CRIMINAL PROFILING OF SERIAL KILLERS

Article BY Nichols Peacock - Art by Tania Larionova

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There have long been attempts to root out prolific criminals in society by means of the employment of intelligence techniques focused on the nature of the perpetrator, reflexively envisioned by the stalkers of them. This specialist approach aims to understand the modus operandi, as opposed to merely collating the obvious evidence and making the standard procedural enquiries and deductions – if not just seeking the likely suspects or netting the scapegoats.

When the process of applying studious intellectual methodology began is impossible to say. One could posit that the Spanish Inquisition was a very methodical approach to tracking down and establishing the guilt of those in the societies it touched, though the crimes committed were of a very separate nature, being heresy and apostasy, and of course, many unpopular figures were put forward for interrogation after torture. Though it should be considered that the myth of rampant flayings, burnings, garrottings, or whatever lurid imaginations have conjured, are most likely hyperbolic and it was mostly the mentally ill, the hardened unrepentant heretics, the enemies of Catholic society – rich Jews for example – and the few unfortunates who were under the scrutiny of depraved Catholic jurist sadists, who met their executions in the auto-da-fés. They were either hung or some other quick dispatch used, or, unfortunately, it has to be imagined, burnt alive. It wasn’t really what people imagine it to have been though – not quite the orgy of torture, confession and murder, as the numbers attest.

It can realistically be said that the first documented utilization of criminal profiling was that of the perpetrator, or perhaps perpetrators, of the Jack the Ripper killings in the East End of London at the end of the 19th Century. It was Thomas Bond who tried to profile Jack the Ripper and in his notes dated 1888, his suppositions about the character in question were laid out.

To understand the realm of the Ripper or rippers, or just the random killers of the unfortunate prostitutes and down-and-out itinerants in question, you need to take yourself back to London in the late Victorian era, a time when it was the most prosperous city in the world, the kernel of the British empire, and imagine the extreme poverty that was just a stone’s throw from the hearth of international finance – the City.

It was Whitechapel where the slums were to be found, where the entrenched abject poverty begat poverty as though a curse hung over the area. This led many women to resort to desperate measures to fund the bed and board in the doss houses, and the alcohol to numb them into oblivion of the degrading, bleak, not to say treacherous, existence their dejectedness had brought to bear. This was the hunting ground for thieves and rapists, whose depredations went largely unchallenged by the police (Coppers as they were known), but murders were not common – even by modern measures – and the community was hugely affected by the hideous developments. Though aware of the gangs that plagued their community, people were quite at a loss as to which element within or without might be the responsible for the appalling crimes known as the Whitechapel Murders – eleven – of which the Jack the Ripper murders numbered five.

The narrow and often unlit warren of streets dividing the tenements were where fallen women would loiter seeking “business” with locals and the many people who frequented the area, soldiers for example, from the barracks about the city. The Whitechapel Murders began 3 April 1888 and ended 13 February 1891.

The widely acknowledged victims of the Jack the Ripper murders were prostitutes; by order: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. The killings started in August 1888, when the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found with her throat cut multiple times, seemingly with extreme force. The other four victims were discovered with varying degrees of wounding or mutilation, culminating in the discovery of Mary Jane Kelly, whose body was butchered – as the photo shows – to the point that her face was virtually removed and one can see her right femur devoid of muscle. Her body had been subjected to a desecration, was almost completely eviscerated; it was defiled! It seemed the culmination of psychopathic fury unleashed on another alcoholic wretch whose means of miserable subsistence was to solicit men and risk, at the very least, beatings and robbery, and what she received was a madman’s dissection.

The investigative means of these crimes were very basic by modern standards, certainly from a forensic point of view, and behavioral analysis was not a recognized technique; so the unusual nature of these crimes posed considerable problems for detectives who were familiar with only straightforward crimes. Here, it seemed, was a monster of some cunning with an unnatural bloodlust, an alien motive, stalking about with impunity.

Added to the quandary were the missives purportedly from the killer: the "Dear Boss" letter, the "Saucy Jacky" postcard, the infamous "From Hell" letter” - which contained a section of what was determined to be human kidney, the other half, the author boasted had been eaten. It might rightly be surmised that these were from pranksters, agitators looking to shame the police force, or journalists trying to raise the profile of the case for their own ends and in fact, in 1931, a journalist called Fred Best reportedly confessed that he had written letters to "keep the business alive". With modern forensic science it could be imagined that such crimes would stand a vastly greater chance of being solved. The importance of modern criminal profiling here is far less certain.

Initially the investigation was conducted by the Metropolitan Police Whitechapel (H) Division  of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, but after the Nichols murder Scotland Yard became involved and Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews, were sent there from Central Office to assist. After the Eddowes murder, which occurred within the City of London, the City Police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam became involved. Overall command was under Robert Anderson, head of the C.I.D., who was on leave in Switzerland during the murder of Chapman, Stride and Eddowes, this prompted the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, to appoint Chief Inspector Donald Swanson to coordinate the enquiry from Scotland Yard.

After the double murder of Eddowes and Stride, there were moves to seek professional advice on the nature of the killer and thus Police Surgeon Thomas Bond was asked to give his opinion, and this is the earliest recorded criminal profile. He based his findings on the most mutilated of the remains. What he said was:

“All five murders no doubt were committed by the same hand. In the first four the throats appear to have been cut from left to right, in the last case owing to the extensive mutilation it is impossible to say in what direction the fatal cut was made, but arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman's head must have been lying.

All the circumstances surrounding the murders lead me to form the opinion that the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut.”

He was quite adamant that this was the work of someone without anatomical knowledge, neither surgeon, butcher or even horse slaughterer; just the frenzied knife-work that anyone of a sufficient level of violent derangement could render in a fit of maniacal endeavour. And that was somewhat controversial since it had earlier been posited that this was the work of a man of some anatomical training.

What Bond had to say of the psychological condition of the perpetrator, was that he was subject to "periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania", and possibly given to “satyriasis” (promiscuousness – or rampant rape). Also, he stated, "the homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that religious mania may have been the original disease but I do not think either hypothesis is likely", which is somewhat non-committal and lends weight to the notion that Bond really had no idea what sort of offender he was dealing with. While there was no evidence of rape – what evidence was there to find in those days? – it is surmised that the penetration of the victims with blades may have had a sexual significance (piquerism), as did the genital mutilation and, at least in Mary Jane Kelly’s case, the positioning of the body indicated some sexually perverted requital, though this theory is widely discredited.

It was not until 1943 that the next definitive case of criminal profiling arose, despite the heinous crimes that went on in the interlude; those of H. H. Holmes, Albert Fish, Peter Kudzinowski, Peter Kurten (The Vampire of Düsseldorf), Thomas Neil Cream (The Lambeth Poisoner), etc. It was Adolf Hitler who became the subject of the techniques of Criminal Profiling; a man regarded as a criminal who was psychologically profiled. This approach was considerably different from that employed by Dr Thomas Bond, firstly, in that the authority, Walter C. Langer, was not a medically trained man – although he was admitted to the American Psychiatric Association. Langer conducted his enquiries from afar, with no direct access to the manifestations of the subject’s behaviour – no murder scene to examine for nuanced clues, subtle details showing style, like the paint strokes of an artist that can conjure a picture of the author.

By 1943, victory over NAZI Germany was in no way a forgone conclusion so many avenues were explored to expedite it. While the titanic battles of Eastern Front played out, so distant from America, and after some defeats, it seemed Germany was not invincible, there were concerns that some kind of rabbit-out-of-the-hat weapon might materialise that would change the conflict of attrition and threaten the course of the war. The Americans wanted to take all precautions and sought an insight into the mind of their nemesis. Hitler, if not a serial killer, was certainly a man whose business was killing people he found undesirable, be they Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and given his maniacal racist theories, the scope of his genocide and eugenic madness, may have encompassed the majority of humanity.

Langer was commissioned by the Chief of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William J. Donovan, to develop a profile of Hitler, an endeavour he felt quite impossible at the time, and possibly otiose anyway. Langer’s task required the exhaustive location and analysis of information pertaining to Hitler’s background and life, of which a considerable store of documents could be accessed, though their value was highly questionable. There was of course Mein Kampf, which was his manifesto, and there was no shortage of his theories fervently expressed within! But more importantly, Langer would access footage of the dictator’s speeches and examine his deportment; much more relevant was the testimony he would solicit from those who had known him well, and for this he would call upon a few people who then resided in Canada and the U.S.A.

Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl had been a close friend and confidante of Hitler. He fell out of favour and defected, ending up in Canada, thence was handed over to President Roosevelt to work on his “S” Project to which he added much detail of over 400 NAZI officials. He then worked for Langer giving as much information as he could about Hitler’s mindset. One quote was, "What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 2½ hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years". Other than that, any incisive accounts are unknown here.

Otto Strasser, along with his brother, was a leading member of the NAZI party’s left-wing faction. After the Night of The Long Knives – in which his brother was killed – he was expelled and fled. Of his insight into Hitler, only one thing is recorded here and that is Otto’s recollection of a conversation with Geli Raubal, Hitler’s half-niece, who it is believed was held under strict conditions by him (as though an errant nun), in which she confided a terrible secret. Otto claimed that Geli was pressured by Hitler into urinating onto his chest; that this was for sexual gratification, and if so it would be urophilia. It has to be considered though that, given the hatred Otto had for Hitler – his brother having been murdered – this lurid tale may well have been libel, though it should be noted that Geli committed suicide not long after the confession.

The Freudian approach to such paraphiliac behavior, presuming it were true, would be to suggest something had malfunctioned in this individual’s development at the Anal Stage, which concerns both bowel and bladder function. It would be absurd to deny that something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in Hitler’s development, but the determination of exactly what that was is hugely speculative.

Edourd Bloch was a Jewish doctor, that of the Hitler family. He had observed Hitler as a child, noting that he was feeble looking but in good health - Hitler was the only male to live past childhood. Bloch was aware of the schism in the Hitler household, that of the violent alcoholic brute of a father – who would beat Adolf senseless – and the doting mother in whom he received succour, whose death from breast cancer in his early teens, Bloch noted, caused immense grief in the nascent tyrant. Bloch fled Austria during the Anschluss, headed for U.S.A., given free passage by Hitler after a missive explaining the peril he was in due to his former patient’s anti-Semitic tyranny.

Langer’s completed profile painted Hitler as someone of a paradoxical nature: on the one hand a hugely self-confident man, yet, there was a weak side to him. There was the emasculation caused by his father’s fists and feet, which he was no doubt desperate to remedy, and that innate rage can be counterpointed with the more feminine influence his mother might have imparted though her doting. There were the competing forces of cruelty and injustice courtesy of his father, who he despised, and compassion and fairness, from the upstanding nature of his mother, whom he regarded very highly. Bloch commented that “if she (his mother) knew what he had become, she would turn in her grave”.

This sort of background is conducive to the nature of the bully. The bully vents their rage on the vulnerable and sates the retribution sought upon another – with Hitler it was his father. Hitler made Europe his schoolyard, seeking whole peoples as the scapegoats for his mistreatment and the inability to seek redress back then. And he perhaps felt that he was somehow appointed to exact his vengeful plan, an instrument of divinity; someone who survived his brothers, and the First World War in which his Company had been decimated.

The weak side of Hitler manifested according to Langer as a modesty of his appearance, a sense of despondency when his maniacal phases had passed, and, awkwardness around women. The oedipal complex was considered present in his psyche – that he wanted to kill his father is highly plausible.

It was inferred that Hitler was a sadist and a masochist; that he probably indulged in many aberrant notions which would not be of interest were the subject not a demonic enurgumen bent on unleashing hell on earth.

What was postulated that proved to be true was that Hitler would most likely unravel and that faced with capture, would commit suicide. The analysis did not help the allies catch Hitler, nor understand much about the course of the war, which was a forgone conclusion by the latter part of 1943 barring the appearance of nuclear weaponry. It can therefore only be regarded as a probe into the darkest recesses of a cavernous mind in which the devil made his lair.

Langer later published his work as, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report. It should not be regarded as instructive in the study of the serial killers; perhaps though, serial killers do embark on a kind of genocide, which is severely limited due to their resources, and ends abruptly with their apprehension, death, mental deterioration, in some cases even surrender, and maybe, as unfathomable as their murderous intentions seem, they just desist.

The next person of note in the development of criminal profiling was the psychologist James A. Brussels, New York State's assistant commissioner of mental hygiene. Between 1940 and 1956, New York City was terrorized by a spate of bombings in locations including  movie theaters, phone booths, Radio City Music Hall, Grand Central Terminal, and Pennsylvania Station. The perpetrator was dubbed the “Mad Bomber”. Though he was not strictly a serial killer, two homicides were connected with him.

Brussels was recruited to profile the assailant while standard detective work was employed. Here we get to an era when science was much more applicable to the detection of criminals as forensics had become a serious tool in the elucidation of the essence of a crime scene and the trail to the criminal. But as for the profiling, in retrospect, it was still an art more than a science, if it has ever been deemed otherwise.

Brussels gave a rather detailed description of the “Mad Bomber” which turned out to be uncannily accurate in some ways. He said he would be a heavy middle-aged man who was unmarried, but perhaps living with a sibling. Moreover, the offender would be a skilled mechanic from Connecticut, who was a Roman Catholic immigrant and, while having an obsessional love for his mother would harbour a hatred for his father - a Freudian oedipal notion again. Brussels suggested that the offender had a personal vendetta against Consolidated Edison, the city’s power company: the first bomb targeted its 67th Street headquarters. Dr Brussels informed the police that, upon the offender's discovery, the "chances are he will be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned."

And so it turned out that some of Brussels’ speculations were quite exact: George Metesky, when tracked down, was in fact an immigrant Roman Catholic, an ex-employee of Con Ed, and wore a fully buttoned double-breasted suit when taken off to the Police Station. Those ventured predictions proved correct, were enough to convince many that Brussels knew this offender quite intimately based on his psychological analysis. Others were very skeptical, and here it would be useful consider this: of those characteristics Brussels proposed – what was the basis for such deduction, and what was the significance to the crimes?

After Brussels came Howard D. Teten, a veteran police officer from California whose profiling work began in 1962. He had liaised with Brussels while developing his own approach to criminal profiling, and though he disagreed with Brussels on matters Freudian, he did embrace the tenets of his investigative approach, or at least the gist of his methodology, which is not elaborated on to my knowledge enough that it can be outlaid here.

Teten was instrumental in the emergence of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, along with FBI Instructor Patrick J. Mullany, whose team he joined. They collaborated on a system of analysis of unknown offenders in unsolved cases, the theory being that to understand the intimate nature of the criminal, looking for mental illnesses and other behavioural traits, would give officers considerable advantage in their endeavours. Ideally, a feel for the nature of the offender could be composed, a sort of likeness, not and E-FIT of physical appearance – just a type. Where to locate the offender to employ this inference would remain a problem.

The methodology was brought to bear when a seven year old girl went missing from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana in June 1973. The FBI was brought in and Teten, Mullany and Col. Robert K. Ressler were called upon to employ their criminal investigative analysis technique to track down the unknown offender. Their profile drew up someone who was of a single young white male who was a Peeping Tom become homicidal; someone who liked to mutilate and keep trophy parts – or souvenirs (someone a lot like Ted Bundy!). It turned out that they were mostly correct: their profile, created using their “offender profiling or criminal investigative analysis”, led to the arrest of a David Meirhofer, a 23yr old single man, who was a suspect in another killing; a search of his house revealed the “souvenirs” suggested in the profile. That was the first case in some way credited to the FBI’s criminal profiling team – though it must be pointed out, this did not lead to his apprehension! A decade later, the technique became a more sophisticated and systematic profiling tool known as the Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (CIAP).

It was Ted Bundy and The Green River Killer who were next in line for the scrutiny of a criminal profiling, by a man whose name was Richard D. Keppel, along with a Criminal Psychologist named Richard Walter. In 1974 they began to combine their expertise; Walter was a psychologist in Michigan’s notoriously violent prison system, interviewing violent sex offenders and serial killers, to try and piece together the threads of their various mindsets to build a picture of axiomatic features, and from this he deduced the distinct subtypes: power-assertive, power-reassurance, anger-retaliatory, and anger-excitation or sadism.

Walter co-founded the Vidocq society, an exclusive organization of forensic professionals who solved cold cases for law enforcement agencies, worldwide. Both Keppel and Walter created the HITS (Hunter Integrated Telemetry System) database, which listed characteristics of violent crimes so that common threads could be investigated and links considered.

Whether the capture of either Bundy (he was arrested due to the failed rape/murder of Carol DaRonch – who identified him in a lineup) or Ridgway (picked up on prostitution charges) were in anyway expedited by criminal profiling is hard to say, but it seems highly unlikely given the nature of their arrests. This does pose problems for the advocates of offender profiling, who have to excuse the fact that luck or simple police methods seem to be the factors pertinent to the capture of so many of the serial killers, and added to that criticism, might be that, criminal profiling carries on while the murders do – so how active, or how prolific, does a serial killer need to be, while the profilers are working away, before their efforts are subject to serious skepticism?

With the departure of Teten from the Behavioral Sciences Unit in 1978, John Douglas and Robert Ressler came into prominence with their comprehensive studies of sex murderers, devising typologies of both organized and disorganized offenders, which are still utilized to this day.

Features of organized and disorganized killers can be summarized as follows:

Organized murder scene
Planned
Victim — targeted stranger
Control including restraints,
Controlled talk
Aggression before death
Body hidden or moved from crime scene
Weapon and evidence absent

Disorganized scene
Spontaneous
Victim — known by offender
Little control
 
Sexual acts before death
Body not hidden or left at crime scene.
Evidence present

Organized murderer
More-than-average lQ
Skilled occupation
Controlled mood
Living with partner
Mobile — for example, car
Socially competent
Sexually competent
High birth order status
Fathers work stable
Inconsistent discipline as child
Use of alcohol during crime
Follows crime on news
Limited change in behavior after crime

Disorganized murderer
Less-than-average IQ
Unskilled
Uncontrolled
Living alone
Lives near crime
Socially incompetent
Sexually incompetent
Low birth order status
Unstable
Harsh discipline as child
Alcohol not used during crime
Does not follow crime on news
Major behavior change after crime

Source: FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 1985

It was Ressler who founded the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC); he was also involved in the establishment of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), which is organizationally seated in Critical Incident Response Group's (CIRG) National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), all of which is within the FBI.

ViCAP is designed to track and correlate information on violent crime, especially murder. The FBI provides the software for the database which is widely used by state and local law enforcement agencies to compile information on:

• solved and unsolved homicides, especially those involving a kidnapping or if they are apparently motiveless, sexual or random or suspected to be part of a series

• missing persons, where foul play is suspected

• unidentified persons, where foul play is suspected

• sexual assault cases

The system merely seeks to correlate crimes, thus a matrix of information can be formed and correlations presented; deductions possible where similar features are revealed. This is not, ipso facto, a criminal profiling tool, just a database; it is still very much the work of the imagination of those possessed of it that must be employed to picture a perpetrator, something which must be considered an art.

The first comprehensive offender profile in Britain was the work of a Criminologist and Psychologist at the University of Surrey, David Canter. In 1986, a serial offender known, firstly as the Railway Rapist, then after his first murder, as the Railway Killer, was profiled, and when later arrested, 13 of the 17 proclamations about John Duffy (whose accomplice was Mulcahy), by David Canter proved to be true.

It would be tempting to say that 13 out of 17 is fairly conclusive proof of the value of offender profiling, but it has been pointed out by a few detractors that this is in no way quite the sage insight that it seems: one must consider how vague the deductions are and how much they can be fitted around the actualities, hence, a very well worded interpretation might allow for much leeway when applied to the findings; there is also the fact that prognostications can be very platitudinous and be applied to many people, relating to the most mundane aspects of human life, which even deranged serial killers adopt.

According to former FBI agent Greg McCrary, the process of profiling for homicides is predicated on the premise that behaviour reflects personality. This is far more pertinent for a serial killer than common-or-garden murderers whose activities are merely a means to an end or resultant from fairly common behavioural traits such as jealousy, anger, betrayal etc. That is not to say that serial killers don’t present these regular traits also; it is the aberrant behaviour which may give them away, if it can be detected and they can be traced, displaying their distinguishing features.

FBI profilers try to collect the personality of the offender through questions about his or her behaviour at four phases:

• Antecedent: What fantasy or plan, or both, did the murderer have in place before the act? What triggered the murderer to act some days and not others?

• Method and manner: What type of victim or victims did the murderer select? What was the method and manner of murder: shooting, stabbing, strangulation or something else?

• Body disposal: Did the murder and body disposal take place all at one scene, or multiple scenes?

• Post-offense behaviour: Is the murderer trying to inject himself into the investigation by reacting to media reports or contacting investigators?

Another representation of the strategic approach is rendered thus:

Certain information about the offender is supplied before a profile can be made: colour photos of the crime scene, data about the neighbourhood of the crime (for example, the type of housing and average income of residents), the medical examiner’s report, a map of the victim’s travels prior to death, a complete investigative report of the incident, and background details of the victim. The collection of this information is part of a systematic process following four stages:

• Data assimilation – collection of all available information.

• Crime classification – attempts to classify the crime.

• Crime reconstruction – attempts to reconstruct the crime and generate hypotheses about behaviours involved.

• Profile generation.

Rossmo (1997) has analysed the process of how serial killers find a victim into two phases:

The first phase is “the Victim Search Method”, which can be divided into four variables:

• Hunters or, “marauders”; these offenders set out in their environs looking for a particular type of victim – it was found that 87% out of a group of British serial rapists lived within an “Offence Circle” – they operate locally.

• Poachers or, “Commuters”, are offenders who set out to find a particular type of victim some distance from their abode. The FBI noted that 51% of a group of serial rapists lived outside their “offence circles”.

• Trollers are those who engage in their crimes opportunistically, while engaged in a separate activity.

• Trappers are offenders who locate their victims through their line of work, particularly if it affords them some control over them: Gerald Schaeffer, who was convicted of two murders, but may have committed as many as 34 was a police officer.

The second phase is the “victim attack method”, sub-divided into three types.
• Raptor, who attacks victim on meeting.

• Stalker, who follows victim, then attacks.

• Ambusher, who attacks only when victim is in a situation controlled by offender, such as the offender’s premises.

Sadly, this terminology fails to narrow down traits to a level where categorisation of known offenders is made any nearer the science that criminology seeks to be. Ted Bundy could be aligned with multiple categories of the above as he committed many different variations of those crimes, all as a means of fulfilling his ultimate goal, that of murdering young women for sexual gratification, if not other less understood reasons. It seems that he merely adapted his approach depending on what he thought he could get away with.

According to Holmes & Holmes (1996) there are three major goals of profiling:

• Social and psychological assessments: the profile should contain basic information about the offender’s personality, age, race, type of employment (if any), religion, marital status and level of education.

• Psychological evaluation of belongings: once a main suspect has been identified, the profile should provide suggestions as to any possessions the offender may have that would associate him with the crime scene. These may include scene souvenirs, photos or items of pornography.

• Interviewing suggestions and strategies: people who have committed similar crimes do not respond to questioning in the same way as their motives are different. A good profile can provide the police with strategies that may be effective for a particular type of offender. An example cited by Holmes & Holmes (1996) was the murder of a young girl and her boyfriend in which the stepfather was the main suspect irrespective of the lack of substantiating forensic evidence: under conventional investigation, he denied involvement, so the profiler, thinking him a man pathologically controlling, suggested an approach whereby they solicit his help in solving crime. The suspect was surrounded by photographs of the crime scene and, fell into a sense of controlling the investigation becoming engrossed; revealing such familiarity with the crime that he eventually broke down and confessed.

In conclusion, offender profiling, though a comprehensive discipline, extensively adapted, evolved, and developed, and firmly inveigled in governmental agencies of law enforcement, is persistently decried as useless and even harmful to investigations. According to consultant psychologist Dr Craig Jackson, co-author of a critique of the profession, “Behavioural profiling has never led to the direct apprehension of a serial killer or murderer, so it seems to have no real-world value,” furthermore, “There have been no clinical trials to show that behavioural profiling works and there have been major miscarriages of justice”.

Unfortunately, his sentiments are upheld by this author who sees that no normative individual will ever get inside the mind of the serial killer to fully understand their nature despite the temptation to do so. There is so much about criminal profiling that fails to predict; the nature of serial killers being almost wholly unpredictable, their novelty unforeseen, and yet, working with past information on the MOs and psychological profiles of past captured offenders is expected to yield valuable insight into serial killers at work and undetected and those who are yet to be. Given the number of serial killers operating at a given time – a wildly speculative guess – where are the profilers’ fruits of deduction? Serial killers are invariably caught in ways which, though perhaps it could be argued are assisted by the application of scientific and psychological analysis and empiricism, are due to standard police work, luck, grave errors by the offender in their crimes or, their loss of control, and there are some who just hand themselves in.

The stark lack of concrete validation for this branch of criminal investigation will continue to be highlighted as new unforeseen characters emerge, whose traits confound those who believe they have the answers, but are merely clutching at straws and trying to imagine what someone completely unlike themselves might present as and this is surely a hopeless task. Give me a profiler who predicts the next Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy type individual, with comprehensive details about his emergence, development and traits, and enough details of the crimes to be, and I will think that person somehow a prophet, or incredibly lucky in their guess work.