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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 11:50:34 GMT -5
CRIMINAL PROFILING: PART 1 HISTORY AND METHOD By Katherine Ramsland Chapter One Early Crime Analysis In 1888, in an area called Whitechapel in London's East End, five prostitutes were murdered in fairly quick succession, as depicted in a proliferation of books, including Rumbelow's Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook. Innovative measures were called for, and the case unintentionally launched the area of criminal profiling, based in victim and crime scene analysis. The first woman killed was 45-year-old Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols. On August 31, she went out into the street. A friend saw her at 2:30 a.m., and an hour later, she was found dead. Her skirt was pulled up to her waist, her legs were parted, and the severe cuts into her abdomen and throat appeared to have been made by a long-bladed knife. The next woman, too, was worked over with such a knife. Annie Chapman was discovered on September 8. Her stomach was ripped open and her intestines pulled out. Her throat was cut, too, and her bladder and uterus had been removed and taken away. A note that arrived on September 29 raised hopes for a lead. Signed, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," the author claimed that he was "down on whores" and would continue to kill them. By the end of that month, on September 30, there were two victims on the same night with slashed throats: Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. These kills were bolder. With Eddowes, the intestines had been pulled out and placed over the right shoulder, the uterus and one kidney had been removed, and the face was oddly mutilated. Then came a letter "from Hell" to the head of the Whitechapel vigilante organization, enclosed with half of a kidney that turned out to be afflicted with Bright's disease—a disorder from which Eddowes had suffered. The note's author indicated that he'd fried and eaten the other half. He even offered to send "the bloody knife" in due time, and taunted, "Catch me if you can." It was the last victim, Mary Kelly, 24, who took the brunt of this offender's frenzy. On November 8, she apparently invited a man into her room and after he killed her, he spent about two hours disemboweling her. He also skinned her chest and legs. Her heart had been removed and was missing, and hunks of flesh had been cut from her legs and buttocks. In response, the police requested an analysis from Dr. Thomas Bond, a surgeon. He had assisted in the autopsy of Mary Kelly, so had a pretty good idea of just how demented this killer was. Investigators wanted a specific description of the wounds and procedures, but in notes dated November 10, 1888, Bond offered more. The murders had escalated in brutality and were clearly sexual in nature, with an intense element of rage against either women or prostitutes. Except for the last one, they were clean, quick, and out in the open, often disemboweling the victim in some manner. Bond said that all five had been committed by one person alone who was physically strong, cool, and daring. He thought the man would be quiet and inoffensive in appearance, middle-aged, and neatly attired, probably wearing a cloak to hide the bloody effects of his attacks out in the open. He would be a loner, without a real occupation, eccentric, and mentally unstable. He might even suffer from a condition called Satyriasis, a sexual deviancy. Very likely, those who knew him would be aware that he was not right in his mind. According to Brian Innes in Profile of a Criminal Mind, Bond added that he believed this man possessed no anatomical knowledge—could not be a surgeon or even a butcher, but this is contradicted by Don DeNevi and John Campbell in Into the Minds of Madmen. They quote Bond's notes as indicating that the killer had great surgical expertise and anatomical knowledge. In addition, Bond believed the offer of a reward would garner clues from people who knew the man. He was certain the same man was responsible for the murder of a sixth woman, Alice McKenzie, whose autopsy he had performed as well. But despite the details of this report, Red Jack was never caught. Within a few years, criminal profiling moved out of the surgeon's hands and onto the couch of criminal psychiatrists.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 11:52:44 GMT -5
Chapter Two The Psychiatric Approach Throughout the next half century, some mental health professionals made a study of murderers and in their published works, the motives and backgrounds were often clarified. Psychiatrist Karl Berg questioned German serial killer Peter Kürten in prison in 1930 after he was charged with numerous counts of assault and murder. James Melvin Reinhardt, a psychiatrist and professor, published his interviews with spree killer Charles Starkweather in 1960. These reports were not behavioral profiles but attempts to understand the crimes. Yet the detailed analyses done contributed some structure and ideas to the development of profiling. Holmes and Holmes, in Profiling Violent Crime, discuss a secret profile drawn up for the U. S. Office of Strategic Services on Adolf Hitler in 1942 (although, strictly speaking, this is not a "profile" of an unknown suspect but a behavioral analysis toward the end of predicting behavior). Dr. Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst based in New York, offered a 135-page "long-range" evaluation of what Hitler was probably like - and what he might do if he believed he were going to lose the war. The OSS wanted a psychological basis for making plans, given various options. Langer used speeches, a lengthy biography, Hitler's book Mein Kampf, and interviews with people who had known Hitler, and later he published a book on what he said. The profile noted that Hitler was meticulous, conventional, and prudish about his body. He was robust and viewed himself as a standards-bearer and trendsetter. He had manic phases, yet took little exercise. He was in good health, so it was unlikely he would die from natural causes, but he was deteriorating mentally. He would not try to escape to some neutral country. Hitler always walked diagonally from one corner to another when crossing a room, and he whistled a marching tune. He feared syphilis, germs and moonlight, and loved severed heads. He detested the learned and the privileged, but enjoyed classical music, vaudeville, and Richard Wagner's opera. He also liked the circus acts that endangered people. He showed strong streaks of narcissism and sadism, and he tended to speak in long monologues rather than have conversations. He had difficulty establishing close relationships with anyone. Since he appeared to be delusional, it was possible that his psychological structures would collapse in the face of imminent defeat. The most likely scenario was that he would end his own life, because he'd threatened it before, although he might get one of his henchmen to do it for him. Hitler was more recently profiled through samples of his handwriting - not considered a scientific approach. Innes indicates that Sheila Lowe used Hitler's letters to analyze his pessimistic, rigid personality. However, despite Innes's inclusion of this method in his book on profiling, it's not considered psychologically sound and no professional profiler would use it.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 11:54:37 GMT -5
Chapter Three Famous Early Profile But perhaps the most famous profile by a psychiatrist to that point was the one developed by Freudian psychiatrist Dr. James Brussel during the 1950s. Almost every book on the subject of profiling documents this case, in part because it was surprising but also in part because it grounded a historic turning point for the FBI's future program. More than three dozen explosions had occurred during the 1940s and 1950s in places like Radio City Music Hall and Grand Central Station, and the perpetrator had sent a number of angry letters to the area newspapers, politicians, and utility companies. Believing there was a "method to his madness," Brussel studied the crime-related material for the police and provided details about the man's ethnicity, motivation, approximate age, personal presentation, living situation, level of paranoia, religious affiliation, employment status, and even his typical manner of dress - a double-breasted suit. The man was a skilled mechanic, Brussel said, and contemptuous of others. He once had worked for Con Edison, the utility company to where letters had been sent, and his resentment had built over time, with no relief. He would probably live with a maiden sister or aunt in Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Maine. When the police finally tracked down George Metesky in 1957 to Waterbury, Conn. (thanks to an open letter Brussel had published in the newspaper that drew a veiled response), he was in his robe. He did live with two unmarried sisters, and was of the correct age, ethnicity and religion. The police told him to get dressed and he returned buttoning up in a double-breasted suit, just as Brussel had predicted. Many of the other profile details checked out as well. Brussel also went on to profile the man who was committing a series of sex murders in the Boston area from 1962-64, but others had done so as well and it became clear from the many diverse professional opinions that the area of criminal profiling was not an exact science—not even close. Learned men openly contradicted one another in their assessments of the Boston Strangler, and the police were back at square one. Brussel wrote about his approach in a book, which caught the eye of Howard Teten, an FBI agent who was teaching a course in criminology at the National Academy (NA). That crossroad proved momentous for the future of profiling.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 11:56:58 GMT -5
Chapter Four The FBI Prepares As murder rates rose in the 1950s and 1960s, along with an increasingly larger percentage of them being stranger murders, the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, received expanded jurisdiction. The area of serial crime (called pattern or repetitive crime) needed immediate attention. Notorious killers such as Ed Gein, Albert DeSalvo, Charles Schmid, John Norman Collins, and Harvey Glatman had been caught by 1970 and all were either convicted of, or suspected in, numerous murders. DeNevi and Campbell quote figures that indicate that there had been five known serial killers during the period from 1795 to 1850 , the next 50 years brought 20, another half century increased that to 33, and finally between 1951 and 1993 there were nearly 400 [probably a high estimate]. Something had to be done, so a new unit was formed to take on this task.
The first book to address the now-famous Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI was H. Paul Jeffers' Who Stole Precious? (The reference is not to the dog so named in The Silence of the Lambs but to a murdered prostitute.) At the time, around 1989, according to Jeffers, John Douglas was the unit chief and the outfit had shifted dramatically from a curious group relegated to cramped offices and limited resources to the nine-member arm of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
Jeffers offers a detailed overview of how the BSU came to be part of the FBI. He quotes an article written by two early profilers, Robert R. Hazelwood and Richard Ault, to the effect that law enforcement to that point had distrusted psychology, yet "investigators can and should make use of advances in the behavioral sciences." Unlike detectives who looked for physical clues at a crime scene, Douglas and his crew viewed a crime scene's appearance as symptomatic of the offender's unique aberration. That was certainly not how the FBI traditionally had worked.
Briefly, the Bureau was founded in 1908 but was ill-managed until 1924 when J. Edgar Hoover was appointed its director. He remained in the position until his death in 1972. As part of his plan, he set up the FBI Training Academy in Washington, D.C., in 1935. Eventually it spread onto the Marine base at Quantico, Va. As the FBI's jurisdiction increased in variety and scope, there was more demand from around the country for their resources and the agency developed itself into an elite law enforcement organization. Greater coordination occurred during the 1950s with the Ten Most Wanted program, and in 1967, they set up the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), with access for state and local agencies. But this was not a database for unsolved crimes. That was yet to come.
At the Academy, instructors experienced in investigation offered courses, and a handful of agents wanted to introduce ideas from psychology and sociology. That was the initial seed for the Behavioral Science Unit, and once planted, there was no extracting it.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 11:59:35 GMT -5
Chapter Five The BSU Former profiler Robert Ressler calls the BSU Hoover's last positive legacy, although others have noted that only with his death was the way cleared for real emphasis on psychology. When it opened in 1972, the Behavioral Science Unit was initially formed with eleven agents, and Jack Kirsch was their first official chief. DeNevi and Campbell describe the tentative early steps. (Their history is sometimes inaccurate when they discuss cases, but it's the first to offer a comprehensive account of the personalities of those innovators who made the BSU what it is today.) While the BSU offered advice to local law enforcement on different types of crimes, serial murder would become their forte. Kirsch, a former police training coordinator, served for eight months, followed by John Pfaff. Howard Teten, also a member, had already toyed with the idea of criminal profiling, and had included some of the ideas in his NA course, Applied Criminology. Upon meeting with Dr. Brussel and also having some success of his own, he made profiling a more central component of his training. Although Teten disagreed with Brussel's Freudian interpretations, he accepted other tenets of the analysis. With the energetic Special Agent Patrick Mullany, who had an advanced degree in psychology, Teten designed a method for analyzing unknown offenders in unsolved cases. He would look at the behavioral manifestations at a crime scene for evidence of aberrant mental disorders and other personality traits and then use that information to make deductions. Eventually, his ideas on specific crimes were much in demand. The initial BSU staff handpicked agents that seemed to have a knack for behavioral analysis, and as the demand on their time and the daily exposure to brutal crimes became more intense, they developed a strong camaraderie. With the pressure for greater analytic sophistication, many of them began to specialize. Hazelwood, for example, went into sadistic sexual crimes and autoerotic fatalities, while Dick Lanning focused on child abuse and investigated alleged satanic ritual abuse. As the various members went out to local jurisdictions to teach, they helped to solve many puzzling cases. Among these was one from Montana in 1973-74. As time went on, the analysis appeared to the local cops to be a failure but actually ended up as a spectacular, albeit tragic, success. DeNevi and Campbell provide the details. The kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl yielded no physical evidence but a viable suspect, David Meirhofer. Yet he was well-groomed, courteous, and educated, and he passed a polygraph. Although they eventually got him for killing a young woman in the area, he would not confess to knowing anything about the little girl. The local police who had consulted the profilers were ready to pass on him, but the BSU team who had looked at the crime remained convinced that Meirhofer was the guy. After killing the child, whom he'd kept imprisoned for a period of time, he did confess and also added the murder of two boys. Then he committed suicide. The profilers were sadly vindicated. Requests for consultations started to come in from police departments around the country, so more agents were trained, and that became the Crime Analysis and Criminal Personality Profiling Program. By 1977, the unit had a substantial identity, comprised of a three-pronged purpose: crime scene analysis, profiling, and analysis of threatening letters. The profilers did not go to every case of serial murder (and still do not) but only those into which they were invited or that clearly involved federal crimes. Even so, thanks to the NA training programs, they had made good contacts with graduates who acknowledged their skills and were eager to get an experienced perspective. Many jurisdictions rarely even had a homicide, let alone a series of them, so to have professionals who had seen many such crimes and crime scenes available was often considered a boon. Robert K. Ressler, among the early agents to enter the new program and author of the second book to be published on the unit, describes his early experience in Whoever Fights Monsters. John Douglas, who joined in 1979 and eventually became unit chief, followed that with the bestselling Mindhunter, and several others have since added their own contributions to the pool of materials. But who are those guys?
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:01:37 GMT -5
Chapter Six The Mind Hunters The early profilers, those who entered the BSU during what many refer to as its "golden age," were bold, innovative, and instinctive. They knew they were pioneering a program that would have to be nurtured along and carefully introduced to those law enforcement agencies that resisted change—especially a change that involved an area they did not know or trust. Somehow, the right personalities came together synchronously to produce what many today regard as an important contribution to understanding the most brutal and extreme human behavior. Unlike technicians who could clearly compare fibers or fingerprints, the profilers were evaluating the indirect results of elusive and sometimes clever minds. When asked what traits a profiler should possess, former BSUer Roy Hazelwood has a quick response: "Common sense. Another term for that is practical intelligence. An open mind - you have to be able to accept other people's suggestions. Number three is life experience. Number four is an ability to isolate your personal feelings about the crime, the criminal and the victim. Number five would be an ability to think like the offender thinks - not get into his mind. All you have to do is reason like he does. You don't have to get into his mind." At this stage, criminal or behavioral profiling is considered more an art than a science, based in a combination of analyzed data and extensive law enforcement experience. The method certainly has its critics, but it also can claim some success. Because profiling is based on patterns derived from knowledge about past cases, assuming that human behavior tends to show commonalities, it can seem to be uncannily accurate. But it can also go wrong and sometimes this type of analysis is no help at all. It is just one tool among many in police work. It's a guide, but profilers are quick to point out that the totality of details are not intended, and should not be taken, as gospel. To devise a multi-dimensional profile, psychological investigators examine such aspects of the crime and crime scene (usually murder but other types of crime as well) as the weapon used, the type of killing site (and dump site, if different), details about the victim, method of transportation, time of day the crime was committed, and the relative position of items at the scene. "I use a formula," says former profiler John Douglas, "How plus Why equals Who. If we can answer the hows and whys in a crime, we generally can come up with the solution."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:05:52 GMT -5
Chapter Seven Art & Science The basic idea is to acquire a body of information that shows common patterns for a general description of an UNSUB (unknown subject) in terms of habit, possible employment, martial status, mental state, and personality traits. Contrary to popular belief, it's not necessary that the offender be a serial criminal. Profiling can be done from a single crime scene (as Robert R. Hazelwood demonstrates in The Evil That Men Do), and since 70 to 75 percent of murders are situational, developing a way to profile without reference to repeated patterns is useful. Profiles have also been devised in product tampering, serial bombing, serial rape, kidnapping, and arson. Probing for an experiential assessment of a criminal from a crime scene (or series of crime scenes) involves, first and foremost, a detailed victimology. In other words, the profiler must learn significant facts about the victim's life, especially in the days and hours leading up to his or her death. A timeline is drawn up to map their movements, and investigators study all of their personal communications for signals to where they may have crossed paths with a viable suspect. It's important to know their state of mind and their mental health assessment and history, as well as their risk level (with a prostitute's risk being much higher, obviously, than a girl in her own home). Once the victim's details are known, the crime scene and offender's methodology are evaluated for how best to categorize him (or her). Based on the idea that people tend to be slaves to their psychology and will inevitably leave clues, profilers can assess whether the person is an organized predator who planned and arranged a crime or instead committed an impulsive crime of opportunity, with little appreciation for what he may have done. "John Douglas and I wrote an article in 1980, 'The Lust Murderer,'" recalls Hazelwood, "in which we first set forth the distinction between organized and disorganized homicides. I had noticed that in a number of cases, there were some that seemed to be well thought out and others that were highly spontaneous. I went to John and told him my ideas. So we sat down and came up with the characteristics of each type. But then the members of the Behavioral Science Unit told us it would never fly because it was too simple. But what happened? You go anywhere in the world in law enforcement, and among criminologists and mental health workers, and you'll hear that there are two broad categories of killers: organized and disorganized. So it did stick." Profilers may also observe if the offender used a vehicle, is criminally sophisticated, or appears to be enslaved to a sexual fantasy. They look whether a weapon was brought in or taken out, the state of the crime scene(s), the type of wounds inflicted, the risks an offender took, his or her method of committing the crime and controlling the victim, and evidence that the incident may be staged to look like something else. In addition, there may be indications that the offender did not act alone.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:08:25 GMT -5
Chapter Eight Where Profiling Works Best Profiles work best when the offender displays obvious psychopathology, such as sadistic torture, postmortem mutilation, or pedophilia. Some killers leave a "signature"—a behavioral manifestation of an individualizing personality quirk, such as positioning the corpse for humiliating exposure, postmortem biting, or tying ligatures with a complicated knot. This helps to link crime scenes and may point toward other types of behaviors to look for. What a profile can offer that's helpful are the offender's general age range, racial identity, ideas about the modus operandi, estimates about living situation and education level, travel patterns, the possibility of a criminal or psychiatric record, and probable psychological traits. A profile may also describe a fantasy scenario that drives the person or even pinpoint an area where he or she probably resides. This is all based on deductions about the specific crime from what is already known about offenders and deviancy. The best profilers have gained their knowledge from experience with criminals and have developed an intuitive sense about certain types of crime. Their knowledge base is developed from both physical and nonphysical evidence. Generally, profilers employ psychological theories that provide ways to detect mental deficiency such as delusions, spot imprints from hostility, recognize criminal thought patterns, and predict the right character defects. They also need to know about actuarial data such as the age range into which offenders generally fall and how important an unstable family history is to criminality. Much of that information came from actual cases, such as the following.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:11:25 GMT -5
Chapter Nine An Early Case: The Vampire of Sacramento Richard Trenton Chase, the "Vampire of Sacramento," was quickly identified and apprehended with the help of a psychological profile in 1978. He had murdered a woman in her home, eviscerating her and drinking her blood. It was so brutal that the FBI was called in, and it gave the profilers a chance to show what they were worth. Agents Robert Ressler and Russ Vorpagel developed independent profiles, and both wrote about this case in their respective books. Ressler says it was the first time he was able to go on-site with a profile, and he was ready. He offers a step-by-step method analysis for how he derived the traits he lists. For example, from a psychiatric study of body type and mental temperament he'd read, he decided the offender was scrawny. Given the disorder at the scene, it was likely that the UNSUB did not have a career or much education - nothing that required organized thinking and concentration. The profile was all a matter of logic and knowledge about principles of human behavior, which Ressler was able to fully explain to anyone who asked. Vorpagel's profile was similar. Ressler figured the UNSUB for a disorganized killer as opposed to an organized one, with clues pointing toward the possibility of paranoid psychosis. He clearly had not planned the crime and did little to hide or destroy evidence. He left footprints and fingerprints, and had probably walked around oblivious to the blood on his clothing. In other words, he gave little thought to the consequences. His domicile would be as sloppy as the place he had ransacked, and his mental capacity was likely screwed up. That meant he probably did not drive a car, indicating he lived in the vicinity of the crimes. He was white, 25-27, thin, undernourished, lived alone, and probably had evidence that pointed to the crime in his home. He was likely unemployed and the recipient of disability money. All of this was derived from known information that such crimes tended to be intra-racial, specific to a certain age range, and similar to other people with a paranoia-based mental illness. From what Ressler knew, it was also likely that this offender would kill again, and keep on killing until he was caught. They had to work fast. Three days after the first murder, the killer struck again, this time slaughtering three people in their home, including a man and a child. He grabbed a baby and stole the family car, but then abandoned it in broad daylight. This suggested an oblivious, unhinged mind and offered more information for refining the profile. Ressler and Vorpagel were sure he lived close to both scenes, and after a massive manhunt the police found Chase living less than a block from the abandoned car. His appearance was just as anticipated and he suffered from paranoid delusions. He was also 27 years old. Body parts, empty pet collars, and a bloodstained food blender were found in his apartment. He lived alone, was unemployed, and had a history of psychiatric incarceration. He had been released only months before he began to kill. His arrest stopped a string of murders that apparently, from marks on his calendar, was to include some 44 more victims that same year. Vorpagel faced this man in the interrogation room, and Chase admitted he had committed the murders, but had done nothing wrong. He was saving his own life, because his blood was turning to sand and he needed theirs to prevent it. Talking to someone like Chase helped to confirm what the profilers thought, and it was cases such as this that gave Ressler an idea.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:13:14 GMT -5
Chapter Ten The Prison Interviews While on the road teaching local jurisdictions this method of behavioral analysis, Ressler thought it might be a good idea to visit some of the prisons they were near to gain access to dangerous criminals. They were profiling unknown offenders but could actually talk to known offenders and find out more about their motives and their crimes. If the BSU could devise a protocol of questions to ask, and could get detailed responses, they could start a database of information about traits and behaviors that these men shared in common. "In 1978," Ressler recalled in an interview, "I had come up with the idea of improving our instructional capabilities by conducting in-depth research into violent criminal personalities. I suggested we go into the prisons and interview violent offenders to get a better handle on them and formulate a foundation for criminal profiling. Initially, it was me and my partner who did this while we were on road trips for teaching purposes. If I was in California, I would contact the agent who was our training coordinator and have him set up interviews at local prisons with people like Charles Manson or Sirhan Sirhan." John Douglas and Robert Ressler both write about these visits in their books, and they were generally the team who did the prison interviews. "If you want to understand the artist," Douglas writes in Mindhunter, "look at his work." Initially, they contacted different types of offenders, from mass murderers to assassins (even failed ones) to serial killers. Jeffers goes into extensive detail on this aspect of the program. He makes it clear that the team did not want to ask questions that psychiatrists might have used during prison assessments. They were interested in law enforcement not psychoanalysis. Data were collected on 118 victims, including some who had survived an attempted murder, and finally the team devised a questionnaire routine that covered the most significant aspects of the offenses. The goal was to gather information about how the murders were planned and committed, what the killers did and thought about afterward, what kinds of fantasies they had, and what they did before the next incident (where relevant).
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:15:15 GMT -5
Chapter Eleven William Heirens & Others Among the interviewees was William Heirens, who in 1945 and 1946 had committed three murders in an area that Ressler had been familiar with growing up, and who was famous for writing in lipstick a plaintive request to be caught before he killed again. "My father worked for the Chicago Tribune," Ressler said, "and he would bring home the newspaper. I had heard that there was a killer loose in Chicago who was killing women and leaving writings on the wall. It was a classic case and I started following it." Among the interviewees was William Heirens, who in 1945 and 1946 had committed three murders in an area that Ressler had been familiar with growing up, and who was famous for writing in lipstick a plaintive request to be caught before he killed again. "My father worked for the Chicago Tribune," Ressler said, "and he would bring home the newspaper. I had heard that there was a killer loose in Chicago who was killing women and leaving writings on the wall. It was a classic case and I started following it."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:17:48 GMT -5
Chapter Twelve Refining the Methods As they went along, the profilers kept refining their methods. Sometimes they had to be creative to get the information they sought. They soon learned about the problems with self-report interviews, when some of the men bragged about brutal deeds, or those who were psychopathic played games and even lied. Nevertheless, these were the men who were there when the crime was committed—the only living witness, in most cases--and they were the ones who could tell the tale, so there were advantages to these interviews as well. To get as much information as possible, the profilers usually did extensive research on a subject before talking with him. That way they showed some respect that the killer might enjoy, as well as knowing when his story deviated from the facts. Despite the brutality of many of the crimes, the agents realized that it was important to convey nonjudgmental interest in the subject's world. The initial study, meant to include 100 convicted offenders, compiled data from only 36, but it still proved helpful. Afterward, the interviews continued and other agents got involved. Ressler estimated that he had done more than 100, and he describes this with John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer in I Have Lived in the Monster. Gregg McCrary, who joined the unit in 1985, added to the database with interviews such as the one he describes in The Unknown Darkness with serial bomber and genius forger, Mark Hoffman. When all was said and done, from this sample of subjects, the researchers gained statistical information that was useful for developing profiles in the late 1980s. One third of the offenders were white, nearly half had a parent missing from the home growing up (usually the father), three-fourths reported having had a cold or negligent parent, a majority had a psychiatric history as well as a history of unsteady employment, the mean IQ was bright normal, three-fourths had paraphilias, and the same percentage reported some form of physical or psychological abuse. The sample was too small to draw significant conclusions, but it was a good start. Years later, Roy Hazelwood also developed a study, with Janet Warren of the wives and girlfriends of serial sadists, the results of which he published in the third edition of Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation. Some of them, too, were serial killers, and their stories contributed new knowledge to the database. Even before the initial prison study was completed, something else happened to put profiling on the map.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:22:25 GMT -5
Chapter Thirteen High Profile for the Profiling Unit What the profilers needed was a case that would demonstrate their technique with a clear success that would get the public's attention. The Vampire of Sacramento was interesting, but that threat had been local and quickly contained. With all the calls coming in from around the country, it was likely the profilers would find a good opportunity, and they did: a string of deaths in Atlanta that was making national news. In Mindhunter, Douglas tells how he and Roy Hazelwood were the BSU representatives on this case. From 1979 to 1981, someone was killing Atlanta's youth. More than 25 black males, some as young as nine, had been strangled, bludgeoned or asphyxiated. All potential leads had turned into dead ends. The only real clue was the presence on several of the bodies of fiber threads. A few also bore strands of what was determined to be dog hair. Douglas and Hazelwood, who arrived after a number of the murders had been committed, walked around the neighborhood where the victims had lived and said that this was not a racial crime; they predicted the killer would be black. They also indicated that the next victim would likely be dumped in the Chatahoochee River, since that was the pattern. The police set up a stakeout. On May 22, 1981, this strategy appeared to pay off. In the early morning hours, the stakeout patrol heard a loud splash. Someone had just thrown something large into the river. On the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, they saw a white Chevrolet station wagon, and when they stopped it, they learned that the driver's name was Wayne Williams. He was a 23-year-old black photographer and music promoter. They questioned him, but when he said he'd just dumped some garbage they let him go. Only two days later, the police found the body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater. He'd been asphyxiated approximately 48 hours before. A single yellow-green carpet fiber was found in his hair. The police got a search warrant for Wayne Williams' home and car, and the search turned up some valuable evidence: The floors of Williams' home were covered with yellow-green carpeting, and he also had a dog. Comparisons from the samples removed from the victims showed good consistency with Williams' carpet. Three separate polygraph tests indicated deception on Williams' part. The prosecution relied on only two of the twenty-eight suspected murders---the one from the river, Nathaniel Cater, and another recovered in the same general area a month before, Jimmy Ray Payne. A single rayon fiber had been found on his shorts, which was consistent with the carpeting in Williams' station wagon. They also introduced into evidence the fibers found on the bodies of ten of the other victims, which also matched those in Williams' car or home. In total, there were 28 fiber types linked to Williams. In addition, several witnesses had come forward to place him with some of the victims. John Douglas acted as a consultant in the 1981 trial, predicting Williams' behavior to certain strategies, and he records the moment when Williams became upset and shouted that he wasn't going to fit the FBI's profile. Douglas also knew that Williams would take the stand and try to control the proceedings - and even that he would pretend one day to be sick. "It was a showcase for him," Douglas says. After only 12 hours, the jury returned a guilty verdict against Williams, with two life sentences. "That was good for our program," Jeffers quotes Douglas as saying afterward. "We'd proven that a psychological profile can help convict a killer." But it wasn't enough to develop profiles from one crime to another; the workload was building fast, and the need for a computerized database was pressing.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:25:23 GMT -5
Chapter Fourteen The NCAVC Jeffers, as well as DeNevi and Campbell, document the tale of how a homicide detective in Los Angeles came to spearhead the movement to develop a national database for unsolved crimes around the country. His name was Pierce Brooks and it all began with the murder of a woman in 1958. As he studied the crime, he believed that the offender had killed before. Then he got an unrelated case that struck him the same way. Brooks spent off-hours and weekends in the library looking for similar incidents as a way to link these crimes to a repeat offender. He started in Los Angeles and then began to go through articles from other major cities. The task seemed hopeless, but then he found a murder that was similar to one of his. He made a fingerprint match between the two cases and found a good suspect. But the process had been painstaking. Roy Hazelwood takes the story from there: "Then he went to his police chief in Los Angeles and said, 'Look, I think we need to buy a computer, enter these kinds of cases, and see if we can't match these cases together.' The chief scoffed at the idea, because a computer at that time would cost $1 million and take up a city block." Brooks also managed to link a string of three deaths associated with an early serial killer, Harvey Glatman, who asked women to pose for photographs before he killed them. He was known as the Lonely Hearts Killer. With cases like this, Brooks knew that investigators around the country needed a centralized database and he never stopped pushing for it. At a Senate subcommittee meeting for the U.S. Congress years later, he and others presented a case for funds for a computerized system. John Walsh was among them, testifying about his murdered son, Adam. True crime writer Ann Rule also testified, and she pointed to a large group of serial killers who had been mobile enough to go from state to state: Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi of the "Hillside Stranglers," Gary Addison Taylor, and Harvey Louis Carnigan. She said that in Bundy's case, according to Jeffers, a system like VICAP might have saved as many as 15 lives. Brooks said that his own method of looking up linked crimes had remained the same for 25 years, which was shameful in light of computerized technology. "Then in the early '80s," says Hazelwood, "Brooks got the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and that's when VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, was born. Glatman's case started that whole process. It was decided that the FBI would run it out of Quantico and in 1985, we hired Brooks to become the first director of VICAP, because it was his idea." Thus, in 1985 the BSU came under the auspices of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). It's now known as Behavioral Science Services, with an Investigative Support Unit offering the Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (CIA), in which profiling plays only a part. CIA is a multi-faceted approach to many types of crime, dividing an investigation into four clear stages. Determine that a crime has been committed Try to accurately identify the crime Try to identify and apprehend the offender (profiling) Present evidence in court Using standard VICAP forms, which have been revised and simplified over the years, investigators collect data from police departments around the country on solved, unsolved, and attempted homicides; unidentified bodies in which the manner of death is suspected to be homicide; and missing-persons cases in which foul play appears to have played a part. In other words, thanks to the program, a homicide in Los Angeles may be linked to one in New York done by the same person; a murdered John Doe in Missouri can be identified as a runaway from Boston. Everyone involved expected great things from this development, but their influence sometimes reached even farther than they had expected.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:27:12 GMT -5
Chapter Fifteen International Influence Profiling may be useful even after an offender is caught, as illustrated with the infamous Andrei Chikatilo, Russia's most demented and prolific serial killer. From 1978 to 1990, he raped, brutalized, and murdered at least 53 women and children. Richard Lourie describes it in Hunting the Devil, and Robert Cullen offers The Killer Department, a book on which the HBO movie, Citizen X, was based. Trying to narrow possibilities for suspects, chief investigator Viktor Burakov, influenced by what he knew about the FBI's program, asked several psychiatrists to draw up a profile. Most refused, but Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky agreed to study the few known details, as well as the crime scene patterns, to come up with an extensive profile. The killer, he said, was a sexual deviate, 25 to 50 years old, around 5'10" tall. He thought the man suffered from some form of sexual inadequacy and he blinded his victims to prevent them from looking at him. He also brutalized their corpses, partially out of frustration and partially to enhance his arousal. He had difficulty getting relief. Once Chikatilo was caught, the state officials were unable to obtain the confession they desperately needed to prosecute him. Finally, when the probability loomed large that the man would be released, they brought in Dr. Bukhanovksy. The psychiatrist saw right away, writes Cullen, that this was the type of man that he had described in his 1987 profile. So many of the indicators were there - ordinary, solitary, non-threatening. Painstakingly, he read the profile to Chikatilo, admitting that he might have gotten some of it wrong. His description went into the nature of Chikatilo's mental illness and some possible reasons for it. As Chikatilo listened, he heard his secret life described so clearly that he began to tremble. Finally he broke down and said that it was all true. He had done those horrible things and he began to confess to 56 murders, although there was corroboration for only 53: 31 females and 22 males. The FBI got wind of this case and notified authorities there that they admired the work that Burakov been done to bring this killer in. (The delivery of this news to the lead investigator was the most moving moment in the film.) Despite national boundaries, the method of psychological analysis appeared to have international ramifications. Just as this case drew media interest, so did others, and eventually a fiction writer was granted access to the BSU.
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