bureau later described the figure as wearing a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses. The hood and the dark lenses became the public image of UNABOM, the case name for a series of 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995 that killed three men and injured more than 20 people.
The sketch did not identify anyone. After Salt Lake City the bomber went quiet for six years. The break came in words rather than features: after The Washington Post published the bomber’s long essay in September 1995, David Kaczynski and his wife recognized the ideas and the style of writing of his brother, Theodore, a former Berkeley mathematics professor living in a cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. David gave investigators letters and documents his brother had written, and the FBI’s linguistic analysis concluded that the same person had almost certainly written them and the essay. Theodore Kaczynski was arrested at the cabin on April 3, 1996.
On January 22, 1998, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento to every count of two indictments covering all three deaths, under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table, the Justice Department announced; he was sentenced on May 4, 1998, to life without the possibility of release. In 2011, when the government auctioned his belongings to raise money for his victims, a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of sunglasses sold together for 20,025 dollars, the Associated Press reported. He died on June 10, 2023, at the federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina; the AP reported that he had taken his own life.
In November 1988 a woman, then 30, survived a shooting in South Los Angeles, and a composite sketch was made from her description. Investigators linked the shooting to earlier killings of women in the area. Police had a drawing but no name, and the drawing went up in public. Billboards offering a 500,000-dollar reward and bearing the suspect’s police sketch were posted eight blocks from the house of Lonnie Franklin Jr., a former city sanitation worker and police garage attendant, the Associated Press reported in 2010. Police Chief Charlie Beck said Franklin drove past them every day.
No one put a name to the sketch. Franklin was identified in July 2010 through California’s familial DNA search program, which pointed investigators to a relative whose profile was in the state’s data bank, the state attorney general’s office announced; he was arrested on July 7, 2010. At his trial in February 2016 the woman who had survived in 1988 pointed to him and told the jury she was "100 percent" certain he was the man who shot her. He had "less hair now, but he still looks the same," she said, according to City News Service. Under cross-examination she said the sketch an artist drew after the attack "didn’t really look like" her assailant.
On May 5, 2016, the jury convicted Franklin of ten counts of first-degree murder, with a multiple-murder special circumstance, and of one count of attempted murder, for the 1988 shooting, the Los Angeles Police Department announced. The women whose murders he was convicted of were Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, Alicia "Monique" Alexander, Princess Berthomieux, who was 15, Valerie McCorvey and Janecia Peters. He was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016, and died at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, while his automatic appeal was pending.
Over about three weeks in February and March 1996, six people were shot dead in and around Merano, the spa town of South Tyrol. The first description investigators relied on was wrong. A young man who had been near the February 8 killings told carabinieri he had seen the gunman and described a tall man with short black hair, L’Unità reported. That account was later judged false, and it became one of the reasons he himself was arrested. He was held as the suspect for 22 days, by the paper’s count.
On the evening of February 27 an accountant, Paolo Vecchiolini, was killed in the old center of Merano. His fiancée, who was with him, survived, and her description of the gunman was turned into a composite sketch, the Austrian broadcaster ORF reported. Carabinieri carried it from shop to shop. A barber in Merano who had known Ferdinand Gamper, a solitary German-speaking shepherd, since their school days recognized him at once. "When the carabinieri came into my shop with the composite picture, I recognized Ferdinand," he told ORF years later. He told L’Unità he had been shown the black-and-white drawing on the Thursday, the day before the last killings. Carabinieri said they had received about a hundred tips and checked about ten people before then, none of them Gamper.
On March 1 the farmer who rented Gamper his lodgings at Rifiano, Tullio Melchiorri, 58, and a carabinieri marshal, Guerrino Botte, 54, were killed. Gamper died by his own hand that morning near Rifiano before he could be arrested. The young man who had been jailed was released that night. After Gamper’s death, L’Unità reported, the surviving fiancée identified him as the man she had seen. Investigators attributed all six killings to him, but no charge was brought and no court ever weighed the case.
For more than a year the task force hunting the man whose DNA linked the deaths of five women around Baton Rouge and Lafayette worked from an FBI profile that, Newsweek reported, assumed he was white; the profile was amended in March 2003 to cover all races. A separate drawing existed. A woman in Breaux Bridge, in St. Martin Parish, a survivor, had helped police produce a composite sketch, but her case had not been linked to the series.
On May 23, 2003, the task force helped St. Martin Parish release a modified version of that sketch, with a description of a car linked to one of the incidents. Tips came in that afternoon, and over the next day four callers named Derrick Todd Lee, a laborer from St. Francisville with a record of burglary, stalking and peeping, the Louisiana Supreme Court recorded. A cheek swab had already been taken from Lee on May 5 under a subpoena obtained by detectives in Zachary working older cases, and on the same May 23 the State Police Crime Lab finished testing it. It matched. Baton Rouge police named him on May 26, and he was arrested in Atlanta on May 27, 2003.
The sketch mattered most in the appeal. In January 2008 the Louisiana Supreme Court held that the subpoenaed swab had been an unconstitutional search: the subpoena lacked the probable cause and sworn support a warrant requires, and Lee’s apparent consent was not voluntary. It ruled the DNA evidence admissible all the same, under the inevitable discovery doctrine, because once the sketch went out the tips naming Lee had arrived independently and the task force’s standard practice would have led it to swab him. The drawing, in other words, carried the conviction past a constitutional defect.
Lee was convicted in 2004 of the second-degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, and sentenced to life, and of the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, for which a jury chose death. He was never tried for the other killings linked to him by DNA. He died on January 21, 2016, and the coroner’s office later gave the cause as heart disease, WAFB reported.
The Mexico City investigation produced drawings by the dozen. In December 2003, a month after Mexico City police announced that they were looking for a serial killer of elderly women, they released a first sketch based on witnesses, showing someone said to pose as a worker for a city program that paid support to older adults, according to Susana Vargas Cervantes, a Carleton University researcher who has studied the case. Over the following years the police produced more than 64 sketches and posted them in parks, patrol cars, government offices and metro and bus stations. In August 2005 the first composites of a single suspect went up on patrol cars in all 70 of the city’s police sectors. Two of the sketches released that month were printed side by side under the heading "Se buscan," Wanted, and Vargas Cervantes has observed that they did not look like each other.
Behind the drawings stood a theory. Investigators told the public that the killer was most likely a man dressed as a woman, and in October 2005 police detained dozens of transgender sex workers to take their fingerprints. None matched.
On January 25, 2006, police arrested Juana Barraza Samperio, 48, in the Venustiano Carranza borough, the day the death of Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro, a widow in her eighties, came to light. Barraza was a former professional wrestler who had fought as La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. The likeness was close. Barraza resembled the police composite drawings and a sculpted rendering of the suspect, "even including a similar haircut and facial mole," the Associated Press reported. Vargas Cervantes adds two details that sit uneasily beside that match: a week before her arrest Barraza had appeared on national television at a wrestling event without anyone connecting her to the posters, and she had reportedly been to the prosecutor’s offices at least three times.
On March 31, 2008, a Mexico City criminal court convicted her of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies against elderly people and sentenced her to 759 years, Notimex reported. She called the sentence unjust and said she would appeal. She has said since that she killed one woman, not the others, and that her other statements were made under threats, Milenio reported in 2024. In September 2026 she was still in prison, using a wheelchair, El Financiero reported.
In Phoenix in 2006 the composite of the man the press called the Baseline Killer showed a Black man in dreadlocks and a fisherman’s hat, the Phoenix New Times reported. The survivors' memories did not all agree, and the New Times summarized them as describing a strong, athletic, light-skinned Black man who often wore disguises. Police suspected that the dreadlocks were a wig.
The drawing still did its work. On July 14, 2006, a woman who had seen the sketch told the authorities that the man in it was Mark Goudeau, a Phoenix construction worker on parole. She had reason to know his face: her own earlier case had sent him to prison for 13 years, the New Times reported. The paper also documented a detour in the same investigation. A patrol officer spent months pursuing another man, whose features did not fit the survivors' description and who did not wear disguises; a detective excluded him after learning he had been in jail when one of the killings took place.
The physical case came from the laboratory. In August 2006 a Y-STR DNA test run by the state Department of Public Safety laboratory linked Goudeau to a September 2005 case involving two sisters, the Arizona Supreme Court recorded. He was arrested in Phoenix on September 6, 2006, and convicted in September 2007 of 19 counts in the sisters' case. On October 31, 2011, a Maricopa County jury convicted him of nine counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Georgia Thompson, Tina Washington, Romelia Vargas, Mirna Palma-Roman, Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera, Chao "George" Chou, Kristin Gibbons, Sophia Nunez and Carmen Miranda, and of 58 other counts, and he received nine death sentences, which the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in 2016. He has always maintained his innocence. A post-conviction petition filed in February 2026 claims that police framed him, and as of April 2026 it was pending, the Arizona Mirror reported.
Set the ten drawings beside the ten faces and no single verdict on the composite sketch emerges. In Los Angeles in 1985 and Mexico City in 2006 the drawing and the face were close enough for reporters to remark on it. In Merano a barber needed only a glance. In Phoenix and Huntington Beach the right person saw the sketch and supplied a name. In Louisiana the drawing produced tips that a state supreme court later used to save a conviction.
Elsewhere the drawing was weaker than the paperwork or the laboratory. A Polish miner who looked like the militia’s portrait walked free in 1979 because an attendance list said he had been at work, and he was not arrested until 1982. The New York sketches disagreed with one another and fed a theory that no court ever accepted. The South Los Angeles billboards went up eight blocks from Franklin’s house, and the woman whose memory it recorded said under oath that it did not really look like him. The UNABOM figure in hood and glasses identified no one; a brother’s recognition of a style of writing did.
What a sketch carries is a witness’s memory at one moment, and the cases show how far that memory can reach and where it stops. It reached a barber’s chair in South Tyrol within days. In South Los Angeles it reached nobody for more than twenty years, until a database supplied a name and the woman who had described the man sat in court and told the jury the drawing had not looked like him.
• July 29, 1976, to July 31, 1977: the shootings in New York later admitted by David Berkowitz.
• August 1977: Time reports that witness sketches in the Son of Sam case do not resemble one another.
• August 10, 1977: Berkowitz is arrested in Yonkers.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder.
• June 20, 1979: Robin Samsoe, 12, disappears in Huntington Beach; a composite is circulated soon after.
• June 23 and 26, 1979: Alcala leaves his hair unchanged until after the sketches are published, then has it cut.
• July 24, 1979: Rodney Alcala is arrested in Monterey Park.
• September 1979: Joachim Knychała is detained, recognized by a survivor and released on mine attendance lists.
• May 1982: Knychała is arrested after the death of his sister-in-law, Bogusława Ludyga, 17, comes to light.
• April 19, 1984: Knychała is sentenced to death in Katowice; he is hanged in Kraków on May 21, 1985.
• August 30, 1985: Ramirez’s name and booking photograph are released; UPI reports the resemblance to the composite.
• August 31, 1985: Richard Ramirez is taken into custody in East Los Angeles.
• February 20, 1987: a bombing in Salt Lake City injures Gary Wright; a witness’s account produces the UNABOM composite.
• November 1988: a woman survives a shooting in South Los Angeles; a composite is made from her description.
• September 1989: Ramirez is convicted of 13 murders and 30 other felonies.
• February 27, 1996: Paolo Vecchiolini is killed in Merano; his fiancée’s description becomes a composite.
• March 1, 1996: two more killings at Rifiano; Ferdinand Gamper dies by his own hand; the jailed young man is released.
• April 3, 1996: Theodore Kaczynski is arrested near Lincoln, Montana.
• January 22, 1998: Kaczynski pleads guilty; he is sentenced on May 4, 1998, to life without release.
• May 23, 2003: a modified Breaux Bridge sketch is released; tips name Derrick Todd Lee.
• May 27, 2003: Lee is arrested in Atlanta.
• December 2003: Mexico City police release a first sketch in the killings of elderly women.
• 2004: Lee is convicted of the murders of Geralyn Barr DeSoto and Charlotte Murray Pace.
• August 2005: composites of a single suspect go up across Mexico City.
• January 25, 2006: Juana Barraza is arrested in Mexico City; the AP reports her resemblance to the composites and a sculpted rendering.
• July 14, 2006: a woman names Mark Goudeau after seeing the Baseline composite.
• September 6, 2006: Goudeau is arrested in Phoenix.
• January 16, 2008: the Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Lee’s conviction under the inevitable discovery doctrine, citing the sketch tips.
• March 31, 2008: Barraza is convicted of 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies.
• February 25, 2010: Alcala is convicted of five first-degree murders and kidnapping in Orange County.
• July 7, 2010: Lonnie Franklin Jr. is arrested in Los Angeles after a familial DNA search.
• June 2011: Kaczynski’s hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses are sold at a government auction for his victims.
• October 31, 2011: Goudeau is convicted of nine first-degree murders.
• January 21, 2016: Lee dies on Louisiana’s death row.
• February 25, 2016: the 1988 survivor testifies that the sketch "didn’t really look like" Franklin.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted of ten first-degree murders and one attempted murder.
• March 28, 2020: Franklin dies at San Quentin.
• July 24, 2021: Alcala dies in California.
• June 10, 2023: Kaczynski dies at Butner, North Carolina.
• May 2024: Berkowitz is refused parole for the 12th time.
• April 2026: Goudeau’s post-conviction petition is pending.
• September 2026: Barraza is reported still in prison.