GEOGRAPHIC PROFILING

[The Tracker]

GEOGRAPHIC PROFILING

Chapter 1

Random or Planned? The Zodiac Killer

According to former FBI profiler John Douglas, many serial killers are motivated by a "desire to create and sustain their own mythology." One of the most complicated cases along those lines, in which the geography of a series of murders seemed to play a part, was that of the Zodiac killer. He operated in and around San Francisco, California, in the late sixties.

Exactly which murders are to be credited to him is controversial, in part due to inconsistencies in his own letters to the police and the press. Only after someone made a connection to the 1966 killing of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside, for example, did "Zodiac" claim that it was his. Yet the vicious crime did seem to bear his signature, and letters were sent to the police, the press, and to Bates's father in a way that echoed the Zodiac's later communiqués.

The next incident was the murder of a couple, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jenson, on December 20, 1968. It took place near the town of Vallejo, north of San Francisco. In the same general area, in July, 1969, another couple, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau, were assaulted with a semiautomatic gun, and only Michael survived. He managed to provide a description, but no one was arrested.

Then letters arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallajo Times-Herald, each containing specific references to the murders along with what turned out to be one-third of a code. The three pieces had to be published and put together to give someone a chance to crack it. There were many attempts and finally a letter emerged, from the symbols, that was written by a man skilled at ciphers that attested to how much he loved to kill—especially people. A week later another letter came to the Vallejo paper specifically from "the Zodiac."

All leads went nowhere until there was another attempted double murder at Lake Berryessa of a couple (killing the girl), and the near-public slaughter in the city of a cab driver. These deaths were followed by a letter that contained a piece of the driver's bloody shirt, which alerted police to the possibility of an arrogant madman in their midst—especially when he sent another letter that warned of a bomb. The communications kept coming and even though there was nothing more than the abduction of a woman who escaped, Zodiac kept taunting police until 1984. He claimed a mounting number of deaths---although none were verified---of as many as 37 people.

What gave the Zodiac case a decidedly geographical edge was the result of a map that he himself sent of Mount Diablo, a bay area landmark. Something interesting would be found, he said, if the police placed a "radian" on Mount Diablo. A radian is a unit of angular measure used by engineers and mathematicians of 57 degrees, 17 minutes, 44 seconds. It is an angle over an arc whose length is equal to the radius of a circle, of which the arc is part. If a radian is placed on the map with the apex on Mount Diablo and one leg of the angle across the Vallejo murder sites, then the other goes through Presidio Heights in San Francisco, where the cabbie was killed. According to the school of thought that believes this to be a valuable clue, the victims appear to have been chosen not because of who they were but to mark a particular time and place.

This clue shifted the investigation somewhat, because it appeared to be the case that the suspect was more likely to be a man with a higher IQ than had first seemed evident from the illiterate tone of the letters. The misspelled words and poor grammar now appeared to be more a clever manipulation than a genuine expression of the killer's limited abilities.

Although no one was ever arrested for these assaults and murders, the idea that someone might be targeting victims in specific geographic areas for some purpose known only to himself eventually evolved into a specific type of criminal analysis: geographic profiling. The Zodiac case was neither the first nor the last to highlight the fact that killers often operate by mental maps. First let's take a look at how profiling works.

[The Tracker]

CHAPTER 2

Profiling and Geography

In the practice of profiling, many things are taken into consideration, including the victim's background, the time and place of the crime, the method of abduction, the type of weapon used, and any evidence of overkill.

"I use a formula," says 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."

Probing for an assessment prior to actually questioning a suspect involves looking at such data as the following:

the weapon used
the killing site (and dump site, if different)
he position of the body and whether it was moved
the type of wounds inflicted
minute details about the victim
offender risk factors
method of controlling the victim
evidence of staging or signature

The basic idea is to get a body of data yielding common patterns so that one can give a general description of an UNSUB (unknown suspect) in terms of personal habits, possible employment, marital status 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, and since 70-75% of murders are situational, developing a way to profile without reference to repeated patterns is useful.

A good psychological profile is an educated attempt to provide parameters about the type of person who committed a certain crime, based on the idea that people tend to be slaves to their psychology and will inevitably leave clues. The kinds of information sought include:

the offender's gender
the MO
any evidence of an organized or disorganized personality
geographic stability vs. transience
evidence of being impulsive or compulsive
the type of "personation" or signature at the scene
the type of fantasy that seems to be involved
evidence of ritual
whether a "trophy" was taken

A profile is most easily developed if the offender displays some evidence of psychopathology, such as sadistic torture, postmortem mutilation, or pedophilia. Some killers leave a “signature”— a behavioral manifestation of a personality quirk, such as staging the corpse for the most humiliating exposure or tying ligatures with a complicated bow. This helps to link crime scenes and alert law enforcement officers to the presence of a serial rapist or killer. If a pattern is detected, it may also help to predict future possible attacks or the most probable encounter sites. According to Douglas, the "signature," or behavior done for emotional satisfaction, is key: "I've found that signature is a more reliable guide to the behavior of serial offenders than an MO. That's because the MO evolves, while the emotional reasoning that triggers the signature doesn't."

The best profilers have gained their knowledge from encounters with criminals and have developed an intuitive sense about certain types of crime. While some people criticize the inferential nature of profiling, it's generally based on extensive experience, and the base of information derives from both physical and nonphysical evidence. Generally, profilers employ psychological theories that provide ways to analyze mental deficiency or criminal thought patterns. They also use actuarial data such as the age range into which offenders generally fall and how important an unstable family history is to criminality.

Profiling is not just a personality assessment of the UNSUB, but includes other types of data. Noting an UNSUB’s age, race, sex, occupation, educational level, social support system, type of employment, and other sociological factors are just as important as evidence of a character disorder. Added to that is the significance of the type of place a killer chooses as a body dump site, such as Ted Bundy’s preference for the heavily wooded mountains outside Seattle. That's where a wholly different type of analysis comes in.

A relatively recent development in the profiling concept is the emphasis on a suspect’s geographic patterns: where a victim is selected, where the crime was actually committed, the travel route used for the body disposal, where and how the bodies are dumped, and the relative isolation of the dumpsite. All of this information tells something about the suspect’s mobility, method of transportation, potential area of residence, and ability to traverse barriers (such as crossing state lines or going over a bridge). Some professionals view geographic profiling as a subspeciality of the FBI's general program, while others see it as an entirely different approach. Nevertheless, the sort of profile that results from either method offers similar information -- approximate age, employment, evidence of psychosis, and probable living conditions of the UNSUB.

Familiarity is part of one’s comfort zone and many murderers begin a crime spree in areas where they live, and with victims with whom they feel relatively safe.

One killer in the Midwest who was believed to have murdered at least eight young women turned out to have lived very close to where he had abducted them. He even worked with one of them. In his case, there were many geographic similarities among his crimes. Six of the bodies were found in rural areas and five of the body dumpsites formed a tight circle with a few miles radius. This indicated that the UNSUB traveled this way back and forth, had a car, and knew the area well. Two girls were actually killed in the same place and transported to different locations, but it was clear that the killer wanted to stick to a familiar landscape.

Geo-forensics of this type is applicable even to single cases in terms of learning things about a perpetrator, because any dumpsite tells a story. In the famous 1947 case of the Black Dahlia in Los Angeles, this young woman’s naked body, severed in two and drained of blood, was left in an abandoned lot of a residential area just steps from the sidewalk, placed there in the early morning hours after the dew had settled. That indicated a bold or deranged killer because he could easily have been seen. When her personal effects were found, it was easy to trace his route of exit and to take a guess as to where she may have been killed. Someone also noted that she had been left in the one place in Los Angeles that appeared on a map in the shape of female genitalia. That would affirm that this was an organized killing by a sadistic misogynist.

The crime sites that are most valuable for this kind of analysis are those in which the killer has exercised spatial intentionality — predatory acts and body disposal planning that seem to have a relationship. In a localized rampage, one can tell nearly as much from the paths connecting the sites involved in the offense as by the sites themselves. When a killer travels, such as in the recent string of murders along railroads, much can be learned from the types of places in which the perpetrator chooses to kill — and people can be alerted.

Yet how does geographic profiling actually differ from psychological profiling? The idea is that one starts with the crime scene and works "backwards."

[The Tracker]

CHAPTER 3

Geographic Profiling 101: Approaching a Case

A persistent problem in many criminal investigations is "linkage blindness." That is, investigators fail to recognize when certain crimes have important links to other crimes because they're focusing too much on dissimilarities. For example, in the Zodiac crimes, the cab driver was not immediately linked in the series because previous attacks had been aimed at couples. In other words, investigators had developed a tentative psychological map that did not account for the Zodiac's apparent reasoning. The need to determine links is one of the motivations for developing the FBI's VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), but programs are only as good as the data entered into them.

Geographic profiling (sometimes known as geoforensics, but to be distinguished from geoforensics that involves geological profiling) helps to organize an abundance of information via geographical links in order to accelerate the apprehension process.

"Geographic profiling enables you to focus the investigation in a small area of the community," says Inspector Glenn Woods of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, "rather than on the whole metropolitan area." That means it cuts down on the amount of time and resources required for what can shape up to be a major investigation.

For example, in the case of Rafael Resendez- Ramirez, police agencies in three states noted that a series of murders had taken place near railroads. First in 1997 a couple was attacked near tracks in Lexington, Kentucky, and the boy was murdered. The following year, Dr. Claudia Benton was viciously killed in her Houston-area home, which was also near railroad tracks. Less than five months later, still in Texas, a minister and his wife were bludgeoned to death in the church parsonage. In part because of the track connection, an evidence match was made between this double murder and the killing of the doctor, and a suspect was identified who had been repeatedly deported back to Mexico. The search became focused on Resendez-Ramirez.

Then in only two days, two more women were found murdered in their Texas homes, but the killer had already moved on to Illinois. There he tied up and shot an 80 year-old man in Illinois and killed his daughter with the butt of the shotgun. Both were left inside their trailer, which stood about one hundred feet from a track.

The Railroad Killer had left enough fingerprints at the various crime scenes to be clearly identified. He was eventually apprehended, tried, and convicted for the rape-murder of the physician, although he was clearly linked to the seven other deaths as well. That he stayed near trains had indicated to investigators his on-the move, drifter-type mentality, so it was not difficult to narrow down the suspect list and find this Mexican immigrant who had been in trouble with the law for years. Although he was not officially analyzed with a computerized profiling system, the geographical similarities helped to rapidly link him to successive crimes.

It was Vancouver detective inspector Kim Rossmo who in 1995 wrote a doctoral dissertation at Simon Frasier University's School of Criminology on a method of geographical profiling that has become an oft-cited source. The first such profile was done out of his police department in 1990 and Rossmo's seminal work has been utilized extensively in Canada and the U.K., with more limited application in the U.S.

Preferring to work with a psychological profile as part of the data, he feels that a geographical analysis highlights the crime location, any physical boundaries that were present (that might not otherwise be noticed), and the types of roads and highways that come into both the abduction and body dump sites. He also notes the importance of the routine activity of the victims, because people tend to stick with familiar territory. That means that an analysis of all the crime scenes could provide clues about where an offender lives.

Like psychological profilers, those who concentrate on geographical analysis are also trying to determine how sophisticated and organized an offender is, whether the crime was planned or opportune, and whether the offender approached a high or low risk victim. However, they are also trying to take it a step further to use objective measurements to pinpoint as precisely as possible the locus of criminal activity.

The construction of a geographical profile involves:

Complete familiarity with the case file
Examination of the crime scenes
Interviews with investigators and witnesses
Study of area maps
Analysis of neighborhood demographics for both the abduction site and body dump site
Computerized analysis

To assist in the scientific angle, Rossmo developed a computer program, Criminal Geographic Targeting (CGT), which assesses the spatial characteristics of a crime. (Environmental Criminology Research, Inc. developed a prototype called Rigel.) Using specific measurements, the program makes numerous calculations and produces a topographic map based on the locations of a series of similar crimes. This map shows via color arrangements and graphs the "jeopardy surface," or likelihood that some area is the location of the killer's home or base of operation. It is then superimposed on a street map on which the crimes are pinpointed, which are thought of as "fingerprints" of the offender's cognitive map. The program's predictive power is related to the number of crime sites, and the more the better.

To provide these results, CGT takes into account known movement patterns, comfort zones, and hunting patterns. Right-handed criminals who are trying to escape in a hurry will flee to the left, and will discard weapons to the right. When lost, males go downhill while females go up.

Initially Rossmo tried out his program on cases that had been solved to see how accurate it was. For example, Robert Clifford Olson was arrested in 1981 in Vancouver, B.C., for picking up two hitchhikers. He subsequently confessed to eleven murders, mostly young girls and boys. Rossmo generated a map of his crimes and pinpointed within a four square block are where Olson had actually lived.

Rossmo prefers to have at least five crimes in a clearly linked series to analyze, or at least five crime activity sites. From that, and from records such as suspect lists, police reports, and motor vehicle information, he enters information into his program and builds from there. It can be added to or modified whenever new data comes in. In the case of a serial rapist, for example, Rossmo used 79 of the more than 100 crime scenes and came up with a red dot on his computerized map that turned out to be the very spot to where the man lured his victims—his basement.

Just how does such a program work?

[The Tracker]

Chapter 4

The Components of a Geographic Profile

When entering the data for analyzing the geographical patterns, the principle elements involved are:

Distance
Mental Maps
Mobility
Locality demographics

Central to the approach is the idea that there is a difference between perceived distance and actual distance, and certain things influence how this disparity can affect the commission of a crime. Perceptions of distance vary from one person to another, and how distance is perceived can be influenced by such things as availability of transportation, number of barriers (bridges, state boundaries), type of roads, and familiarity with a specific region. The fact that Richard Trenton Chase, the notorious "Vampire of Sacramento," did not have a car meant that he had to take into account how far it would be to walk from a crime site back to his home. The fact that Ted Bundy did meant that he could travel across the country if he wanted to.

Another significant factor in geographical profiling is the concept of a mental map. This is a cognitive image of one's surroundings that is developed through experiences, travel routes, reference points, and centers of activity. The places where we feel safe and take for granted are within our mental maps, and the same holds for offenders. As they grow bolder, their maps can change and they may then increase their range of criminal activity.

Some criminals are geographically stable (stay in a certain region) and some are transient (travel around). Whether they tend toward stability or mobility depends a lot on their experience with travel, means for getting places, sense of personal security, and predatory motivations. Ted Bundy, for example, traveled from the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest and finally to Florida before finally being stopped for good. A cocky man, he admitted to killings in ten different states.

The mental map may also be dependent on whether the killer is a hunter, stalker, or has some other mode of attack, since the type of approach used on a victim also has a relationship to the location of the killer's home base.

Rossmo lists the relevant offender styles as:

Hunter (searches for a specific victim in home territory)
Poacher (travels away from home for hunting)
Troller (opportunistic encounters while occupied in other activities)
Trapper (creates a situation to draw a victim to him)

Any of these types might attack the victim upon encounter, follow a victim before attacking, or entice the victim toward a more controlled area, and these, too, play a part in the calculations.

In general, geographical profiling asks the following types of questions:

Why did he pick his victims from a particular neighborhood?
Why did he pick the dump site (in the case of murder)?
What route must he have used?
When did he use this route?
How is the route generally employed by others?
What do the attractions of this route say about him?
In the case of a series of crimes, what are the geographic patterns?
Are there escape routes?
Was the area where the victim was taken appropriate for predatory activities?
Was the victim attacked in the same place that he or she was encountered?
Was the vehicle used in the attack also dumped somewhere?

Profilers like Rossmo believe that plotting the travel routes of serial offenders makes the offender's mobility more predictable. The more he offends, the more confidence he gains and the more his crime area tends to expand. That means that the initial acts will in all likelihood be closest to where the offender lives. Even Bundy began in his own neighborhoods. That's why Rossmo believes that geographic profiling is locating the killer: it focuses on where he lives and travels rather than focusing on where he might commit his next crime.

There are some geographic profilers who are so confident in this approach that they believe it supercedes the methods used in psychological profiling. Let's look at what one of the leading authorities has to say.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 5

The Predator System

Dr. Grover M. Godwin ([e-mail]) works in the Justice Center at the University of Alaska where he teaches courses in criminal profiling and serial murder. He has published Hunting Serial Predators, which offers a unique multivariate analysis approach to profiling, and his own computer system for geographic profiling is called Predator. Holding a doctorate in investigative psychology, he lectures widely and has served as a law enforcement consultant in developing geographical profiles. Currently, he is one of the leading authorities on this method. To his mind, geographic profiling is more scientific and more accurate than the inferential methods used by the FBI.

According to Godwin, the steps in developing a geographical profile first involve deciding on which of two different ideological positions you will take:

The sole use of body dump sites
The use of both the body dump sites and victims’ abduction locations (or where a victim was last seen).

His research (with David Canter) on fifty-four American serial killers suggests strongly that the abduction sites significantly affect the predictive power of a program when determining the offender's home base area, so he prefers option #2. This involves getting more data, but it also makes the analysis more solid.

"The site where the victim was last seen," he says, "can be developed from any number of sources, such as eyewitness accounts, visual sightings, telephone conversations, and official documents like traffic citations, police field reports, jail booking logs, long distance calls, toll records, and credit card receipts."

Using this information, the next step is to determine the geographical coordinates of both the location where a body was found and the physical address of where the victim was last seen or abducted from. Godwin feels that the best measures are made by visiting all crime locations and obtaining geographical coordinates with a global position unit (GBS).

He then enters the data into Predator, although he points out that besides CGT, there are two other programs available: Dragnet, developed in the Investigative Psychology Department at the University of Liverpool, England, and Crime Stat, developed at the National Institute of Justice.

The program produces the same type of 3-D map as Rossmo's, displaying various colors that depict different results. "For example," Godwin explains, "in the Predator program, a light-colored area suggests a high probability of the offender living in that area, while darker color areas suggests a low probability."

His main interest is to provide a psychological theory about the spatial behavior of a certain offender, i.e., what caused the offender to travel the way he did, based on data about how killers interact with their victims. Godwin's ideas were affirmed in 1996 in a serial murder case in North Carolina.

He had read about the crimes in a Raleigh newspaper and fed whatever facts he could find into his database, which at the time consisted of information from 728 victims. The police resisted the idea that the murders were connected, yet Godwin was able to show clear links. The victims were all black women who were choked and beaten, and the geographical pattern indicated a relatively small area of operation, mostly around railroad tracks. When asked by the newspaper to provide a profile, he said that the offender was an explosive person between 28 and 35 who would commit his acts in an unplanned but stylized burst of violence. He also indicated where he believed the killer probably lived.

The day Godwin presented his profile, John Williams, Jr. was arrested for one of the crimes. He soon became a suspect in the others, as well as in five rapes. It turned out that Godwin was correct in his overall assessment, but most specifically in the geographic pattern as a clue to the offender's home. "In the John Williams, Jr. case," Godwin states, "I predicted within one block where he lived---which is more accurate than any other geographical profiling system."

To explain how his program works, he says, "Killers have a certain kind of place in mind, where experience has taught them that suitable victims can be found. Each subsequent trip to these locations forms something of an analogy with previous successes, modified by experience and perhaps intelligence gained from previous murders. The killer’s perception will be shaped both by actual characteristics and those inferred from factors such as where a victim hangs out and with whom."

Then the killer tends to go about his routine activities until the opportunity arises to snatch someone. He may have a passing conversation with the potential victim, see her from afar, or even work with her.

"The situational context within which network interactions occur is critical to understanding the hunting patterns of a predator," Godwin explains. "For example, if the killer targets victims in a location at which contact is likely to be witnessed, the chance of detection will increase."

That means that analyzing potential settings where a victim may have had contact with a killer can help to narrow the focus of an investigation to promising areas for locating witnesses and for people who may have survived an attempt at grabbing them.

Furthermore, according to Godwin, the areas of greatest risk from serial killers include:

Urban subcultures (bars, night clubs, and red light areas)
Isolated landscapes (parking lots, jogging paths, and rest areas)
Areas with a high concentration of elderly and poor individuals
Derelict areas of a city
University campuses

"These landscape layouts," he points out, "provide the serial killer with ease of access and escape routes to avoid detection. For example, of the five high-risk victim-targeting areas, the university campus appears to be a safe place. However, university campuses have certain landscape features, such as large isolated parking lots, which make them ideal for hunting and abducting victims. Ted Bundy is a classic example of an offender who targeted victims on college campuses."

For criminals, the home environment is familiar and predictable, with certain people becoming a focal point of the "experiential space." Godwin adds that "the tangible home area becomes an enduring symbol of self, of the continuity of their
experiences. If their crimes develop as an elaboration of their daily activities, then it would be predicted that the home would be geographically and symbolically central to their criminal activities."

In other words, the places where criminals shop, eat, and get involved in recreation play a significant role in defining their crime awareness space.

Even if the emphasis on targeting specific areas at high risk for crime provides a more accurate profile assessment than trait analysis, all profiling approaches need to be used as one tool among many in any criminal investigation. Profiling is not magic; it has its limits.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 6

Pros and Cons

Geographic profiling has been used effectively for cases such as serial rape, a series of burglaries, serial murder, bank robbery, kidnapping, arson, and bombings. Had it been developed in the sixties, it might have even provided better information about the Zodiac's cognitive map. The program most widely used in Canada once pinpointed the workplace of a man who was robbing credit unions during lunch, and it also reduced a database of over three thousand suspects in a murder to merely a handful.

What a good geographic profile can do is provide information that helps investigators to narrow the area in which to do door-to-door canvassing and set up police stakeout surveillance. It can also prioritize suspects, develop strategies for linkage analysis of information, and even help to make up an effective polygraph session with a suspect. Yet, although a crime scene can provide clues about an offender's spatial perception and mobility, it remains the case that insight into psychological motivation, degree of organization, and lifestyle make an important contribution to an investigation as well.

Still, some critics think that both fall short. According to Brent Turvey, author of Criminal Profiling, geographical profiling, like trait analysis or future crime prediction, relies too strongly on a single manifestation of behavior (e.g., offense location selection) and attempts to infer meaning from the overall emotional context. He believes that geographical profiling cannot then distinguish between two similar offenders operating in the same area and may mistakenly assign crimes to the wrong person. He also believes it only works when the offender actually lives in or near his circle of offenses.

Another criticism often levied is that while geographical profiling involves objective measures, it still relies on subjective interpretation, which makes it subject to the interpreter's experience and skill.

Responsible investigators know, however, that geographical profiling is only an investigative tool and does not in itself solve crimes. They also agree that geographical profiling is best used in serial type crimes, because any profiling system works best with pattern analysis, and patterns are more easily highlighted with more crime scenes than less.

Currently, geographical profiling is endorsed more firmly in Canada than in the U. S., and as of 1997, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put in place Rossmo's information management system, Rigel. The RCMP plans to use this to complement their Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS) so they can conduct automated computer searches and do efficient case management. The more success it has, the more likely it is that law enforcement agencies in other places will educate their task forces in this method and add to the current data bases. Despite what the critics say, some of the successes have been undeniably stunning.

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