Why We Love Serial Killers

by Scott Bonn

  What Is Criminal Profiling?

  Criminal profiling is a cross between law enforcement and psychology. It is still a relatively new field with few set boundaries or definitions. Practitioners of criminal profiling do not always agree on methodology or even terminology. Despite their disagreements, however, practitioners of profiling all share a common goal of analyzing evidence gathered at a crime scene and statements provided by victims and witnesses in order to develop a description of an unknown offender. The offender description can include psychological factors such as antisocial personality traits, psychopathologies (mental illnesses), behavioral patterns, as well as demographic variables including, age, race, and geographic location.

  In practice, particularly as conducted by the FBI, criminal profiling is involved in the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution phases of the criminal justice process. In the investigation phase, profiling is used to determine whether or not crimes are linked and to predict the personality and lifestyle characteristics of an unknown perpetrator. In the investigation phase, profiling is used to develop strategies to apprehend the unknown criminal and to assess the likelihood of escalation in the perpetrator’s crimes. In the apprehension phase, profiling is used to predict where to look for an unknown serial criminal, to determine what information should be included in a search warrant, and how he or she may react upon apprehension. In the prosecution phase, criminal profilers act as experts in court to link crimes based on forensic evidence and to connect an alleged perpetrator to a series of crimes.

  The Evolution and History of Profiling

  Profiling has a long and storied history. In what is frequently cited as the first application of criminal profiling techniques, London physicians George Phillips and Thomas Bond used autopsy results and crime scene evidence in the fall of 1888 to make rudimentary but informed predictions about legendary serial killer Jack the Ripper’s personality, behavioral characteristics, and lifestyle. In his written report after examining the available forensic evidence, including the bodies, Dr. Thomas Bond concluded that “all five murders no doubt were committed by the same hand . . . the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was cut first.” Dr. Bond stated that Jack the Ripper had no medical training or knowledge of anatomy, despite the killer’s extensive cutting and mutilation of his victims.

  This bold statement by Dr. Bond directly opposed what law enforcement authorities had previously concluded—that Jack the Ripper was either a physician or had medical training due to the fact that he had removed internal organs from some of his victims. Dr. Bond reached his conclusion after noting that the gaping wounds inflicted by the Ripper were not consistent with the training of a medical expert or “even the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer.” In his opinion, the murderer must have been “a man of solitary habits, subject to periodic attacks of homicidal and erotic mania, and the character of the mutilations possibly indicating satyriasis” or uncontrollable sexual desire. Of course, we will never know for sure if Dr. Bond was correct because the Jack the Ripper murders remain unsolved.

  Profiling techniques were later used during World War II by the US government in an attempt to create a personality profile of Adolf Hitler. The report was commissioned by the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan. The OSS, precursor of the modern CIA, retained psychiatrist Walter C. Langer to probe the psychology of Adolf Hitler from the information available at that time. A psychodynamic personality profile was created with the purpose of predicting what decisions Hitler might make under certain hypothetical circumstances. Officially titled “A Psychological Profile of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend,” the report was prepared and submitted in late 1943. Langer’s profile proved to be quite accurate, including his prediction that if the defeat of Germany was imminent, Hitler would most likely commit suicide. The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of modern-day offender profiling techniques, and it served to legitimize the use of psychoanalysis for investigative purposes.

  Dr. James A. Brussel is widely credited with undertaking the first systematic offender profile in a US criminal investigation. In 1956, Dr. Brussel’s services were sought by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) after an unknown bomber had tormented and eluded them for sixteen years. The cunning criminal, who would become known as “Mad Bomber” George Metesky following his capture, was apparently driven to violence due to anger and resentment over events surrounding a workplace injury he had suffered years earlier. As a result, Metesky planted more than thirty small bombs around the city of New York between 1940 and 1956. His targets included Radio City Music Hall, Grand Central Station, Penn Station, movie theaters, telephone booths, and assorted other public locations. A total of fifteen people were injured by twenty-two of his bombs. Incredibly, no one was killed in his attacks.

  In 1956, frustrated NYPD investigators turned to Dr. James Brussel, a psychiatrist and Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, to study photos from the crime scenes as well as handwritten notes sent to the police by the bomber. Dr. Brussel developed a very detailed physical and psychological profile of the suspect based on the evidence he was given. According to Dr. Brussel, the perpetrator would be unmarried, a foreigner, self-educated, middle-aged, reside in Connecticut, suffer from paranoia and have a vendetta against the Con Edison power company. Some of Dr. Brussel’s predictions were based simply on common sense. For example, the first bomb planted in 1940 had targeted Con Edison’s 67th street headquarters in Manhattan, so a vendetta against Con Edison was a logical assumption.

  Some of Brussel’s other predictions, however, were based on his psychological training and medical expertise. Dr. Brussel knew that clinical paranoia tends to peak around age thirty-five in the general population. Therefore, he reasoned that in 1956—sixteen years after his first bombing—the perpetrator would most likely be in his fifties. As it turned out, Dr. James Brussel’s criminal profile proved to be dead on, including the fact that Metesky was fifty-three years old. His profile led the NYPD directly to George Metesky, who confessed to the bombings immediately upon his arrest in January 1957. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity in court and committed to a state mental hospital. Metesky remained there until his release in 1973 when medical experts determined that he was no longer a threat to society. He died in 1994 at the age of ninety.

  In the decades following the capture of “Mad Bomber” George Metesky, police in New York and elsewhere continued to consult with psychologists and psychiatrists on the development of criminal profiles for unknown serial offenders. However, authorities encountered a persistent and frustrating problem in the process. The problem was that all of the psychiatrists based their criminal profiles on their own individual experiences and knowledge. So, when the police drew upon several psychiatrists to assist them on a complex case, such as the Boston Strangler in the early 1960s, the psychiatric professionals often came up with very different criminal profiles. Many of the profiles developed by different professionals for the same offender, utilizing the same case evidence, contradicted one another and were of little value. In the early years, there seemed to be no systematic approach to profiling other than that belonging to each individual psychiatrist.

  Up until the early 1980s, profilers relied mostly on their own intuition and informal, anecdotal research. Harvey Schlossberg, PhD, former director of psychological services for the NYPD, described the approach he used in the late 1960s and 1970s to develop profiles of unknown subjects by locating commonalities in closed cases—that is, where the perpetrator was identified and apprehended. Dr. Schlossberg said:

  George Metesky, center, flashes a big smile and displays a copy of a New York newspaper telling of his capture on arrival at police headquarters in New York City on January 22, 1957. (photo credit: Associated Press)

  What I would do is sit down and look through cases where the criminals had been arrested. I listed how old [the pe
rpetrators] were, whether they were male or female, and their level of education. Did they come from broken families? Did they have school behavioral problems? I listed as many factors as I could come up with, and then I added them up to see which were the most common.8

  Dr. Schlossberg, who developed profiles of many unknown criminals during the formative years of profiling, including the infamous Son of Sam, stated that profiling is far from an exact science. “In some ways, [profiling] is really as much an art as a science,” said Dr. Schlossberg, as reported by the APA Monitor on Psychology. This statement suggests the value of individualized knowledge and interpretation of evidence, but also indicates that some professionals are more gifted in this regard than others.

  The Birth of Modern Day Profiling

  In recent years, many psychologists, together with criminologists and law enforcement officials, have begun using statistical and research methods to bring more science into the art. While Dr. Schlossberg was refining his psychological techniques, major developments were also taking place within the law enforcement community, particularly at the federal level. In 1974, the FBI formed a Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Quantico, Virginia, to investigate serial rape and homicide cases. Two supervisory agents within the FBI, John Douglas and the late Robert Ressler, set out on a mission to interview incarcerated serial predators to obtain information about their motives, planning and preparation, details of the crimes, and the disposal of evidence, including the bodies of victims. Their goal was to compile a centralized database in which the motives of serial offenders were matched with crime scene information. Between 1976 and 1979, Douglas, Ressler, and several colleagues interviewed a total of thirty-six serial predators and collected massive amounts of data.

  Douglas and Ressler soon faced the problem of how to analyze and share the data they had collected with their law enforcement colleagues nationwide. The answer came in the form of a $1 million research grant that facilitated the design of a computerized database system called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). This system allowed the FBI for the first time to cross-reference information from open cases involving serial predators to closed cases in the database in order to match behavioral characteristics and patterns. More specifically, VICAP was designed to aid investigators in narrowing the search for an unknown subject (or “Unsub” in FBI terminology) and create a likely offender profile by matching the details in an open case to the details in closed cases. Although FBI profilers began working in the field around 1979, VICAP profiling research and analysis were not formalized until 1984 when the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) was created within the agency.

  Ever since the introduction of the VICAP system, a local police department anywhere in the US or Canada can fill out a request form and submit it to the NCAVC for analysis of a series of unsolved murders, people missing under suspicious circumstances, or unidentified human bodies. The VICAP data is then entered into the Profiler computer system. VICAP is an artificially intelligent system, meaning that the computer software has been programmed to reason like a human being using “if-then” scenarios. For example, “if the victim was found at the scene of the crime with no apparent attempt to conceal the body, then the offender is likely to be a spontaneous killer who does not meticulously plan a murder prior to committing it.” The system is constantly updated so that every time the NCAVC research team learns something new about the behavior of serial offenders, the information is programmed into Profiler in the form of a new line of reasoning. Profiler is a tool, not a substitute for human analysis. It uses logic and statistics to arrive at human-like conclusions quickly and create a profile by sorting through the millions of possible if-then combinations.

  The FBI model of criminal profiling is known as criminal investigative analysis (CIA) and it is based on a premise that the personality of an unknown perpetrator can be predicted. More specifically, the “basic premise [of criminal profiling] is that behavior reflects personality,” said retired FBI special agent Gregg McCrary.9 In a serial homicide case, according to McCrary, as reported by the APA Monitor of Psychology in 2004, FBI agents glean insights into criminal personality by answering questions about the murderer’s behavior at four different crime phases:

  • Antecedent: What fantasy or plan, or perhaps both, did the murderer have in place before committing the act of murder? What triggered the murderer to act sometimes and not others?

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

  • Body disposal: Did the murder and body disposal take place all at one scene or multiple scenes? Was there an attempt to hide the bodies?

  • Post-offense behavior: Is the murderer trying to inject himself/herself into the investigation by reacting to news media reports or contacting police investigators?

  Six Steps in the FBI System of Criminal Investigative Analysis

  The FBI system of criminal profiling involves a comprehensive six-step process. Each step is critical to the overall system, so the quality of input at each step directly influences the subsequent steps. Expanding on a discussion presented in the 2004 book Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky, the six critical steps involved in the FBI profiling model are outlined below.10

  Step 1: Profiling Inputs

  Step 1 involves the gathering and organizing of all relevant case information. This includes such items as a detailed report on the criminal investigation, crime scene photographs, a description of the neighborhood or area in which the murder occurred, the medical examiner’s report, a timeline of the victim’s movements immediately before death, and a detailed background profile of the victim.

  Step 2: Constructing a Decision Process Model

  In this step, the fundamental characteristics and details of the homicide are established. These include whether the killing was a serial or single murder, whether homicide was the primary objective of the killer or incidental to another crime, whether the victim was a high-risk individual such as a homeless person or a female sex worker versus a low-risk individual such as a professional, married man. Additional factors used in constructing the decision process model include whether the victim was killed at the scene of the attack or elsewhere and, if elsewhere, the characteristics of the scene where the murder might have occurred.

  Step 3: Crime Assessment

  Step 3 of the process is the most involved. In this step, profilers decide whether the crime scene has the characteristics of an organized offender, disorganized offender, or a mix of both. The breakthrough idea of classifying serial homicide crime scenes according to an organized/disorganized dichotomy is credited to the former FBI agent and profiler Roy Hazelwood. This concept was based primarily on the previously mentioned study of thirty-six serial predators conducted by FBI agents Douglas and Ressler. Profilers use a list of factors such as whether the victim’s body was positioned or posed by the killer, whether sexual acts were performed before or after death, and whether cannibalism or mutilation was practiced on the body. These factors are used to predict whether an unknown offender is an organized or disorganized killer. The organized/disorganized classification of offenders is the centerpiece of the FBI profiling approach and is explained below.

  Ted Bundy mugs for the cameras after his indictment in Florida on July 28, 1978. (photo credit: Associated Press)

  Organized Offenders

  According to the offender and crime scene dichotomy, organized crimes are premeditated and carefully planned, so little evidence is normally found at the scene. Organized criminals, according to the classification scheme, are antisocial (often psychopathic) but know right from wrong, are not insane, and show no remorse. Based on historical patterns, organized killers are likely to be above average–average intelligence, attractive, married or living with a domestic partner, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning, a
nd controlled. They have some degree of social grace, may even be charming, and often talk and seduce their victims into being captured.

  With organized offenders, there are typically three separate crime scenes: where the victim was approached by the killer, where the victim was killed, and where the victim’s body was disposed of. Organized killers are very difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and often are forensically savvy, meaning they are familiar with police investigation methods. They are likely to follow the news media reports of their crimes and may even correspond with the news media. Ted Bundy, Joel Rifkin, and Dennis Rader are prime examples of organized killers.

  Disorganized Offenders

  Disorganized crimes, in contrast, are not planned, and the offenders typically leave evidence such as fingerprints or blood at the scene of the murder. There is often no attempt to move or otherwise conceal the corpse after the murder. Disorganized criminals may be young, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or mentally ill. They often have deficient communication and social skills and may be below average in intelligence. The disorganized offender is likely to come from an unstable or dysfunctional family. Disorganized offenders often have been abused physically or sexually by relatives. They are often sexually inhibited, sexually uninformed, and may have sexual aversions or other pathologies. They are more likely than organized criminals to be compulsive masturbators. They are often isolated from others, live alone, and are frightened or confused during the commission of their murders. They often do not have reliable transportation, so they kill their victims closer to home than organized offenders.

  Significantly, disorganized killers will often “blitz” their victims—that is, use sudden and overwhelming force to assault them. The victim’s body is usually left where the attack took place, and the killer makes no attempt to hide it. Jack the Ripper is the most classic example of the disorganized serial killer. The serial killer known as “Charlie Chop-Off” because of his penchant for genital dismemberment, is a more recent example of the mentally ill disorganized killer. Charlie randomly killed young boys in blitz attacks in New York City in the early 1970s.