In most serial
homicides, FBI agents do not actively participate in the investigation, secure evidence, or pursue the
suspect—that is the responsibility of the local police agency. Nor is the FBI called in if
serial homicides occur in different jurisdictions—that is a myth. The FBI
analysts act in an advisory capacity, only at the request of a local police
department that submits a standard, thirteen-page Violent Criminal
Apprehension Program (VICAP) analysis report to the FBI. The data from the
VICAP report is fed into a computer known as Profiler, and the output
of the computer is then elaborated on by the analysts in the form of a
profile before being sent back to the local police department. FBI analysts
sometimes travel to the scene of a crime or assign one of a team of specially trained local FBI agents, known as
field profile coordinators, to work at the scene. The average FBI agent is fairly
well educated—a university degree is required of recruits. The agents at NCAVC often hold postgraduate degrees in various social
sciences—they are highly trained, highly experienced, and highly educated. They
claim to be formidable “mind hunters” and “monster fighters.” The use of psychological profiling of unidentified criminals is a relatively new technique. It was probably
first used to profile one of history’s most notorious criminals, Adolf
Hitler. During World War II, the OSS—the precursor of the
CIA—commissioned psychiatrist W. C. Langer to construct a psychodynamic personality
profile of Hitler with the purpose of anticipating decisions that
Hitler might make under certain circumstances. Langer’s profile turned out
to be relatively accurate, down to his prediction of Hitler’s suicide at
the end of the war.
Starting from 1940, for sixteen years, New York City
was plagued by a series of bomb explosions in public places. Some thirty bombs
had been planted, although not all had exploded. In 1956, the bombings began to
escalate—the police were worried that it was only a matter of time before somebody
would be killed. From letters that the “Mad
Bomber” left behind and sent to newspapers, it was obvious that he was a
disgruntled former employee of Con Edison, New York’s electric power
company—but there were records for thousands of such former employees and the
police did not know where to begin their search. It was at this point that the
New York City police turned for help to psychiatrist and New York State
Assistant Commissioner for Mental Hygiene Dr. James A. Brussel. Perpendicular
and girth development in good ratio. Neither fat nor skinny.” From the notes
and the behavior, it had been concluded that the Mad Bomber was suffering from
paranoia—an obvious deduction. As paranoia develops slowly and
usually erupts in full force when the subject is near thirty-five years old, it
was concluded that the Mad Bomber, after sixteen years of activity, must be now
be middle-aged. From the Mad Bomber’s neatly
printed and orderly letters, it was deduced that he was a very neat and
“proper” man. He was probably an excellent employee, always on time and always
performing the best work. From the workmanship on the bombs, it was concluded
that he was trained as an electrician or pipe fitter. He was probably always
neatly dressed and clean-shaven, and was not involved in any disciplinary
infractions at work. If he had been dismissed from work, it would be for
medical reasons and not for work performance or disciplinary problems. The language of his letters showed a fairly
well-educated man but either foreign born or somebody who lived among foreign-born
people—there was a certain European stiffness to his writing and a lack of American
slang and colloquialisms. It was as if the letters were written first in a
foreign language and then translated into English. The Mad Bomber was probably a Slav, and by his
regularity, probably a Roman Catholic—very likely Polish. Plotting a line from New York through Westchester
County, Brussels arrived at Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he knew there was a
large Polish community. Armed with this information, the
police again began to review the Con Edison company files for ex-employees who
were skilled, were living in Connecticut with Polish-sounding names, might be
in middle age, and were dismissed for medical reasons. That’s how the name of George Metesky cropped up, a
generator wiper who was involved in an accident at an electrical plant in 1931.
Metesky filed for disability payments but doctors could find nothing wrong with
him. He stopped coming to work and was dropped from the payroll.
Following the Metesky case, police began to use the
services of psychiatrists more often to assist them in their investigations.
The problem, however, was that each psychiatrist based his profiles on his own knowledge
and experience, and when the police pooled together several psychiatrists to
assist them on the Boston Strangler case, they all came up with radically
different profiles. There was no systematic approach to profiling other than
that of each individual psychiatrist. In 1957, Brooks, a former naval officer and blimp
pilot, became convinced that two separate homicides in the Los Angeles area might
have been committed by the same individual. Surmising that if one killer had
murdered two victims, he might have killed three or more as well, Brooks spent
weeks thumbing through old crime files and newspaper reports at the public
library. Brooks realized that he needed a computerized database of unsolved homicide
descriptions, a fairly astute idea in a time when most people were unfamiliar
with computers and what they can do. Brooks proposed that every police department in
California have a computer terminal linked with a central mainframe that stored
data on every unsolved homicide. Every department would have access to data on homicides
in other jurisdictions. Aside from the fact that most of Brooks’s superiors
didn’t know what a computer was, back in 1957 computers were huge elephants
costing millions of dollars. Nobody took his proposal seriously. Brooks put the
idea aside. By the late 1970s, Robert Ressler, an FBI instructor in hostage
negotiation at the BSU in Quantico, was beginning to feel restless. Realizing that
taking a systematized approach and understanding of the psychology of hostage
takers was vital to police responses, Ressler came to believe that the same
applied to what was then called “stranger killings”— murders where the victim
and perpetrator did not know each other. Nobody has precisely defined what the
term serial killer means. The definitions of serial killers and serial murder
vary from expert to expert and include the following:
-
Someone who murders at least three persons in
more than a thirty day period;
-
At least two fantasy-driven
compulsive murders committed at different times and at different locations
where there is no relationship between the perpetrator and victim and no
material gain, with victims having characteristics in common;
-
Two or more separate murders when
an individual, acting alone or with another, commits multiple homicides over a
period of time, with time breaks between each murder event;
-
Premeditated murder of three or
more victims committed over time, in separate incidents, in a civilian context,
with the murder activity being chosen by the offender;
-
Someone who over time commits at
least ten homicides. The homicides are violent and brutal, but they are also
ritualistic—they take on their own meaning for the serial murderer;
-
Someone who murders two or more
victims, with an emotional cooling-off period between the homicides;
The term serial killer might have been coined by
Robert Ressler, who says that he felt the term stranger killings was
inappropriate because not all victims of serial killers were strangers, serial
killers increase their tension and desire after every murder to commit a more
perfect murder—one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied
when they murder, serial killers are instead agitated toward repeating their
killing in an often-unending cycle. The VICAP data is then entered into the Profiler
computer system. It is an artificially intelligent system, meaning that the
computer program has been taught to reason like a human being. Of course, all
artificial intelligence systems are limited by the number of rules by which the
computer reasons. These rules, which were identified through years of
interviews with serial killers and studies of homicide case data, are expressed
as lines of instructions using “if-then” operators—for example, “if the victim is
tied with duct tape, then the offender might be an organized personality; if
the offender is an organized personality, then souvenirs of the murder might
have been taken.” These lines of reasoning refer to each other and can be
assembled in millions of different combinations by the computer, as would a
trained human mind when reasoning out a problem. always analyzed and reviewed by a human profiler.
Profiler is used to statistically pinpoint human conclusions. Sometimes
Profiler and the human analyst disagree, and the data are reviewed—perhaps a
mistaken piece of data was entered into the computer, or perhaps the human
analyst forgot something in his or her assessment. Human error in the analysis
can be identified, because unlike humans, a computer never forgets. Step One, profiling inputs, involves gathering as much
of the following data as possible: a complete investigative report, crime scene
photographs, information on the neighborhood or area, the medical examiner’s
report, a map of the victim’s movements before death, and background on the
victim. In Step Two, constructing
decision process models, the basic nature of the homicide is established:
whether the killing was a serial or single murder; whether the homicide was the
primary objective of the offender or the result of another crime; whether the
victim was a high-risk victim (prostitute or hitchhiker, for example) or
low-risk, such as a middle-class married female. Other factors in building the
model include whether the victim was killed at the scene or elsewhere and the
nature of the location where the homicide might have taken place. Step Three, the crime assessment, is the stage at
which the profiler decides whether the crime scene has the characteristics of
an organized or disorganized offender, or a mix of both. This
organized/disorganized dichotomy is both controversial in current debates on
the effectiveness of criminal profiling (discussed later) and unique to the
system of profiling. According to this pattern,
organized offenders have a tendency to:
-
plan their crimes carefully,
giving thought to escape routes and body disposal;
-
carefully select and stalk their
victims;
-
prefer strangers as victims;
-
engage in controlled conversation
with the victim;
-
capture their victims, kill them,
and dispose of their bodies at separate locations;
-
use restraints, often bringing
them to the crime scene;
-
come prepared with weapons;
-
commit sexual offenses with a
living victim;
-
attempt to extensively control
the victim through manipulation or threats, and desire a show of fear from
their victim;
-
use a vehicle;
-
commit their crimes far away from
their residence;
-
study police investigative
techniques;
-
become more proficient in the
commission of their crime with time;
As individuals, organized killers are likely to be of
above-average intelligence, attractive, married or living with a spouse,
employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning, and controlled. They have some
degree of social grace and often talk and seduce their victim into being
captured. They are more likely to appear physically attractive to their victim,
and their victims are often younger. They are difficult to apprehend because
they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and are often forensically
aware. Their family background is more stable, their father was more likely to have
been gainfully employed, and they are of higher birth order, often the eldest
of siblings. When they commit their crimes they are likely to be angry or
depressed and under the influence of alcohol, and their offense is often triggered
by some kind of personal stress such as divorce, loss of a job, or financial
crisis. They are likely to follow the media reports of the crime and are prone
to change jobs or leave town after the crime. Disorganized offenders, on the
other hand, are more likely to:
-
commit their crime spontaneously
without planning;
-
engage in minimal conversation
with the victim;
-
use a weapon found at the scene
or leave one there;
-
position the body;
-
perform sexual acts with the
corpse;
-
leave the body at the scene or
keep the corpse with them;
-
try to depersonalize the body
through extensive mutilation;
-
not use a vehicle;
The disorganized offender is likely to be of lower
birth order, come from a unstable family, and have been treated with hostility
by his family. Parents often have a record of sexual disorders; the offender
himself is sexually inhibited and sexually ignorant and may have sexual
aversions. They are more likely to be compulsive masturbators. They often live
alone and are frightened or confused during the commission of their crime. They
commit the crime closer to their workplace or home than organized offenders and
they are likely to kill victims they know and who are older than them. They
often “blitz” their victims—use massive sudden force— to overcome and capture
them. They are unlikely to stalk their victims for any length of time or to
talk or seduce their victims into capture. Disorganized offenders are very
likely to be heterosexual, be uneducated, and leave forensic evidence behind.
They are unlikely to transport their victims from where they first encountered
them to another location. Stress is not a major factor in triggering their
crime, but significant behavioral changes may be evident in their daily conduct.
A crime scene can also be mixed when there are multiple offenders of different
personality types or when the offender is immature or undergoing psychological
transformation midway in his killing career. In Step Four of the criminal profile, the profiler
offers a report describing the personality and possible physical and social
characteristics of the unknown offender, listing objects that might be in the possession
of the suspect, and sometimes proposing strategies for identifying, apprehending,
and questioning him. The report can vary in length from a mere few paragraphs
to pages, depending on how much information the profiler had to analyze. Step Five, the investigation, depends on whether the
report is accepted by the local police department and introduced into the
investigative strategy. Using the profile data, police can narrow the list of
likely suspects or adopt strategies likely to lead to an arrest. If additional
crimes occur or more evidence or information is discovered, the profile can be
updated and expanded during this stage.
Finally, Step Six is apprehension. The success or
failure of a profile is compared to the identity of the actual offender in
custody. The results are added to the variable database and the interpretive
algorithms used by profilers are tuned, with the objective of further enhancing
profiling accuracy in the future.
Acknowledgements:
The Police Department;
www.politie.nl and a Chief Inspector – Mr. Erik
Akerboom ©
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