Profiling. The idea of an investigator knowing who committed a crime just from the scene has fascinated the public. Whether fiction or true crime, it’s hard to escape from the image of a serious man in a suit pouring over the crime scene. But what is profiling? How do investigators reach these conclusions? While for some people it can seem like magic, there is actual science behind criminal profiling that comes from the collective experience of investigators and countless interviews from criminals. While the first example of modern profiling was used in 1956 by James Brussel to catch George Metesky, the Mad Bomber of New York City, it wouldn’t be until 1978 that the Behavioral Science Unit in the FBI would start to develop the style of profiling so often portrayed in modern media. It was during this time the Robert Ressler and John Douglas started a series of, at first informal, interviews with thirty-six different convicts. While their sample was limited to the inmates in the North American prisons that they could get access to, through these interviews they developed a series of classifications that would lead to many profiling techniques that are still used today.
The idea behind profiling is a simple one; nothing someone does happens in a vacuum. For every action that a person takes, we can see either ripples leading outwards to an effect or backwards to the cause. These ripples end up causing patterns, which allow investigators to draw upon knowledge of those who came before them to follow the patterns and find their source. For example, throughout history, most violent serial murderers have been men, while women tend to lean more towards silent killers like poisons. Due to the roles each gender most commonly plays in society, men are taught to express their more violent urges while women aren’t. Instead, women are generally in charge of cooking or caring for the sick, placing them in the perfect position to poison others. Even in modern times with more equal roles in the work force, women are generally raised to take on the caregiver role. Therefore, when faced with an extremely violent crime, investigators know that it is more likely going to be a male perpetrator.
Similarly, the investigators can also tell age of the perpetrator by the level of crime and the history of such crime in an area. Violent crime occurs in a series of escalations. If you look at the history of any murderer there is usually at least one or two incidents of violence before the murder. A violent murder is rarely a perpetrator’s first crime and the violence of said murders will increase with each one. For example, Edward Kemper’s first murders, that of his grandparents, were quick and simple. He shot his grandmother three times and his grandfather once before calling his mother, who contacted the police to arrest him. When he murdered his mother, the second to last of his ten victims, he bludgeoned her with a claw hammer and slit her throat before mutilating the corpse. In contrast, the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, were accused of brutally and ritualistically murdering three young boys in 1993 but had no prior history of violence. When profiler John Douglas investigated the latter, he found no evidence that the three boys had committed the crime, in part due to the fact that they had no history of violence. Unless something drastic happens, like head trauma that changed an entire personality, brutal murder is not the first step in the ladder of escalating violence, but rather one of the later ones.
Despite how it may appear in films and television shows, profiling isn’t a magic wand that investigators can wave to solve a crime. A profile is created by drawing upon the facts of the crime and comparing them to known facts about other criminals in order to form a clear-cut picture of who the current offender is. Unlike in modern media, in real life a profile is not the magical solution to a case. A profiler will never look at a suspect and state they did it. Rather, a profile is a road map that the profiler gives investigators, another tool in the box for solving crimes.
