|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:30:35 GMT -5
Chapter Sixteen Spilling into Fiction Author Thomas Harris received permission to go to meetings and learn everything he could about the men who did the profiling. From them, he devised the novels, Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988). The latter was made into a movie in 1991, winning five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and bringing even more fame to the unit. This was considered a great benefit --- for a while. DeNevi and Campbell say that unit chief Roger Depue was the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs. Other sources indicate that Ressler (including himself) was the model, while still others say that it was John Douglas, who says that Harris spent a lot of time with him, as did the movie crew. He describes in Mindhunter how he showed Scott Glenn, the actor playing Crawford, some crime scene photos as a way for him to understand what the life of an FBI profiler was really like. There was also some indication from the fact that Crawford's original name was going to be Campbell that the model was John Campbell, who was also involved in reading the script. Yet neither Harris nor the movie producers got it right. In the story, a young agent-in-training, Clarice Starling, is sent to the prison cell of brutal serial killer and cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to get information about the mind of "Buffalo Bill," a murderer who is holding a woman hostage. This killer was based on a combination of Ted Bundy, Gary Heidnik, and Ed Gein. Lecter stands on his own as a mad psychiatrist whose kills are "refined." While the BSU crew looked over the script and suggested important changes, according to DeNevi and Campbell, apparently the only concession they got was a name change. The unfortunate impression was given in this story that young agents can become profilers without any field experience and that female agents might be left alone with dangerous killers—even go out on their own to try to apprehend them. The novel and movie were such a success that a sequel was written. Hannibal became a bestseller and another hit movie—and was even more ludicrous in terms of FBI protocol and the psychology of serial killers. The divide between what the public now believed about the BSU and what the BSU agents actually did was widening. In the midst of all of this, several of the first generation profilers had retired from the FBI and were now writing books about their experiences. Readers could not get enough. The profilers were touted as super-sleuths, each one a contemporary Sherlock Holmes. This idea spawned a television series, Profiler, in which a female FBI agent has extra-sensory powers of vision. Thanks in large part to the media, profiling itself went from being viewed as not just one among many crime investigation tools, but as the ultimate tool. Having a profile seemed like a guarantee that a serial killer would inevitably be caught, and those professionals who could do this were deemed to have uncanny, larger-than-life abilities. Fictional serial killers were redesigned to become their worthy adversaries. But then things began to go wrong. It started with the media's misunderstanding of what a profile was, and with journalists seeking people who would provide a priori profiles of types of killers, or offer profiles on an instant's notice, with little to no evidence. The most common error was the view that profiling is a sort of blueprint or set list of traits for certain criminal categories against which one can measure people to see if they might be viable suspects. This is known as prospective profiling, akin to racial profiling, which is not what the BSUers were doing. For example, the media might ask, "What is the profile of an angel of death and does nurse so-and-so fit it?" But that's the wrong question. More accurately, law enforcement interested in a profile would ask, "From what you see at this crime scene, what traits or behaviors in a person might we be looking for?" Responsible investigators resisted the media's demand, but there were always people willing to slap on the label "profiler" and step in to offer whatever was needed. The ideas and phrases were available, thanks to fiction and film. Some people even offered quickie seminars that fraudulently certified eager young novices as profilers. As with all things that go up, coming down was not far away. Since profiling is not a miracle technique and since its success relies on both the information available and the skill and experience of the person interpreting it, there were bound to be mistakes. "You have to be careful that the information you're using is accurate and complete," says Gregg McCrary. "If there's information out there that hasn't been collected, that can affect the profile's accuracy." He wrote a piece for the Congressional Quarterly in 2003 to make this point, saying that "if either the profiler or data are compromised, so is the potential for a successful outcome." Where once those mistakes might have been absorbed and forgotten during the course of an investigation, the media glitz was too intense for that to occur. Between charlatans, over-eager professionals seeking the limelight, and simple human error, the love affair the media had with profiling had finally reached the honeymoon's end. Now they were looking for the pock marks, and they didn't have far to look. Psychologists who disliked how profiling had been touted by people with no psychological training supplied reasons why it was a poor method, and cases with high visibility showcased the errors.
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:32:29 GMT -5
Chapter Seventeen Problems In 2002, over a three-week period, people living along the I-95 corridor from Maryland to Virginia were getting shot and killed as they performed mundane tasks such as getting gas. The nation went into a frenzy over this serial sniper and the profilers were called for their professional opinions. With no behavior to assess except for accurate marksmanship, commentators shot from the hip and offered all sorts of ideas about the "white loner with military background driving a white box truck or van." One media darling with no profiling background even said that the box truck was now ditched in a lake somewhere. It soon became clear that the offender was listening to what the commentators and police were predicting, because whatever was concluded about "him" was soon undermined. "He doesn't shoot children" - then he did. "He doesn't shoot on weekends" - then he did. So that was a bit of additional behavior, as were the quick getaways that suggested two people working together. McCrary pointed out that when there are few clues in a case, people can develop "tunnel vision," such as believing that the sniper drove a white van, which was based only on a witness report. No one really knew if a white van was involved, yet the media and the investigators clung to it. They also clung to the notion from a profile offered on television that the shooter was white (because most lone snipers up to this point have been white). But it turned out that they were wrong about the van, the offender's race, and the idea that they could publicly spout whatever they wanted without inflaming this UNSUB to keep killing. The "shooter" turned out to be a team of black men and one of them later admitted that he shot certain people after watching the police chief on news programs try to anticipate what he would or would not do next. Because it was such an unusual spate of crimes, data from past cases that bore no relationship to it fueled erroneous conclusions. Yet all behavioral scientists know that human behavior is full of anomalies. While it was reasonable to say this shooter was white, that did not eliminate the possibility that he was of another race - or gender. When Chief Moose later came out with a book on his experience, he indicated that the actual FBI profile did not make the claims that the commentators had made who had presented themselves as profilers. But the media had run with whatever they had said, conveying the impression that all profilers were of a common opinion, and all were therefore wrong. Worse was the hasty application of geographical profiling, which had entered the profiling arena as another investigative tool, and which was probably inappropriate to use in such a large area. While it had proven itself as a way to pinpoint where an UNSUB lived or worked in contained areas, it had never been tested in a case like this. While the hope was that the public would now see what geographical profiling was all about, and would therefore vote to bring funds to the program, instead the pundits derided it as worthless.
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:35:10 GMT -5
Chapter Eighteen The Baton Rouge Serial Killer Similarly, profiling took a hit in the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer, a man who had murdered five women in Louisiana. Contrary to the FBI's predictions of an unskilled white man awkward around women, the killer, Derrick Todd Lee, turned out to be black, personable, and had a family and a job. But reporters failed to mention that the local police officers, not the profilers, had neglected to include witness reports that identified a black man near one victim's home. What they showed the FBI profilers who came into the case were the witness reports that described a white male. In fact, while the Baton Rouge killer's profile was mistaken on a couple of points, it was actually right on many more. They were correct about his age, his controlling behavior, his strength, his tight finances, and his non-threatening style. The accuracy of many other details are still unknown. But the media did not report any of that. They only pointed out the errors, and that's what stays in the public's mind. What got lost in the frenzy was the fact profiles are merely tools, and they're only as good as the information they get. They're also based on probability from the analysis of past cases that are similar to the one under investigation. If most past serial killers have been white males, it's reasonable to suggest that a current UNSUB will likely be a white male. With more data on female, black and Hispanic serial killers in the future, the range of possibilities will become more flexible. Until that time, as long as most serial killers remain white males, the probability analysis in a given profile is still going to favor a white male. Probability always has a margin of error and any other approach is just wild-ass guessing. Not long after that, reporters discovered that famed profiler John Douglas had been wrong about something in the Green River Killer case that might have made a difference in the investigation - perhaps even saved lives. After Gary Ridgway was caught and confessed to 48 murders, he said that he'd sent an anonymous letter to the newspaper in 1984, in the midst of his long spree. Douglas had decided it was amateurish and had no connection to the murders. While he was correct on several other things, it was this mistake that made headlines.
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:37:44 GMT -5
Chapter Nineteen The Anthrax Terrorist Then after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the anthrax scare that followed, a profile was developed of what that perpetrator might be like. When they failed to make an arrest, Lawrence Sellin wrote a scathing report arguing that the profile has not yet helped to catch this person and offered a dramatically different alternative. Since it's not yet known whether his alternative is correct, it's also not yet known whether the FBI profilers were wrong, but the anger evident at the FBI's imperfections is evident throughout the piece. If it turns out that they truly had tunnel vision (or worse, a bumbling rush to judgment), then the anger is justified. A rush to judgment is inevitable when the demand is great and the public visibility is high, but that's how mistakes get made. Perhaps it wasn't prudent to allow moviemakers enough access to develop the image of super-sleuths that was likely to backfire. Or perhaps people (including reporters) who believe that crime solving methods are guaranteed are just setting themselves up for disappointment. In any event, those who use this method of behavioral analysis know that they cannot predict every possible human behavior or trait from what they have at a crime scene. Yet with additional crime scenes and more behavioral evidence, profiles do evolve. So, also, has the method itself. In fact, as in the past, profiling is not just the province of the FBI. Psychologists with a specialty in criminal behavior, and some criminologists, are developing their own ideas on the subject, and even their own methods.
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:39:49 GMT -5
Chapter Twenty Still in the Game Psychologists, too, may become profilers, but for them the field is more entrepreneurial. They don't get hired to do it full-time. They have to go looking for opportunities. Typically, someone interested in going into forensics will get a degree in clinical psychology, and then do an internship in a prison or forensic hospital (or some other forensic setting). While programs have been developed to offer Ph.D.s in forensic psychology, they are still strongly based in clinical perspectives, with courses in abnormal psychology and personality assessment. Students of forensic psychology who seek to become profilers may work with victims of abuse, juvenile delinquents, or adult criminals, developing experience with the legal system and contacts among law enforcement agencies. Once they have achieved a relationship of trust, they may then be called upon for consultation with crimes or at crime scenes. An equivocal death analysis is one possibility, wherein psychologists may offer insights about a victim's state of mind to help interpret otherwise ambiguous information. Actual profiling is another. The more visibility a psychological consultant gets, and the more success he or she has, the more that person's reputation will be enhanced and the more likely it is that police agencies may call for assistance. Robert Ressler works with psychologists toward that end in his post-retirement consulting business. Gregg McCrary also likes to bring psychologists together with law enforcement for mutual benefit. Whether people enter the field via law enforcement or psychological consulting, they must still learn the ropes. They need to know the process of investigation and the methods used to determine if a death is a suicide, accident or homicide. They need to understand the nuances of staging a crime, and the way the mind of a psychopath works. They must also recognize that sometimes there are false allegations. They need to know how to interview different types of people, from victims' families to rapists, pedophiles, and murderers. They need to understand that law enforcement relies on its own vocabulary and not psychological jargon, and they need to know about evidence collection and courtroom protocol. Besides learning about psychology, they must also learn the logic of crime scene analysis and the job of the medical examiner in determining the cause and manner of someone's death. They must forget what the media or the movies say about the function of a profiler, and they must refrain from trying to become a detective. Above all, they need to know how to work with a team of investigators with a common goal. When the work becomes stressful, as it can in any area of clinical psychology, practitioners need to know when to get help, and it's usually a good idea to do as the FBI does---have stress support available. Looking at crime scenes and autopsy photos can be daunting at times, and the constant awareness of what people do to one another can be bruising, even to professionals who see it all the time. Academic psychologists can also provide research support in this area, and the FBI has hired them to become part of the NCAVC's programs. Even outside the FBI, psychologists who believe that behavioral profiling should have a more scientific foundation and a standard methodology have attempted to design studies that will prove something through statistical analysis. For example, both a study in 1990 and one in 2000 pitted trained profilers against other groups to determine if they fared better on sample cases. The first study indicated that they did not, but the subject pool was too small to be significant in any respect. The second study showed that profilers do have an edge in this method, although there was great variability among them in the results. In other words, some profilers are outstanding while others, even with training, are no better than the average person. Even so, to date, no study has actually proven anything one way or the other. It remains for future researchers to either provide the program with a solid scientific basis or to allow it to be what the early practitioners said it was: an art, based in experience, that can be helpful when used in the correct context.
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:42:10 GMT -5
Chapter Twenty-One Evolution: What the FBI's BSU is Today Special Agent Mark A. Hilts is the current chief of the F.B.I.'s Behavioral Analysis Unit that deals with crimes against adults, including serial murder, and he got his start in 1981 as an officer with the Police Department in Plano, Texas. "Starting off on the ground floor with crime scenes and criminal investigation," he says of his six and a half years there, "has been greatly beneficial." He then applied to the Bureau and for seven years was assigned to their Miami Division. "I ended up on a violent crime task force there," he explains, "and we worked kidnappings, extortions, hijackings, and violent fugitives. During that time I became interested in the programs at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes and became an NCAVC Coordinator in the Miami division. Every one of our fifty-six field offices has at least one NCAVC Coordinator in residence. The coordinators are the primary liaison with the field offices and with local and state law enforcement. They're working with local authorities every day, so they're in a position to know when there's something that would benefit from us taking a look at it. The coordinators are our front line." While in Miami, Hilts was involved in a serial murder investigation known as the Tamiami Trail Strangler, which ran from September 1994 with the first victim until June 1995. Rory Conde, a native Colombian who resided along the Tamiami Trail, murdered six prostitutes, including a transvestite. He left a drawing on one victim indicating this was his third murder, which helped to link the crimes. "After the third victim had been killed in that case," says Hilts, "I got a phone call from someone I knew in Metro Dade. I spent the next couple of months working with them, and in my role as NCAVC Coordinator, interacting with the unit at Quantico." The final killing occurred in January, but it took another five months before the Strangler made a mistake. He duct-taped a woman and left her in his home, but she was able to get a neighbor's attention and Conde was arrested. In 1999, he was convicted of the sixth murder in the series, and then in 2001 he pled guilty to the other five. Around the time of that investigation, Hilts put in for a position with the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, and based on his experience from Miami, he got the job, joining eleven other agents assigned to focus on such cases. When asked about how the original Behavioral Science Unit evolved, Hilts responded with the following history: "The Behavioral Science Unit, which was part of the Training Division, became the Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit. The next significant evolution was in 1994, with the creation of the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG), to integrate the F.B.I.'s crisis management, behavioral, and tactical resources within one entity. By that time the unit had changed its name again to the Investigative Support Unit. At the same time, the Director of the FBI created the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. So that was the first time there were multiple operational units rather than a single unit: the Profiling and Behavioral Assessment Unit and the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. "That lasted about three years. Then we evolved once again into just the Behavioral Analysis Unit, East and West. The units were divided geographically, east and west of the Mississippi River, each doing the same thing in different areas. Then in 1999, based on the Protection of Children from Sexual Predators Act of 1998, the F.B.I. received some mandates related to crimes against children and serial murder, and one of them was the creation of the Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center (CASMIRC). For a while, CASMIRC was a training and research entity supporting the BAU East and the BAU West. That's how things remained until after 9-11 [the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001]. We then started getting more involved in counter-terrorism responsibilities, so we took another look at ourselves to ensure that we were structured most appropriately. "At that point, we decided to remake ourselves again into what we are today, which is the Behavioral Analysis Unit 1 [counter-terrorism and threat assessment], Behavioral Analysis Unit 2 [crimes against adults], Behavioral Analysis Unit 3 [crimes against children], and the VICAP Unit, which had broken off from the Profiling and Behavioral Assessment Unit a few years before. By structuring ourselves by crime problem, rather than geographically, we are able to develop a concentration of personnel in each unit that possess specialized training and experience in their areas of responsibility." Some readers will be unhappy to learn that the offices are no longer in the Academy's lower levels, a place fondly described in many of the former profilers' books. "We moved out of there about nine years ago," Hilts explains. "Eventually the rest of the NCAVC and the rest of CIRG followed us." Nevertheless, there is still a Behavioral Science Unit in residence there, but it's not the same as the BSU of twenty years ago. "For years, there was no Behavioral Science Unit at the F.B.I., but several years ago, the Training Division recreated a Behavioral Science Unit. We collaborate with BSU on research and training matters, but it can be a source of confusion, because that's the name of the program where this all started, but they're involved in training, primarily at the National Academy, and are not operationally involved in cases the way we are."
|
|
|
Post by The Tracker on Jan 12, 2006 12:45:47 GMT -5
Chapter Twenty-Two Always Learning Once an agent is selected into one of the behavioral analysis units, Hilts says, they go through a 16-week classroom-based program, taught by both agents and outside professionals. "We try to start with a basic foundation of psychology," he points out, "and then go to specifics. By the last several weeks, we get into the specialties of specific types of crimes." The coursework involves such subjects as: Basic psychology Criminal psychology Forensic science Body recovery Criminal Investigative Analysis Death investigation Threat assessment Statement/document analysis Crimes against children Child abduction and homicide Sexual victimization of children / Internet issues Interview and interrogation procedures Serial murder In addition, a limited number of internships in research are available to both graduate and undergraduate students in law enforcement and mental health. "They're an indispensable part of our research program," says Hilts. He suggests that interested students contact Violent Crime Resource Specialist Cynthia J. Lent, at clent@fbiacademy.edu. About the current status of what the agents in the BAU-2 do, Hilts states that their goal is the same as it always was: "We're simply one of the tools in the toolbox. In some cases, we play a bigger role than in others in the resolution of the case." Currently, he supervises seven agents, including two retired homicide detectives from major cities, and at any given time they can have as many as one hundred fifty open cases. "Some may be serial murder cases that we work on for months, with multiple trips, and some may involve only a consultation on interview strategy with an identified offender." Their work includes consulting on international cases, as well as assisting other countries set up their own behavioral units. When dealing with the media, they all realize that there are misunderstandings to resolve. "The public's interest in profiling has been intertwined with an interest in serial murder," Hilts offers. "With the television depiction of profiling as something mysterious and different, that has become the image of what it is. Some people in the media--and in law enforcement as well--don't make the connection that that's not reality. There are many different types of serial killers and many different motivations. When I'm involved in a case, I view a portion of my job as being to educate. The public gets the impression from fictional depictions like Hannibal Lecter, who get away with multiple murders, that serial killers are smarter than the rest of us and have unlimited resources. People are looking for that type of individual, and that's not what most serial killers are. "We look at the facts of every case individually. There is no single answer or formula that fits every case. We don't have a template that fits every serial killer. What's appropriate is to address serial killers in a multi-disciplinary way, with law enforcement joining with experts in the academic and mental health worlds. We try to look at all aspects of serial killers, from how they commit their crimes, to developmental factors that influenced their violent behavior. There are many different theories regarding serial killer development. Is it biological, environmental, chemical imbalance? Do their brains function differently? The bottom line, I believe, is that there is no single answer. We won't be able to look at one factor and say this is what creates a serial killer." In pondering the future of what the Unit may do about serial murder investigations, Hilts says, "It's not just a law enforcement problem. Certainly, law enforcement has a responsibility to catch them, but we need to look outside law enforcement for some of the answers that will help us do that. That's what we do here. We have a research advisory board made up of outside experts from the academic world that we meet with regularly as part of our program. Our research program supports our operational effort, and we are creating empirical studies of closed and solved cases, as well as interviews with incarcerated offenders. In every type of crime that we're involved in operationally, we have some type of research project going. "Over the past few years, we've also hosted several international symposia on different topics, such as school violence, domestic violence, workplace violence, and sexual exploitation of children. We bring together multi-disciplinary experts and talk about what the commonalities are, what we know and what we still; need to know in all these areas. We are doing the same thing in the area of serial murder."
|
|