Module 5 - Criminal Profiling

History has proven that multiple murderers are of various types, each with distinct characteristics.

A mass murderer kills several people, typically at the same time and at one location. Mass murderers are sometimes divided into those who kill only members of their family and those who kill victims to whom they are not related. For example, a former computer programmer, Richard Farley, was fired for stalking one of his co-workers. He returned to his former workplace with a gun, killed seven, and injured four of his ex-colleagues. The female he had stalked was one of the four people injured.

A spree murderer kills several victims during a short time, usually in two or more locations. For example, spree killer Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University better known as Virginia Tech, caused the Virginia Tech massacre. The tragedy consisted of two separate shootings about two hours apart in April 2007 on the Virginia Tech campus. Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 people before committing suicide. The Virginia Tech massacre is the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history.

A serial murderer kills several victims in three or more separate events during a time that may be days, weeks, months, or even years. Many serial killers are psychopaths who are considered to have a personality disorder but appear quite normal and charming. Serial killers are motivated specifically by various psychological urges, primarily power and sexual compulsion. Serial murderers are further categorized into three sub-types:

• Visionary: The offender hears voices or sees visions that tell him or her to kill.
• Missionary: The offender goes on a hunting mission to rid Earth of a certain group of people.
• Hedonistic: Offenders are of four types, all of whom take pleasure in the kill: comfort-oriented, lust-oriented, thrill-oriented, and power-oriented. The latter takes pleasure in domination and manipulation, getting a ‘rush’ from the victim’s misery.

Behaviour Reflects Personality

In criminal profiling and especially in homicide investigations, the behaviour of an offender is thought to reflect the personality of the offender. Profilers try to predict the personality of the offender after analyzing the suspect’s behaviour before, during, and after the crime. To predict personality from behaviour, criminal profilers often try to answer the following questions:

In 1980, Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas made a distinction between organized and disorganized criminal behaviour. Both Hazelwood and Douglas were criminal profilers working in the FBI’s Behavioral Science unit.

Organized Offenders: As the name implies, organized offenders plan and execute their crimes in organized ways because they are scheming, deliberate, and methodical individuals. The organized offender is a self-absorbed psychopath lacking empathy and remorse. Most organized offenders are well spoken, outgoing, and pleasant. Because of this, they appear non-threatening at first. Organized offenders target their victims, choosing primarily strangers whom they often capture by conning them, perhaps by offering money or asking for assistance. Offenders usually bring their own weapons and take them from the crime scenes. Organized offenders are careful; they often take time to clean up or remove evidence such as fingerprints, blood, bullet cartridges, or knives from the crime scenes. Often this type of offender will move or conceal the body.

Disorganized Offenders: In contrast, disorganized offenders are loners with poor social skills. They often feel inadequate and have difficulties maintaining friendships and loving relationships. Disorganized offenders tend to appear unkempt and often will live in messy homes. Their crimes are usually committed impulsively sparked by a mental disorder, drugs, alcohol, youth, or inexperience. The disorganized offender tends to attack people they know, such as family, friends, neighbours, or acquaintances. Their victims are incapacitated quickly without much warning and usually left badly mutilated. They often kill their victims with items at the crime scene and make no effort to hide the weapons or the bodies afterwards. This type of offender leaves a chaotic mess.

The following two lists outline some of the potential behavioural and personality traits often exhibited by organized and disorganized offenders.

Some crime scenes demonstrate elements of both criminal sophistication and chaos. These point to an offender with a combination of organized and disorganized characteristics. Although criminals have one or even two characteristics that fit the opposite offender profile, they are considered a combination offender only if they have an equal number of characteristics from both offender categories.

Criminals with combination or mixed characteristics may be described as

Some believe that the perfect crime is one committed so well that no evidence is apparent and, therefore, the culprit cannot be traced. The most likely individuals to commit perfect crimes include suspects who picked victims they do not know and suspects with no criminal records. Nothing is stolen during the crime, and the culprits have told no one about the crimes. Some examples are the Black Dahlia murder, the Zodiac murders, and the Chicago Tylenol poisonings. The possibility remains that a culprit for these so-called perfect crimes may someday be identified.

- Image Source: Wikipedia.org

His Early Years

Ted Bundy was born in November 1946 at a facility for young unwed mothers. The identity of Bundy’s biological father was unknown to him; he grew up thinking his grandparents were actually his parents. To hide the shame of his unwed mother, he was made to believe that his mother was actually his older sister. Bundy achieved high grades in school and was known as well mannered and well dressed. When Bundy went to university for degrees in psychology and eventually law, he fell in love for the first time. However, this relationship ended badly, and he was devastated. Soon after this break up, he discovered his parents were actually his grandparents.

The Washington State Murders

Bundy’s first confirmed assault was on the night of January 4, 1974. He entered the basement bedroom of an 18-year-old female dancer and student at the University of Washington. He sexually assaulted the girl, then he beat her with a metal rod from her bed frame. The girl survived and but suffered permanent brain damage. Later that month, Bundy killed another University of Washington student and dumped her body in a separate location. His next attack was in March 1974 at Evergreen State College where he kidnapped and murdered a 19-year-old female student. A month later, a female student from Central Washington State College disappeared. He lured her by wearing a cast on his arm and asking her to help him carry some books to his car, a Volkswagen Beetle.

His next victim was a female student at Oregon State University who was last seen in May 1974. In June 1974, he killed two young female university students, one after she was seen leaving a tavern late one night and the other while she was walking at night from her boyfriend’s dorm to her sorority house on the University of Washington campus. Witnesses later reported that a man with a leg cast was seen asking a woman to help him carry a large briefcase to his car, a Volkswagen Beetle.

In July 1974, Bundy changed the location and time of day he hunted for his victims from university campuses at night to parks during the day. Twice during the same day, he abducted and murdered two young females from Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington. Numerous witnesses told the police a handsome young man named Ted with a Canadian accent asked them to help him unload a sailboat from his Volkswagen Beetle because one of his arms was in a sling. Several witnesses actually saw one of the victims walk away from the beach with Ted. All eyewitness accounts led to police distributing a sketch and description of Ted Bundy to newspapers and television stations. This eventually led to Bundy's girlfriend, one of his psychology professors and a former co-worker and now famous crime novelist Ann Rule, to report him as a possible suspect. However, police did not pay much attention to this report because he was a clean-cut law student.

The Utah Murders

In the fall of 1974, Ted Bundy moved from Washington to attend law school in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he continued to kill young females. However, he changed his modus operandi (MO). He decided to target young females that were not university students. He lured his victims by claiming to be a police officer conducting an investigation. He abducted and killed three young females during October 1974. However, when he tried this technique in November 1974, it failed twice. On the first occasion, a young female got into Bundy’s car after he told her she needed to come with him to the police station. After she was in the car, he handcuffed her. However, when he tried to hit her with a crowbar, she managed jumped from the car while he was driving. This failure did not seem to deter Bundy because later that day he hunted for another victim. At a Utah high school, he tried to convince a teacher and a student to come to his ‘police car’, but they both refused. Instead, he abducted and killed a 17-year-old female student who was leaving the school to pick up her younger brother.

The Colorado and Idaho Murders

Likely because he had been seen by numerous eye witnesses in Utah, in 1975 Bundy decided to target females in the nearby states of Colorado and Idaho. From January 1975 to May 1975, he abducted and killed four separate females by pretending to have a leg injury and asking for help to his car. One victim was taken just outside her hotel while on a holiday; two victims were abducted in the parking lot of a ski hill; the fourth was a junior high school student who disappeared while walking home from school.

Arrest and Two Escapes

While driving his car in August 1975 in Utah, Bundy was arrested for failing to stop for a police officer. When police searched his Volkswagen Beetle, they found what appeared to be burglary tools: a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, and an ice pick. Detectives soon linked his car to the kidnapping in which the girl escaped and to the other Utah murders. In March 1976 following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In 1977 while awaiting for his trial for the murder of one of the Utah victims, Bundy escaped from the law library of the court building. He was caught after only six days, but seven months later, he escaped again from jail.

Florida Rampage Leads to Final Arrest

After his second escape, Bundy took a train, then a stolen car, and finally a bus to Florida where he began another murderous rampage. In January 1978, in a 30-minute period late one night, he brutally attacked four female students at a sorority house on the Florida State University campus. Two of the victims died after the attack; the other two were severely injured. Bundy then broke into another home a few blocks away and severely injured another female student while she slept. In February 1978, he killed a 12-year-old girl in south Florida. He was caught less than a week later in a stolen Volkswagen Beetle. He eventually confessed to murdering 35 young women, but many believe the number to be much higher. Ted Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989, after he lost several court appeals.

Bundy’s Modus Operandi

To gain a better understanding of serial murderers and organized offenders, Ted Bundy was interviewed by criminal profilers while he was incarcerated. Ted Bundy’s modus operandi was both fascinating and frightening. It provided experts with a better understanding of the deviant mindset of organized serial murderers.

Ted Bundy’s MO included the following:

Mugshot of Richard Trenton Chase

- Image Source: Wikipedia.org

Early Years

Richard Trenton Chase was born in May 1950 into a middle class family in California, U.S.A. He had a very strict father with whom he was never close and an abusive mother. At age 10, Chase had trouble with bedwetting, he liked playing with fire, and he began torturing and killing cats. In his early teens, he began using drugs and alcohol heavily. He dated some girls in high school, but he stopped to avoid embarrassment when he discovered he had an erectile dysfunction.

A Fragile Mental State

After high school and into his twenties, Chase had trouble finding and maintaining employment as well as a place to live because of his strange behaviour and because he looked so unkempt. He was treated various times in psychiatric hospitals and was prescribed anti-psychosis medication that he did not always take. The strange behaviours that lead to this treatment included going into hospital emergency rooms and stating that his pulmonary artery had been stolen or killing dogs and rabbits, then drinking their blood and eating some of their raw organs. He said he did this to maintain his own blood levels, which he felt would disappear if he did not continually stock up. In addition, Chase often held oranges on his head, believing the Vitamin C would absorb into his brain through osmosis.

Committed to a Mental Institution

In 1975, Chase was sent to a mental institution when he contracted blood poisoning after injecting rabbit's blood into his veins. He escaped from the facility and went home to his mother. He was soon apprehended and sent to an institution for the criminally insane. In this facility, he killed some birds while outside and attempted to drink their blood.

After undergoing months of what his physicians thought were successful treatments with various anti-psychotic drugs, in 1976 Chase was released into the care of his mother. Mrs. Chase felt Richard did not need to be on the antipsychotic medication he was prescribed; over time, she stopped giving it to him.

First Two Victims

In December 1977, Richard Chase shot his first victim, Ambrose Griffin, in a drive-by shooting outside her home. Just a few blocks away from her, he killed his second victim, Teresa Wallin, in January 1978. Blood was smeared all around Wallin’s house after Chase shot her, sexually assaulted her, and removed some of her internal organs.

His Last Victims

One mile away from the Wallin house on January 27, 1978, Chase entered the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth. Once inside, he met Miroth’s neighbour, Don Meredith, whom he shot. Then, he stole Meredith’s wallet and car keys. Soon afterwards, he shot Evelyn Miroth, her 6-year-old son Jason, and Miroth's 22-month-old nephew, David. He sexually assaulted Miroth and consumed some of her blood. During this carnage, Chase was startled by a knock at the door by a six-year-old girl, a friend of the young Jason Miroth. The frightened girl alerted a neighbour who called police, but Chase fled the scene by stealing Don Meredith's car taking the 22-month-old’s body with him. Chase returned to his home with the body where he drank some of the dead toddler’s blood, ate some of his internal organs, and dumped the body at a nearby church.

His Arrest and Trial

Upon entering the crime scene, police discovered that Chase had left complete fingerprints, handprints, and shoe imprints in the blood that he had smeared around the home. These prints, in addition to a FBI criminal profile, led to the apprehension of Richard Trenton Chase in February 1978. In January 1979, the four-month trial of Chase began. He was found guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death, but he died of a drug overdose in prison before his execution.

His Delusional Motive

When Richard Trenton Chase was asked why he would drink the blood and eat the organs from some of his victims, he said that he needed to do this to prevent Nazis from turning his blood into powder. He believed that Nazis had planted poison beneath his soap dish.

Mugshot of Richard Jeffrey Dahmer

- Image Source: Wikipedia.org

Early Years and His First Murder

Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, and apparently had a happy and healthy childhood. However, at the age of four he underwent surgery for a double hernia after which the family moved to Ohio. These two events seem to change Dahmer; he became very shy, uncommunicative, and very tense around others. During his school years, he was a loner who achieved average grades. He began to drink heavily during high school.

Dahmer’s parents divorced after years of fighting. In 1978, his mother left the family immediately after he finished high school; his father soon remarried. Shortly after, at age 18 Dahmer committed his first murder. He picked up a young male hitchhiker, Steven, and brought him to his house where they began drinking together. When Steven wanted to leave Dahmer’s house, Dahmer prevented him by killing him and burying him in the backyard.

Early Arrests

Dahmer went to university but failed and had to drop out after one semester. He enrolled in the army, but he was discharged after two years because of his excessive drinking problem. In 1982, at 22 years of age, he moved in with his grandmother in Wisconsin. Later that year, he was arrested for the first time after he exposed his genitals at a state fair. Then in 1986, he was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison for masturbating in front of two young boys.

A Series of Murders

In 1988, about one year after his release from prison, Dahmer was arrested and found guilty of drugging and molesting a 13-year-old boy. In 1989, while he was awaiting sentencing and unknown to police, he murdered another young man. In May 1989, he was sentenced to one year in a work release camp. Dahmer was released early for good behaviour and put on probation.

When Jeffrey Dahmer was free, he moved into his own apartment and began murdering more young men. In a 14-month period between 1990 and 1991, he killed 12 victims. He met most of his victims at gay bars and invited them to his place. In his apartment, he would drug, strangle, sexually assault, dismember, and finally dispose of the body. He would keep some of the body parts (such as the skull and genitals) of his victims in his refrigerator as souvenirs.

Dahmer was almost caught in May 1991 when one of his victims escaped. In the early morning, a 14-year-old boy was discovered wandering nude in the streets near Dahmer’s apartment. When Dahmer realized his victim had left his apartment, he went to look for him only to meet up with two police officers. Dahmer told the officers that the teen was his 19-year-old lover and that they had an argument while drinking. Despite the teen’s protests, police brought him back to Dahmer’s apartment. Later that night, Dahmer killed and dismembered the boy, keeping his skull as a souvenir.

His Apprehension

Dahmer was apprehended in July 1991 when once again one of his victims, a 32-year-old man, escaped from his apartment. Like his last victim, the 32-year-old was found wandering the streets near Dahmer’s apartment. He had managed to escape from Dahmer during a struggle in which Dahmer was trying to put handcuffs on him. The would-be victim led police officers back to Dahmer’s apartment. At first, Dahmer was friendly towards police and his place seemed very neat and tidy. However, the officers noticed a terrible odour. When they searched Dahmer’s home, they discovered various human body parts in his refrigerator and photographs showing his victims in various stages of death.

Trial and Eventual Death

Police discovered that Jeffrey Dahmer had killed at least 17 men. Dahmer admitted to eating the flesh of at least one of his victims. With so much evidence against him, Dahmer pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. After a lengthy trial in 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty of 15 counts of murder and was sentenced to 957 consecutive years in prison. In 1994, two years into his sentence, he was beaten to death by another inmate.

General Description

Geographic profiling is a sub-type of criminal profiling. This investigative tool involves analyzing the locations of a related series of crimes to determine the most probable location of an offender’s residence or place of work. This strategy is based on the assumption that criminals do not stray far from areas familiar to them, especially routes they travel among work, home, and recreational areas.

Geographical profiling is not intended to solve a crime by identifying immediately the name of a suspect. Its methodology is based on the premise that a mathematical analysis of crime scene locations, seen through the perspective of environmental criminology, can increase the efficiency of a police investigation by focusing attention on a specific geographic area in which the suspect might live or work.

Criminal profiling is the “who”; geographic profiling is the “where”.

History

Since the methodology of geographical profiling began in the early 1990s, it has become an increasingly popular avenue of investigation in complex crimes involving serial offenders. It has been used in numerous investigations in North America and Europe in recent years. Although the use of spatial analysis methods in police investigations goes back many years (think of pushpins stuck in large maps), the formalized process commonly referred to as geographic profiling originated in research conducted at the School of Criminology of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, in 1989. Its theoretical foundation is rooted in environmental criminology, routine activity theory, and rational choice theory. Advances in crime-pattern theory associated with the work of other researchers at Simon Fraser University led to the search for an effective predictive model of crime.

Research focused on the theory that offenders maintained buffer zones around their homes in which they avoided committing crimes to protect their anonymity. A second theory, commonly referred to as distance decay, is a mathematical function that describes the path of travel taken by offenders as they search for criminal opportunities. This theory suggests that offenders are not interested in travelling long distances to commit crimes unless they are attempting to achieve a larger potential payoff. In other words, offenders are attracted by the ‘pull’ of a potential target, but are ‘pushed’ from their own neighbourhood for fear of being identified by someone who knows them.

The successful development of an algorithm that supported geographic profiling is largely the work of Dr. D. Kim Rossmo, who established its basic principles while completing his Ph.D. in Criminology at Simon Fraser University. Rossmo was a police officer at that time, working as a foot patrol officer in downtown Vancouver at night and attending classes during the day. In 1991, Rossmo created a mathematical formula that expresses two basic principles:

For example, a crime can occur only when a ‘motivated’ offender encounters a defenceless victim in the absence of a guardian figure such as police, security, or even other people. In other words, criminal behaviour results from a decision-making process based on a balance between the probability of being caught and the amount of effort that is necessary to commit a crime.

Rossmo created an equation and turned into an algorithm. This is the basis of a software program called Rigel and drives the analytical work supporting geographic profiling.

After completing his PhD in 1995, Rossmo was transferred to a full-time geographic profiling unit within the Vancouver Police Department, the first of its kind in North America. This approach was slow to catch on, but it is now used in several U.S., Canadian, British, and European law enforcement agencies. Originally designed for violent crime investigations, it is used also in cases of repeat property crime.

Dr. Rossmo has since left the Vancouver Police Department. He is now a Research Professor at the Texas State University Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation where he works full-time on geographic profiling.

Tools employed by geographic profilers include various software systems such as Rigel, Predator, and CrimeStat. Input data typically consist of suspect-victim encounter sites, victim or body recovery locations, suspicious vehicle sightings, related public complaints or tips, and residential and employment locations of known suspects. The greater the number of data points one has to work with, the greater the degree of accuracy within the map. This information is entered into a geographic information system (GIS) that creates a three-dimensional surface map, sometimes referred to as a geoprofile. This map depicts the most likely area in which the primary suspect resides.

The use of such software in crime scene analysis involves entering various coordinates into an algorithm to interpret an offender’s pattern of behaviour. Geographic profiling assumes that the commission of serial crimes follows an identifiable pattern and that most people commit crimes relatively close to home or work. This system incorporates all methods of transportation a person could access and recognizes that an offender will usually maintain a buffer zone around his or her home to ensure some personal sense of anonymity.

Three-dimensional maps are based on occurrence locations. Areas of red represent hot spots of criminal activity. The combination of red and blue areas on the map constitutes what is known as a jeopardy surface, a type of topographical map with each ‘hot’ zone resembling the peak of a volcano. These peaks of criminal activity indicate areas in which an offender is assumed to reside. Investigators can then focus on neighbourhoods or places of work located in the immediate vicinity of these peaks, effectively narrowing the field of suspects who must be interviewed. Although a geographic profile does not produce a suspect’s name, it assists investigators by reducing the list of people police interview.

The geographic profile is then superimposed on a street map that pinpoints where the crimes being investigated have occurred. This map is often referred to as containing the ‘fingerprints’ of the offender's cognitive map. The program's predictive power is related to the number of crime sites entered into the program, which means that a suspect’s increased activity may increase the chances that he will be apprehended. After the map is created, police may assign surveillance teams to specific areas based on their assumptions of where the offender may strike next, or more commonly, they will use it to reduce the size of an area that must be canvassed for information on possible suspects.

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

• Distance: Perceptions of distance of criminal activity from home or work vary from one criminal to another, but they can be influenced by the availability of transportation, the number of barriers (such as bridges or state boundaries), the type of roads, and the criminal’s familiarity with the area.

• Mental map: A cognitive image of a person’s surroundings developed through experiences, travel routes, reference points, and centres of activity is a mental map. The places where we feel safe are taken for granted within our mental maps. Investigators consider that this principle is also true for offenders. As offenders grow bolder, their mental maps may change to produce an increase in the range of their criminal activity.

• Mobility: Some criminals are geographically stable (they stay in a certain region) and some are transient (they travel around). Whether they tend toward stability or mobility depends much on their experience with travel, means for travel, sense of personal security, and predatory motivations. For example, Ted Bundy travelled from the U.S. Pacific Northwest to Florida before being arrested by police. He eventually admitted to killing people in ten different states.

Geographic profiling focuses on these three factors in studying predatory behaviour. Criminals are thought to have certain awareness spaces—places where they feel comfortable enough to seek potential victims. Investigators see these to be the offender’s primary focus of activity. Serial killers are thought to display highly formatted predation patterns, but those suffering from mental disorders may pose difficult challenges for profilers because of their irrational and erratic actions. Richard Chase, also known as the Vampire Killer for his psychotic and highly aberrant behaviour that resulted in the murder of six people during a one-month period in 1977-1978, is such an offender. Only because of his reckless behaviour and disregard for being captured were police able to identify him so quickly. When Rossmo applied the software program Rigel retroactively to the Richard Chase investigation while testing the algorithm for his doctoral thesis, it showed that Chase's home was within 1.7 % of the total hunting area.

The Use of Geographic Profiling by Law Enforcement

Geographic profiling is used typically in cases of serial murder or serial rape, but it may be used in arson, bombing, and robbery. Geographic profiling helps police investigators prioritize information in large-scale major crime investigations that often generate hundreds or thousands of tips and suspects.

This system has had much success, as in the case of the Southside Rapist who sexually assaulted more than 12 women from 1985 to 1999 in Lafayette, Louisiana. When Dr. Rossmo was called to assist in the investigation, his geographic profile reduced the number of possible suspects to a list of twelve. He was initially disappointed to see that DNA testing cleared all twelve suspects, but the validity of the profile was supported when the culprit was later identified through a tip to police. This individual, who was not on the original list of suspects, actually lived within the topographical hotspot generated by Rossmo’s profile map.

Geographic profiling was used with a lesser degree of success in the Beltway Sniper attacks that occurred near Washington, DC, in October 2002. The two killers responsible for the murder or wounding of thirteen people were eventually apprehended after a tip from the public. Rossmo was called to assist in the investigation, but he discovered later that the transient lifestyle of the two offenders negated the use of ‘anchor points’ critical to successful geographic profiling. Because both men were living in their car during the shootings, there was no way to identify a pattern of behaviour incorporating travel between home, work, and recreational areas.

How Police Construct a Geographic Profile

The construction of a geographic profile involves

To assist from a scientific perspective, geographic profilers rely on software that assesses the spatial characteristics of a crime. Using specific measurements, the program makes numerous calculations and produces a topographic map based on the locations of similar crimes. In providing these results, the program takes into account known movement patterns, comfort zones, and ‘hunting’ patterns exhibited by the suspect.

The case of Clifford Robert Olson, one of the most dangerous serial killers in Canadian history, was another source of information that Dr. Rossmo referred to when he tested his theory of geographic profiling. In 1981, Olson murdered 11 children and teens in the Vancouver area. Rossmo later generated a map of Olson’s crimes and pinpointed his address to within a four-block radius encompassing areas of activity related to the abduction of his victims.

The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children

In his dissertation, Dr. D. Kim Rossmo used the Clifford Olson serial homicide case as an example to illustrate his theory of geographic profiling.

Early Years

Clifford Robert Olson was born on January 1, 1940, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Despite being raised in a reportedly stable home with no signs of abuse, at a young age he showed signs of delinquency. Olson was known as a bully and a show-off who loved to be the centre of attention. He skipped classes by Grade 4 and failed several grades in school; and it was rumoured he had tortured and killed animals. Olson was a loner who had no close friends and who was frequently in trouble for compulsive talking. He skipped school frequently and was first arrested for theft at age 13. Olson left school at age 16. From then until he was 40 years old, he was convicted of 83 criminal offences. As an adult, Olson lived outside of prison for only four years by the time he was 40 years old. In terms of various lengths, he had spent more than 22 years in prison.

The Murders

Olson owned a construction company and hired young boys and girls by promising them money. Some of these youngsters did legitimately work for Olson; however, many became his victims. Often, he picked victims in the middle of the day offering them a ride or a job. Then, he would either sexually assault and/or kill them.

Olson murdered his first victim in November 1980. He abducted a 12-year-old girl in Surrey, British Columbia, strangled her with a belt, and stabbed her repeatedly. The body was found on Christmas Day. In April 1981, Olson killed a 13-year-old girl, but her body was not found until five months later. Next, Olson abducted a 16-year-old boy, smashing the boy's head with a hammer and tossing him into a ditch.

In May 1981, near the time Olson married and his wife gave birth to his only child, he was accused of molesting a five-year-old neighbour girl. However, he was never formally charged due to lack of evidence. In May, just four days after his wedding, Olson abducted and murdered a 16-year-old girl; the following month, he killed a 13-year-old girl.

In July 1981, Olson killed seven youngsters of various ages—the youngest a 9-year-old and the oldest an 18-year-old German tourist. Unlike his first three female victims, two of the six victims were boys. He sexually assaulted all his victims, but he killed them in various ways. Four of the victims he strangled to death; three of the victims he bludgeoned to death. Olson dumped most of his victim’s bodies in remote locations, but kept evidence from each murder as a souvenir.

Within nine months, Olson had killed two children and nine youths. Initially, the cases were not linked by authorities because the victims were of both sexes, of varying ages, and murdered in various ways. Also, only three bodies had been found at that time; the other seven were tentatively considered probable runaways. However, in late 1981, when police realized that a serial killer was responsible for the deaths, a major investigation was initiated.

Prime Suspect and Surveillance

Clifford Robert Olson became a prime suspect early in the investigation because he lived in the Surrey area and he had a lengthy criminal record. Police brought Olson in for questioning, but they had insufficient evidence to hold him. However, because their suspicions about him were high, he was put under surveillance.

Olson was not easy to follow. He would often stop in the middle of a street, make sudden U-turns, or go down one-way alleys, stop, and reverse. Olson also drove continually in various rental cars. In a 3-month period, he travelled more than 20 000 kilometres in 14 different rental cars.

Attempted Abduction Leads to Arrest

In August 1981, Olson was arrested for attempting to abduct two young female hitchhikers. Olson picked up the girls near Nanaimo, BC, and drove them up a dirt-logging road. Two RCMP surveillance cars followed him and blocked the entrance to the road. Two officers on foot then followed the car until it stopped. When Olson began yelling at one of the girls, police moved in and arrested Olson.

Olson’s Controversial Deal

When police investigators began questioning Olson about the string of unsolved murders, he soon offered them a deal. He would confess to all 11 murders and show them where the bodies were if his wife and young son were given $10 000 for each victim. At first, this deal infuriated investigators. However, because they had little evidence to tie Olson to the murders and because the families of the missing children were desperate, the deal was eventually made.

In January 1982, Clifford Robert Olson pleaded guilty to 11 counts of murder and took police to each of the bodies. Olson was given 11 concurrent life sentences, and his wife and son were given $100 000.

Create Your Own Geographical Profile

You are part of a Police Task Force that is responsible for investigating a series of armed robberies committed within the northeast quadrant of a large Canadian city over the past four months. To date, 14 robberies have occurred, and everyone is concerned that the suspect is becoming increasingly violent. You and your team must identify this person as quickly as possible, but resources are limited and you have very little time to follow up the hundreds of tips received from the public. Therefore, you decide to create a geographic profile map to help shorten your long list of suspects.

Fourteen sets of coordinates have been provided to indicate the locations of the robberies. Plot the following crime location coordinates on the graph paper provided to create a mock geographical profile map. You also have a list of three possible suspects, but only one surveillance team is currently available. Therefore, you need to use the geographic profile to shorten your list of suspects so that you can utilize your resources as effectively as possible.

After you have plotted all fourteen coordinates, determine which of the three suspects lives and works closest to the ‘hotspots’ identified by the geographic profile.

Which suspect will you ask your surveillance team to follow?
Read Answer

- Sergeant A. Kowalyk, Edmonton Police Service

Criminal profiling is an investigative tool that is used by police to shorten a list of criminal suspects. A criminal profile identifies some of the major personality and behavioural characteristics of an unknown offender based on a detailed analysis of the crime scene. The assumptions made by criminal profiling experts about the behaviours and personalities of unknown offenders have helped law enforcement in the hunt for suspects responsible for serious crimes.

This lesson focuses upon two crime case studies involving criminal profiling. Based on actual events in history, the first crime case study is The Railway Killers; the second is The BTK Strangler. You are expected to answer related questions about these case studies in your assignment booklet.

John Duffy was a violent rapist who embarked upon a four-year crime spree in 1982, attacking lone women near railway stations throughout various neighbourhoods in London, England. It was first thought that he had committed these crimes by himself, but police eventually concluded that he had an accomplice. They would be unable to establish sufficient proof until 1997, when Duffy admitted that David Mulcahy, a childhood friend, had been involved from the very beginning.

The First Attacks

The first sexual assault occurred in July 1982 when the yet to be identified Duffy and his accomplice attacked and raped a 23-year-old woman near a train station in a neighbourhood outside North London. Eighteen more attacks occurred, mainly at night, near various railway stations in the London area. Most victims were teenage girls attacked while waiting for their train to arrive.

When investigators became convinced that two individuals appeared to be responsible for the violent sexual assaults that terrorized the citizens of London, the pair became known as the Railway Rapists. It was later discovered that most of the crimes occurred as close as a five-minute walk from Duffy's house.

Operation Hart

In July 1985, three women were raped on the same night, all within a neighbourhood in North London. The police quickly set up a Task Force, calling it Operation Hart. It was the largest multi-jurisdictional police investigation in the United Kingdom since the Yorkshire Ripper investigation was concluded successfully several years before.

In August 1985, Duffy happened to be arrested after assaulting his wife. His name was eventually added to the Operation Hart computer system as one of many thousands of local men who were being investigated as possible suspects.

In September 1985, another vicious sexual assault occurred. Police thought the attacker’s description resembled Duffy. He was brought in for questioning and even participated in a photo line-up. The victim was unable to identify him as the assailant, perhaps due to the traumatic stress she experienced during the crime.

The First Murders

On December 29, 1985, Alison Day, aged 19, was dragged off a train at Hackney station and repeatedly raped by Duffy and Mulcahy. She was then strangled to death with a piece of rope. This was the first time the two men had killed one of their victims, and police increased the intensity of their efforts to identify the culprit. Day’s murder meant that Duffy would now be referred in the media as the Railway Killer. Yet, still no physical evidence was available to suggest that two men were carrying out the attacks.

In April 1986, a fifteen-year old female was abducted from a train station in East Surrey. The teenager’s body was set on fire after she was raped and strangled, likely to try to eradicate any physical evidence that could identify the attacker.

Duffy was arrested near a local train station less than a month later—this time for the illegal possession of a knife. However, he was released without charge due to a lack of evidence, only to murder another person a week later. In May 1986, Anne Locke, an employee of a local TV station, was abducted as she arrived at a train station just outside London. Her body was found two months later, and the analysis of traces of semen found in her body confirmed that the individual known as the Railway Killer was responsible.

In the meantime, police continued to interview each of the nearly 5000 men who had been added to the Operation Hart database, requesting a blood sample at the time of each interview. This voluntary process likely was offered to each individual as a means of clearing any doubts about guilt or innocence. Duffy was interviewed on July 17, 1986, but he refused to participate voluntarily in the blood test at that time. He then committed himself to a mental hospital, perhaps as a means of covering his tracks.

The Use of Criminal Profiling

By July 1986, police were desperate to identify the person or persons responsible for this string of horrible crimes. Consequently, they requested the assistance of Dr. David Canter, an expert in behavioural science and professor of applied psychology at Surrey University. At this time, a new concept in criminal investigations was being introduced, referred to by Dr. Canter as “Psychological Offender Profiling” (also known as criminal profiling). This was the first murder investigation in England in which criminal profiling had a significant role. John Duffy, who would later be identified as the Railway Killer, was the first person in the history of the English justice system to be identified as a suspect as a direct result of this investigative technique.

To help solve the case, Dr. Canter analyzed large numbers of solved crimes using a statistical technique known as multivariate analysis. In each case, the behaviour of the criminal (including the choice of victims, personal interaction with them, location and timing of each offence, and content analysis of their speech) was used as a data source. As Dr. Canter examined the details of each crime, he was able to build a profile of the attacker's personality, habits, and traits.

He then created a profile based on witness statements, crime scene reports, and geographical information. He produced a list of seventeen personality and characteristic traits including environmental clues that the offender might display. For example, he was able to infer that the killer lived in an area of northwest London and had an unhappy married life with no children. Interestingly, Canter relied on his background in environmental psychology to develop concepts such as the cognitive map, which would prove useful in understanding offender behaviour. In fact, his research found that most British serial rapists lived within the area in which they committed their crimes.

Below is an abbreviated list of points Canter believed would fit the offender’s profile:

Duffy Becomes Main Suspect

As the process of creating an offender profile ended, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was raped in a park in October 1986. When the psychological profile created by Dr. Canter was cross-referenced with the police database of all possible suspects, the computer generated a match for John Duffy.

Duffy was placed under police surveillance. He was arrested on November 7, 1986, when he was seen stalking a woman in a park. He was questioned about his involvement in the numerous rapes and murders committed over the past four years. He offered a weak alibi involving tales of amnesia. With sufficient forensic evidence to support a successful prosecution, Duffy was charged with three murders and seven counts of rape. Police suspected that he had not committed the offences alone, but Duffy refused to cooperate any further.

Dr. Canter’s profile of the killer was accurate in 13 of 17 points. He attributed the success of his technique to an understanding of how a criminal leaves behind ‘evidence of his personality’ through his actions in relation to a crime, including specific behaviours characteristic of that person. Consistent behaviours typical of the person’s social group also provide information that can be used to develop a profile.

According to Dr. Canter, to build a profile of an offender from ‘the bottom up’ is possible. By reviewing a wide range of associated factors and operating under the premise that people behave typically consistently, the analysis of behaviour patterns observed over time can provide clues about a serial offender’s ordinary behaviour.

Conclusion

Duffy went to trial in February 1988. He was convicted of two murders and four rapes, but he was acquitted on the remaining charges, including the murder of Anne Locke. Duffy later revealed to a psychologist that he had not been working alone when he committed his heinous crimes. However, he revealed no further details until 1997 when he implicated childhood friend David Mulcahy, a married father of four who was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison. This marked the end of the lengthy and determined search for the Railway Killers, one that made effective use of criminal profiling.

The City of Wichita

- Image Source: Wikipedia.org

Dennis Lynn Rader murdered at least 10 people in and near the city of Wichita, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. He became known as the BTK Strangler, which stood for ‘Bind, Torture, and Kill’, a name that he had originally passed to the media and police through a wide variety of written correspondence.

First Killings: 1970s

Rader’s first victims were four members of one family (Joseph Otero, his wife, and their two children) who were murdered in their home in January 1974. In April 1974, Rader struck again, using his preferred method of attack by gaining entry to the victim’s home. He tied Kathryn Bright and her brother Kevin, and then strangled her to death. Rader then shot Kathryn Bright’s brother several times as they fought, but Kevin Bright survived the attack. The police were unable to locate the killer from the description he provided.

In 1977, in a period of nine months, Rader murdered Shirley Vian and Nancy Fox in their own homes. He used the same method of binding and torturing to kill these two victims.

Possibly, he had other intended victims, but the murders stopped for a time. Then, two years later in 1979, Anna Williams narrowly escaped death when she returned home from work much later than expected. Rader had broken into her home, but apparently he gave up on her return that evening. He later sent an angry note to her stating "…be glad you weren't here, because I was." He included one of her scarves with the letter.

Letters to Police and Media

Rader seemed to derive perverse pleasure from sending taunting letters to both police and various news outlets. He sent notes and letters from 1974 to 1979. For example, in October 1974, a letter describing in detail the murder of the Otero family had been left in an engineering book in the Wichita Public Library. In early 1978, he sent a letter to a Wichita TV station in which he claimed responsibility for the murders he had committed. This letter identified the BTK Strangler name, announcing that a serial killer was loose in Wichita. A poem was also enclosed, written as a form of macabre tribute to the murder of Nancy Fox. However, nothing was heard from BTK for the next several years. During that time, local police created a Task Force and spent thousands of hours searching for the identity of the BTK Strangler. They used various principles from science and followed up on the realization that all murders had occurred within a radius of approximately 8 km.

By 1988, the trail had gone cold. However, police received a letter from someone claiming to be the BTK Strangler. The author referred to a recent murder but denied responsibility while noting that it had been performed admirably.

Criminal Profiling Involvement

In 1997, Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent, helped outline a profile of the BTK Strangler. Ressler thought the man may have been a graduate student or a professor in the criminal justice field at the local university, was most likely in his mid-to-late-20s at the time of the killings, and was an avid reader of books and newspaper stories concerning serial murders. Additionally, because his pattern of killings had not been seen in Wichita since the '70s, it was assumed that he had likely left the area or had died.

In August 2000, Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, President of the Violent Crimes Institute, created a partial profile of the killer based on limited information. Among her insights was a chilling statement about the mindset of BTK Strangler:

This is not a person who would stop killing on his own. There are only three reasons he would stop: death, prison, or he is too disabled or sick to kill. This is a compulsive psychopath who enjoys killing and will not give it up.

Schurman-Kauflin’s profile of BTK was updated in 2005 (just prior to the BTK Strangler‘s arrest) to provide a more detailed description of his character traits and behaviours:

Letters and Packages from the BTK Strangler

In March 2004, BTK Strangler began a series of communications that ultimately led to his arrest in February 2005. The Wichita Eagle newspaper received a letter written by a person believed to be BTK Strangler who claimed responsibility for the murder of Vicki Wegerle in September 1986. This murder had not been attributed previously to BTK Strangler, but several photographs of the crime scene and a photocopy of the driver's licence of Vicki Wegerle’s were included with the letter, indicating that whoever had sent it had intimate knowledge of the crime. Subsequent letters, notes, and packages were sent throughout 2004 while police encouraged BTK to continue to communicate, hoping that he would make a mistake to identify himself.

In December 2004, Wichita police received another package from the BTK Strangler; it contained the driver's licence of Nancy Fox. It had been stolen from her residence at the time of her murder in 1977. In February 2005, postcards were received by a local TV station and were followed by further writings related to the 1974 murders of a certain member of the Otero family.

Then the BTK Strangler made an error. In February of 2005, he sent a padded envelope containing a computer disc to a TV station in Wichita. On this disc, police found metadata embedded in a Microsoft Word document that identified the Christ Lutheran Church and that showed the document was last modified by "Dennis". Investigators then discovered that the president of the Christ Lutheran Church council was Dennis Rader.

Arrest and Confession

Police immediately began surveillance of Rader and obtained a warrant for the medical records of Rader's daughter. Subsequently, a tissue sample was obtained from her and tested for DNA. It provided a familial match with semen found at an earlier BTK Strangler crime scene. This evidence, combined with other pieces of information gathered prior to and during the surveillance, gave police the grounds to arrest Rader in February 2005. He was taken into custody without incident. He talked to the police for several hours, confessing almost immediately. His confession and subsequent interviews with police filled almost a dozen DVDs.

During his lengthy interviews with police, Rader appeared to detach himself from his victims, describing them as his "projects”, discussing in detail how he had “put them down”. Rader also described the contents of his "hit kit”: a briefcase or bowling bag containing handguns, tape, rope, and handcuffs. He also carried extra clothing that he could change into after committing a murder.

Rader also provided insight into how he chose his victims. He would first wander the city until he found potential victims; he would then stalk them for some time. Then, he would break into the victim’s home when no one was home, cut the phone line, and hide until his victim came home. Rader then bound, tortured, and killed his victims. Usually he strangled them until they lost consciousness, but he would revive them just to strangle them again. He would repeat the pattern, becoming sexually aroused at the sight of their struggles. Finally, Rader would strangle them to death and ejaculate into an article of their clothing, usually underwear.

All victims except one lived in and around central Wichita. Rader lived on the same street as one of his victims.

Conclusion

Rader pleaded guilty in 2005, giving a graphic account of his crimes in court. By this time, Rader had openly admitted to two other murders that the BTK Strangler had not originally been suspected of committing: Marine Hedge in 1985 and Dolores David in 1991.

In August of 2005, Rader was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences (one life sentence per victim) without possibility of parole for 175 years. The police investigation concluded with the statement that Rader was not responsible for any other murders.

Although criminal profiling played a minor role in the search for the BTK Strangler, this story demonstrates the need for an objective, balanced approach to serial crime investigation based on the ease with which a serial killer can blend into conventional society.