Mind Detectives

All detectives seek to understand criminals. But modern psychological profiling techniques take the investigator deeper than ever before into the mind of a killer.

Some time towards the end of 1979, two experts from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit paid a social visit to the British police college at Bramshill. The chat in a local pub at the end of the day naturally turned to the mystery of the Yorkshire Ripper that was the most serious case of the time.

One of the police officers present had a copy of the tape recordings received some months before by Chief Inspector George Oldfield, which had sent squads of policemen searching the Sunderland area for a suspect with a Geordie accent. One of the FBI men said, after listening to the tape, “You realise, of course, that the man on the tape is not the killer?”

Challenged by their companions, the two men reluctantly agreed to give an off-the-cuff assessment – on the basis of the very limited information they had about the case – of the wanted man. Ge was, they said, in his late 20s or early 30s, a school drop-out; his work regularly took him to different areas, and he was probably a truck driver, a mail carrier – or even a policeman. He was not a complete loner, and had a relationship with a woman, although he appeared to have serious sexual problems that had taken years to develop.

Correct assessment

More than 18 months later, Peter Sutcliffe was arrested, and found guilty on 13 counts of murder and seven of attempted murder. He was then 35 years old, a married truck driver for an engineering firm. He had left school at 15 after a long record of truancy. He met his wife, 16-year-old Sonia Szurma, when he was 21; the couple broke up several times in the seven years before they married, they often had furious rows, and it was within a year of his wedding that Sutcliffe committed his first murder.

The two FBI men were John Douglas, an expert on hostage negotiations, and Robert Ressler, one of the first members of the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, the FBI Academy. The unit, which Ressler joined in 1974 soon after it was set up, was founded by Howard Teten and Pat Mullany: Teten had been studying ‘psychological profiling’ since 1969, and was joined by Mullany in 1972. They began building up a file of taped interviews with mass murderers and assassins, entering their characteristic ways of thinking on computers and searching for similarities.

The study of psychology of murderers was not new, although this was the first time that so much data had been made available for research. For many years, Scotland Yard had been building up files of the ‘modus operandi’ of criminals to assist in identification of suspects. As early as 1930, Professor Karl Berg had written a classic study of Peter Kurten, the ‘Vampire of Dusseldorf’, and in 1957 Dr James A. Brussel had amazed police by successfully predicting not only the personality but also the physical appearance and dress of the ‘Mad Bomber’ of New York. A year later, a Los Angeles detective named Pierce Brooks who had spent nearly a year reading newspapers in his public library, looking for reports of murders that matched the characteristics of a case he was investigating, was finally rewarded with success.

However, profiling fell somewhat into disrepute in 1964, when a team of which Dr Brussel was a member attempted to profile of the Boston Strangler. They concluded (although Brussel disagreed) that there were probably two stranglers, one a man who lived alone and was probably a school teacher, the other a homosexual with a hatred of women; but when Albert DeSalvo was eventually apprehended for the murders, he was found to be an over-sexed married man with children. Nevertheless, Howard Teten gathered much useful advice from Brussel, and shortly after Ressler joined his team he successfully put his principles into practice.

Preliminary profile

In June 1973 a seven-year-old girl, Susan Jaeger, was kidnapped from a tent in which she had been camping with her family in Montana. Teten and Mullany put together a preliminary profile: a young white male who lived in the area, a loner who had come across the tent while walking at night. They also concluded that Susan was probably dead.

Peter Dunbar, the local FBI agent, had a suspect, a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran named David Meierhofer, but there was no material evidence to connect him with the crime. In January 1974, however, the men at Quantico knew that psychopaths were able to separate their personalities, only one of which could remain any knowledge of the crime, and they persuaded Dunbar that Meierhofer could still be the guilty man. They thought he might well be the type who telephones the relatives of his victims to relive the excitement of his crimes, and Dunbar asked for Jaegers to keep a tape-recorder by their telephone.

On the first anniversary of Susan’s kidnapping. Mrs Jaeger had a telephone call from a man who said that he had taken the young girl to Europe, tauntingly adding that he was giving her a better life than her parents could afford.

An FBI voice analyst concluded that the voice on the tape recording was Meierhofer’s, but this was not considered sufficient evidence in Montana, and Pat Mullany decided on a clever move. He felt that Meierhofer could be woman-dominated, and he suggested that Mrs Jaeger should confront him in a Montana lawyer’s office.

At the meeting Meierhofer was cool and collected, but soon after Mrs Jaeger returned home she received a call rom a ‘Mr Travis’ in Salt Lake City. Travis said he wanted to explain that it was he who had abducted Susan, but before he could say more Mrs Jaeger said: “Well, hello, David.”

With sufficient evidence to obtain a search warrant, Dunbar was able to visit the suspect’s home, where he found remains of both girls. Meierhofer then confessed to both killings, as well as to that of at least one local Montana boy. Next day he hanged himself in his cell.

FBI computer analysis

The FBI continued to build up their computer files, with increasing success in the development of profiles. One of the most successful cases occurred in January 1978, when a horrifically violent murder took place in Sacramento, California. As Robert Ressler later wrote, it “seemed as if it would provide me with an opportunity to … catch a killer almost as soon as he had struck. Most of the time, when a case was sent to the Behavioural Science Unit, the trail was long cold. In Sacramento it was very hot indeed.”

In the evening of 23 January 1978, 22-year-old Terry Wallin was found murdered and violently disfigured. The local police called in the FBI, and Ressler who was due to visit the West Coast in a few days’ time, immediately wrote out a preliminary profile. But, even before he had reached California, three more people were murdered, loss that a mile from the Wallin home, and a baby abducted.

“With a mounting sense of urgency and the certainty that if not caught this man would kill again – and soon,” Ressler refined his profile. He described the murderer in detail, and forecast that he would live within a few streets of where he had abandoned a stolen station wagon. Police concentrated their enquiries in the area, and found a woman witness who had spoken to a young man whom she had known in high school, and been shocked at his appearance.

Police staked out the man’s apartment, lured him out, and arrested him in possession of a .22 revolver and the wallet of one of his victims. In his refrigerator they found parts of human bodies and brain tissue, and other relevant material, including evidence he had planned to murder many more times through 1978. Ressler arrived in time to learn that his profile had been instrumental in preventing a succession of terrible killings.

Description of the criminal

The FBI had now widened the scope of its psychological profiling system to the point where it is possible, from a study of scene of crime photos alone, to provide a working description of the criminal. As recently as 1991, shortly after his retirement from the FBI, Ressler was able to advise an insurance company on a claim for $270,000 damages to a home, apparently the work of vandals.

The photographs showed “damage spread through the living room, halls, kitchen, main bedroom and bath. Walls, furniture, paintings, clothing, vases, jade carvings and other items had been broken and defaced. Curtains were down. Glass over art prints had been cracked. Spray paint graffiti could be made out … such as ‘asshole’, ‘ass’, ‘suck’, ‘c…’. There was also a two-word inscription: ‘F… me’.”

But the destruction was selective: paintings had been damaged, but their frames were intact; one large oil painting of a little girl was untouched; vases and statues were on the floor but unbroken; and the curtains had been taken down and placed gently on the floor. Doorframes were damaged, but not the doors themselves, and no partition walls had been kicked in or knocked out.

Finally, the graffiti did not seem typical of teenage vandalism, and “F… you” would have been a more likely inscription if made by a hostile, arrogant young man.

Ressler suggested that the perpetrator of the damage was most likely to be a white female, between 40 and 50 years of age, probably the mother of an only daughter, and one who had been through several divorces. The obscenities reflected her lack of familiarity with male hostility. Summing up, he said that the woman’s anger was directed against a family member; she was seeking attention; and she had probably hoped to gain insurance compensation to carry out renovations that she could not otherwise afford.

The psychologist who had been retained by the insurance company reported that this profile exactly matched the woman who had made the claim. “White and in her forties, she had broken up with her boyfriend, had money problems, had a daughter who lived with her former husband … The psychologist was rather amazed at my perspicacity. I wasn’t. Compared to the profiles of unknown, vicious, antisocial criminals that I had struggled to compile and make accurate over the past 17 years in the FBI, this attempt at puzzle solving was kid stuff.”

Outside the FBI, psychological profiling had been taken up by researchers in the universities. Ronald Holmes, Professor of Criminal Justice at the university of Louisville, had assisted police in over 100 murder and rape cases. Among cases that he cites was one in which, over the course of four months, four young women were attacked and their throats cut. None was sexually molested, but there were several common factors, and a profile outlined age, education and residence, and predicted the length of time before the next attack would occur. The police were able to capture the attacker on the very night predicted.

In Britain, psychological profiling is still in its infancy, but proved of value in the apprehension of the ‘Railway Killer’ John Duffy in 1986. Consulted by the police, David Canter, Professor of Applied Psychology at Surrey University, drew up a profile of the murdering rapist; he lived in the Kilburn-Cricklewood area of London, was a semi-skilled worker, was married but childless, had a turbulent relationship with his wife, but had two very close male friends. When this analysis was matched on computer against 1,999 suspects, it immediately identified Duffy. Canter’s profile was found accurate on 13 out of 17 points.

As Professor Canter explained: “A criminal leaves evidence of his personality through his actions in relation to a crime. Any person’s behaviour exhibits characteristics unique to that person, as well as patterns and consistencies that are typical of the sub-group to which he or she belongs.”

Analysis centre

In July 1983, Pierce Brooks appeared before a Senate subcommittee in Washington. After 35 years of police work, he was now a consultant, and had been agitating for the setting up of a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) in collaboration with the FBI. Appearing with him was the then head of the Behavioural Science Unit, Roger Depue. Less than a year later, President Ronald Reagan announced the formation of the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

The direct outcome of this was the introduction of the VICAP questionnaire, which was made available to all 59 field divisions of the FBI, and which was intended to supersede the BSU’s use of scene of crime photographs in providing a detailed description of the crime and its surroundings. However, after only six months it became obvious that the questionnaire provided too much detail, and in 1986 the VICAP Criminal Analysis Report form was introduced.

From item No. 1 – the case number – the questions on the form go on from ‘case administration data’ to ‘crime classification’ information (including likely related crimes) to details of the crimes and the victims, the MO, autopsy data, forensic evidence no ness than 189 queries in all.

With this use of this form, local law enforcement officers can request the NCAVC to compare a crime with hundreds of others on the system. Since 1990, the BSU had been renamed Behavioural Science Services, with an Investigative Support Unit running a Criminal Investigative Analysis Program. In 1989 alone 793 cases were examined, 290 of which fell within FBI direct jurisdiction. The FBI director William Sessions has said that VICAP is of vital importance, not only in cases of serial killing and rape but “in solving other similar crimes, including drug-related murders and killings that are identical to other types of offences.” Pierce Brooks agreed. “Its not going to stop them,” he said, “but it could shorten their careers.”

End