What the FBI’s First Unabomber Sketch Got Wrong

On October 6, 1993, the director of the FBI held a nationally televised press conference to announce a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of a “most wanted” terrorist known to the FBI as “UNABOM.”  

For 15 years, UNABOM, who would eventually kill three people and wound nearly two dozen others with homemade explosive devices, had eluded authorities. At the press conference, FBI Director Louis Freeh introduced a new 1-800 tip line, announced the creation of a special UNABOM task force and released a police sketch of the suspect.  

The color image, based on a description given by the only person to see the terrorist face to face, was originally drawn in 1987. It showed a white male in his 30s with a thin blond mustache, his narrow face obscured by dark sunglasses and a hood.  

The FBI hoped that the high-profile press conference and million-dollar reward would lead to a breakthrough in the UNABOM case, which had dogged investigators since 1978. Instead, the announcement was eclipsed by an even bigger story that day: Michael Jordan’s (first) retirement from basketball.  

The members of the UNABOM Task Force knew that they still needed the public’s help to catch the killer, so they decided to refresh the investigation with a new police sketch.  

In 1994, the FBI released a new drawing of the man now known as the Unabomber. Drawn in dark pencil, the black-and-white sketch showed a mustachioed man with a square jaw, large aviator sunglasses and a gray hood pulled down tightly over his curly hair. Almost overnight, the moody portrait—lifelike and captivating—became one of most recognizable images in America.

When the Unabomber was finally caught in 1996, it had little to do with the widespread circulation of his 1994 police sketch. Yet after his arrest, the indelible image of the Unabomber appeared on T-shirts, coffee mugs and keychains.

On February 20, 1987, Tammy Fluehe was working at a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah. Outside the window, she saw a man bending down to place a strange object under her car. “Hey!” Fluehe shouted, and the man briefly turned to look at her.  

“Tammy Fluehe saw the Unabomber up close and personal,” says Donald Max Noel, who was a special agent on the UNABOMB Task Force. “She was within 4 feet of him, watched him closely as he placed the bomb inside the left front tire of her automobile. He made eye contact with her—or at least she thought he made eye contact with her—but he was wearing sunglasses.” 

The mysterious man fled before Fluehe could confront him. Later, Gary Wright, the computer store’s owner, tried to move the odd-looking object under Fluehe’s car when it detonated. The blast threw him more than 20 feet across the parking lot and left him with serious shrapnel wounds and nerve damage, but he survived.

A fragment of the Salt Lake City bomb was etched with the letters “FC,” the Unabomber’s calling card (it stood for “Freedom Club”). The FBI knew him well. The Unabomber planted his first improvised bomb at a Chicago university in 1978, then planted one on an American Airlines flight in 1979. Because his early targets included universities and an airline, the FBI gave him the code name UNABOM.

In the nearly 10 years since the first Unabomber attack, Tammy Fluehe became the first person to see his face in 1987. The FBI called in a police sketch artist, also known as a composite artist, to sit with Fluehe and draw the first public image of the Unabomber.

The original artist, Robert Exter, used a standard method at the time for creating a composite sketch. He showed Fluehe photos of different noses, eyes, head shapes and hairstyles, and had her pick the ones that best matched her memory. He even took Fluehe to the mall to see if she could spot people who looked like the suspect. Exter ended up making several different sketches, because Fluehe was never fully satisfied with the results.  

“When I asked Tammy why all of these sketches were done on different dates, she said, ‘Because he wasn't capturing what I was telling him,’” says Noel, co-author of Unabomber: How The FBI Broke Its Own Rules to Capture the Terrorist Ted Kaczynski. “The two main issues were the shape of the face and the color of the skin. The person that she saw had a very strong, prominent jawbone, not a tear-shaped face.” 

Despite Fluehe's concerns, Exter’s 1987 watercolor drawing was released to the public as the face of the Unabomber. Whether or not the sketch was accurate, it seemed to get the Unabomber’s attention. From then on, he stopped placing bombs in person and went back to mailing his explosive devices, perhaps out of fear that he would be recognized.  

Exter’s sketch was also displayed at the 1993 press conference announcing the $1 million reward. That was around the time that Noel was assigned to the UNABOM Task Force. He says he had reservations about the accuracy of traditional composite sketches.

“To me, they always look like Mr. Potato Head drawings, not like real people,” says Noel, who agreed with fellow task force members that if they were going to catch this killer, they needed a new sketch.  

Jim Freeman was the FBI special agent in charge of the UNABOM Task Force. Freeman came from San Francisco, where the FBI had recently found the killer of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, who was abducted from her home during a sleepover with friends in 1993. For the Klaas investigation, Freeman worked with a composite artist named Jeanne Boylan, who interviewed Polly’s friends to produce a striking likeness of her kidnapper and killer, Richard Allen Davis.  

“When you take Jeanne Boylan's composite of the murderer of Polly Klaas and compare it to the arrest photo of Richard Allen Davis, they're almost identical,” says Noel, who contacted Boylan in 1994 to see if she could do the same thing for the Unabomber case.  

When Noel brought Boylan to Tammy Fluehe’s house in Salt Lake City, it had been seven years since the witness caught a 15-second glimpse of the Unabomber. Luckily, Fluehe had taken meticulous notes in 1987 and Boylan proved to be an “exceptional interviewer,” says Noel.  

Boylan didn’t use the standard sketch artist technique of showing witnesses catalogs of noses and eyes to build a composite face. Instead, she attempted to access the person’s visual memories directly through long and meandering conversations.  

“Human memories are very malleable, especially at the height of emotion,” Boylan said in a 2001 interview. “Ask, ‘Did he have a mustache?’ Well, he does now, because you’re implanting that image.” 

Boylan spoke with Fluehe for four hours while Noel sat with Fluehe’s 2-year-old daughter watching The Lion King. The result was Boylan’s now iconic pencil sketch. Fluehe was pleased with how Boylan captured the Unabomber’s square jawline, complexion and menacing appearance. 

The FBI distributed Boylan’s new sketch nationwide. The drawing was prominently featured in television news coverage of the hunt for the Unabomber and even landed on the cover of Newsweek. By the mid-1990s, Boylan’s sketch of the Unabomber seemed to be everywhere.

On April 3, 1996, federal agents stormed a remote log cabin near Lincoln, Montana. After 17 years of searching, they finally found their man. Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive Harvard graduate, former mathematics professor and onetime child prodigy, later pleaded guilty to federal charges and received multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. He died by suicide in 2023 while being treated for cancer.

But was Boylan’s famous police sketch instrumental in capturing Kaczynski? John Douglas doesn’t think so. Douglas was an FBI special agent who helped develop the first behavioral profile of the Unabomber in the 1980s.  

“The sketches did not really assist in identifying the Unabomber,” wrote Douglas in an email. “Rarely do composite sketches ever lead to the identification of the perpetrator of a crime.” 

Noel disagrees. He says accurate police sketches like Boylan’s are an “investigative tool just like all other investigative tools.” In the Unabomber case, the sketches didn’t lead to anyone calling the tip line and saying, “That’s Ted Kaczynski.” But Noel argues that the sketch, coupled with other evidence, helped strengthen the case against Kaczynski.

Noel thinks that Boylan’s 1994 sketch looks strikingly like a younger Kaczynski, but Robert Exter, the original Unabomber sketch artist, has another theory. Exter thinks that Boylan’s composite looks suspiciously like him. He believes that when Fluehe was interviewed by Boylan in 1994, the face she recalled from 1987 was Exter’s, not Kaczynski’s.

The big break in the Unabomber case came after Kaczynski sent a 35,000-word manifesto to The New York Times and The Washington Post threatening that he would kill again if they refused to publish his anti-technology screed. At the recommendation of FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, the newspapers made the controversial decision to jointly publish the Unabomber manifesto, hoping that someone would recognize the writing and its mystery author.

That’s essentially what happened. Linda Patrik—wife of David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother—was in Paris in the summer of 1995 when news reports about the Unabomber heightened her suspicions that Ted might be responsible. When David joined her in France, she urged him to take those suspicions seriously. After the manifesto was published that September, Patrik persuaded David to read it and compare it with his brother’s writings.

"[Linda Patrik] had been following everything we'd been putting out in the press and in the media about the UNABOM case,” says Noel. “She was very interested and kept telling her husband, ‘That sounds a lot like your brother.’ Linda is the real hero.”