Drawing on Artist’s Skill to Find Killer : Crime: A mother hopes a new composite sketch of the suspect in her son’s death in Huntington Beach will lead to an arrest.

Alice Sommer may need a miracle to find the man who killed her son and his best friend on a downtown Huntington Beach street corner last March. But she’s got determination--and the help of a nationally renowned criminal sketch artist.

Frustrated by a stalled police investigation, Sommer and artist Jeanne Boylan spent last weekend scouring the city for anyone who might have witnessed the March 31 killing of her son, Kenny Paul Sommer, 23, and his friend, Chen Cosmo Maui Blanchard, also 23. With descriptions from two witnesses police had interviewed, Boylan sketched a composite drawing of a suspect that Sommer hopes will unlock the five-month mystery--the city’s only unsolved murder case this year.

“I felt at a dead end,” Sommer said at a news conference Tuesday to release the new composite drawing. “I need to do this as a mother.”

Sommer, who lives in Riverside, may have reason for hope. Boylan, who has drawn more than 7,000 sketches in 16 years, has developed a reputation as an unorthodox sketch artist whose drawings have yielded arrests in a number of dead-end cases.

Boylan’s sketches have been used in high-profile cases, including the kidnaping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, the slaying of Manhattan Beach police officer Martin Ganz, the Green River serial killer case in Washington state and other murders in the United States and Canada.

Sommer called her after McCall’s magazine featured Boylan in its September issue, and they appeared together last week on the New York-based “Rolonda” talk show to discuss unsolved murders. Now, with the talk show paying Boylan’s undisclosed fee, the two women have become partners in search of the killer whose deed feeds Sommer’s daily anguish.

“My pain that I suffer every morning is the same thing--why?” Sommer said. “I just want to know: Why did he take my son?”

A gunman shot the pair to death after they left a pizza parlor at Main Street and Orange Avenue. The man left the scene in a late-model Saab 900 Turbo driven by another man, police said.

Sommer said she planned to distribute flyers with the new drawing and to set up a confidential message service for anyone with tips. She appealed in vain to the Huntington Beach City Council on Monday night to establish a reward for finding the killer.

“Mainly what I hope it does is make the killer aware,” she said. “He has brought such pain to my life and family. The pain is like a vice on my heart. He’s done this to me and he’s walking the streets.”

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Huntington Beach police said their investigation is still open but has stalled as tips dried up.

The case has already generated more than its share of sketches.

Police initially issued a drawing of a longhaired white man with a goatee and glasses. But based on new witness information, they released a sketch a few days later describing an olive-skinned man, relatively tall, 25 to 35 years old, wearing a dark-colored jacket, baseball cap and loose-fitting pants. They said then that the first man was considered a witness, not the gunman.

Police spokesman Michael H. Corcoran said at Tuesday’s news conference that investigators will stick with their own sketch to avoid confusion. Boylan’s drawing is roughly similar to the police description. Boylan said her drawing, a side view, was based on a description of a square-jawed man in his late 20s or early 30s, with light-shaded dark skin, 5 feet 3 to 5 feet 7, and with a short ponytail.

Boylan dismisses standard police sketches as unreliable because they typically require witnesses to choose facial and other features from a catalogue of photographs. Instead, she asks witnesses open-ended questions as a psychotherapist might to loosen memories buried by trauma, and in the process create a description that is more subtle. Boylan said it takes her four to eight hours to complete a sketch.

“My system of interviews gets much, much more in depth in the emotional dynamics,” Boylan said. “I’m reaching into that memory and I’m using that as a base. . . . You can’t catalogue a human face.”

Sommer and Boylan approached dozens of people in downtown Huntington Beach last weekend in hopes of finding people who were there during spring break. They tracked down two witnesses who had provided descriptions for the police sketch and they agreed to sit with Boylan for another attempt.

Sommer said she has made half a dozen outings in search of witnesses since August, despite her family’s attempts to dissuade her from playing detective.

“I didn’t think it would be good for her. I would be scared to go down there,” said Sommer’s 22-year-old daughter, Alison Sommer. She watched as her mother answered another battery of questions from a reporter. “It’s the first time I’ve actually seen her happy,” Alison Sommer said. “She feels like she’s doing something.”

Alice Sommer did not say when she will give up, but hinted that releasing the flyers with Boylan’s sketch and the message service--at (714) 841-8115--might ease her pain.

“I think I can rest knowing I gave it my all,” she said.

Times correspondent Debra Cano contributed to this report.