True Crime

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...