by Pat Brown
People ask, is there a perfect crime? I say, no, there isn’t, but there are plenty of “good enough” crimes. They’re good enough because nobody saw anything, they’re good enough because the body was in water and the evidence got washed away, or they’re good enough because the body wasn’t found for three or four weeks until the dog walker tripped over it and there it was. They’re good enough if the police had a “damn good” suspect but still looked the other way.
Because there are so many good enough crimes, a substantial portion of crimes will never be prosecuted because the evidence won’t be there.
Citizens should have cared more about an innocent girl being slaughtered in their town; they should have protested when they never got an answer as to who killed her. But no one spoke up except me. And when I did, I was told to forget about it. If a woman is murdered in the woods and nobody speaks up, does this mean the victim and the homicide don’t really matter? The system did not function properly. We should all care more about our fellow man and about doing what’s right. That’s what spurred me on the path of becoming a professional criminal profiler.
I DECIDED TO educate myself about psychopaths, serial killers, and serial homicide investigation. I spent the next four years at the “Pat Brown School of Criminal Profiling,” which held study sessions in patients’ hospital rooms, doctors’ waiting rooms, and emergency rooms.
I wanted to know more about the field of profiling and serial homicide investigation. I wanted to learn about forensics and psychopathy. I wanted to learn how to analyze, dissect, and reconstruct a crime.
The first thing I did was look for a college-level program. I had a liberal arts degree, which was heavy in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Those fields were surprisingly useful because I had studied how people behave in society—in the United States and in other countries. I studied how people behave in subcultures, how men and women deal with each other, and their roles within their communities. I learned about deviant behavior and why people commit criminal acts.
But I didn’t have any formal education in criminal profiling or in criminal behavior, crime reconstruction, and forensics, the three fields that are the foundation of criminal profiling. The University of Maryland, near where I lived, offered a criminal justice program, but nothing really useful for profiling. In fact, there was nothing in the entire United States for those not in law enforcement that was focused on criminal profiling. I found a forensics program at George Washington University, but it was pretty much a lab program. The course really wasn’t geared toward criminal profiling, and I wasn’t interested in getting a job as a technician.
There were many programs in psychology—which people often think is what criminal profiling is based on. A profiler is supposed to understand the behavior and the mind-set of the killer, but little of psychology is ever about aberrant behavior and psychopathy. Most of what was taught was general psychology, which didn’t apply to murderers and psychopaths. The few courses I found that focused on deviant psychology and mental disorders were all about treatment, and I couldn’t have cared less about curing rapists and murderers. I figured that by the time you were a bona fide serial killer, you were a hopeless case and a nasty piece of work. I am not one of those who believe that psychologists can rehabilitate a guy who has killed ten women. And even if he could be rehabilitated, he doesn’t deserve the chance. I always say, when you bring the dead woman back to life, then you can give the killer treatment.
So how was I going to learn criminal profiling?
The only straight-line methodology I found was joining the FBI. First of all, I was too old; they wouldn’t even let me try. Second, when you join the FBI, you don’t just become a criminal profiler. You can’t say, “Now that I have joined, this is what I want to do.” You become an agent, and twenty years later, you might still be sitting in Iowa doing whatever FBI agents do in Iowa. Maybe someday, if you were really, really lucky, you’d become a criminal profiler; but then again maybe you wouldn’t. So for me, the FBI was out. I had to find some other way. What was left? That’s what I wanted to know.
There was nothing out there, apparently, so I concluded the only solution was to create my own criminal profiling program, study it on my own, and take advantage of anything complementary that I could find.
I found courses offered online by Brent Turvey, who has a master’s degree in forensic science. Turvey was one of the first independent profilers in the country and he strongly encouraged the Sherlock Holmes scientific method of deduction that he called “Deductive Profiling.” He may have a master’s in forensics but he clearly studied much on his own to learn all the other skills necessary to profiling. These weren’t accredited college courses, but they were informative and I was gathering my education from every existing source that I could find.
I took all the classes that Turvey offered, purchased the recommended textbooks, and learned a great deal. That opened the door to attending a serial homicide conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a death investigation conference in Florida. These experiences exposed me to the skills and tools I needed, acquired at the feet of some of the world’s most accomplished detectives and crime analysts.
On my own, I read and studied some four hundred books related to profiling, crime analysis, serial homicide, and forensics over the next four years. There is nothing better for studying than hours and hours of quiet time at the hospital waiting for the doctor to come in, the surgery to end, and the patient to wake up.
Later on, I earned a master’s degree in criminal justice because I wanted to learn more about police operations and procedures and the challenges of the criminal justice system in general. It wasn’t criminal profiling, but it was an issue with which I was concerned.
The fact is that people are stuck on the concept that you must attend a particular program that certifies you as a criminal profiler. But to date, there are no specific requirements for participation in the field. Any way that you learn, as long as you gain the skills and you understand the field, is an education. A college program is a wonderful opportunity if such a program exists (and today there is a college-level criminal profiling certificate program available that I developed for Excelsior College) but, even with a college program under one’s belt, learning is an ongoing process and one should always seek new information and skills.
During that time, I began to develop my own idea of what was wrong with the present practice of criminal profiling. I disagreed with a lot of what I read. Much of it didn’t even make sense. Some of the methodologies I was reading about seemed like hocus-pocus to me. I couldn’t fathom anything scientific behind certain theories that added up to nothing more than picking something out of a hat.
There was sleight-of-hand being sold by a few profilers who had been practicing for a long time. I’m not saying they didn’t do a good job when they worked their cases; I’m not saying they weren’t good profilers. But by the time they shared their techniques in books, everything became a show of “How brilliant I am” and “How every profile I did matched the suspect perfectly!”
Oh, please! There’s no way you could have gotten those things right, because the methodology didn’t make any sense. You couldn’t have known the things you claimed. Profiles are science, not magic.
I watched a television show about famed FBI profiler John Douglas and a case he worked on in Alaska. On the show, Douglas theorized that when they found the perpetrator, he would have a stutter, and he did! Now how in the world would anybody—I don’t care how much training you’ve got—figure out that a guy who committed a particular crime stutters? From where do you get that? Well, Hollywood twisted the story around like they so often do.
It turned out that the police already had a suspect in mind, and they asked Douglas if he thought that the man they had in custody could be the serial killer, this man who owned a small plane and stuttered. Douglas profiled the crime and, since the profile matched the police suspect, he said the killer would be a stutterer. H
e already knew that the guy stuttered, but the television show didn’t make that clear. In his book Mindhunter, Douglas points out that he knew the suspect stuttered, but Hollywood made him seem like he could pick this trait out because of his brilliance.
While the Hollywood spin on profilers makes for exciting reading, students of profiling are often mystified and discouraged because they can’t understand how they could ever possibly figure the same things out—what color car the suspect drives, that he likes to watch the news, that he is a sports lover. I have news for them. I can’t figure those things out, either.
SOMETIMES, A PROFILER applies inductive profiling to a case.
A sexual homicide is almost always committed by males. How often do you see a woman convicted of sexual assault? Almost never. It’s an extremely unusual crime. A profiler could take statistical information and say, “If you have a girl who’s been raped, then I’m going to say it was by a man.” Anyone can guess that. And most males who commit crimes are between twenty-two and thirty-two. We can start creating a profile by staying with the safe bets: “The sexual assaults were committed by a man between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two.” Then if a guy committed a number of poorly planned crimes, all locally, I could say what he’s not doing well in his life: he’s probably unable to maintain a job or a relationship. And he’s not very clever. I bet I will still be batting close to a thousand with this profile.
But unusual guesses, like a stutter, could not possibly be known logically or statistically.
As I learned about profiling, I discovered that there was a great deal of mythology about the field—promoted by profilers themselves—to make profilers seem like some kind of gods. They want the police and general public believing there are only so many people in the world who could ever do this, because they’re so brilliant and gifted. They can simply look at a scene and—voilà!—they know all the answers. It’s ridiculous.
Brent Turvey pushed for establishing an increasingly scientific practice of criminal profiling. I support his efforts and have continued to promote the deductive method of criminal profiling—one based on evidence, the scientific method, and solid explanations for profile determinations.
A profiler has to spend a long time studying autopsy reports and crime scene photos, doing crime role plays, crime reconstructing, and crime analysis. It is hard work. Deductive profiling isn’t as “sexy” and “mystical” as profiling that makes amazing conclusions through inside information or luck, but it is a much better tool for homicide investigators, and that is the only thing that really matters.
IN 1995, FIVE years after the Anne Kelley murder, I still believed Walt Williams should be a suspect.
Now having greater knowledge and training, I went back into Walt’s history to question once more whether I was right about him, and if he could be connected to any other homicides in the area.
Starting anew with the Anne Kelley homicide, I found it hard to believe that a crime of this nature would be a perpetrator’s first and only crime. Kelley was bludgeoned and strangled. She was sexually assaulted and brutalized. The description of what happened to Anne was one of the reasons I never believed that Michael Potter, just turning eighteen, could have committed a crime this brutal.
I started building a background of Williams by interviewing the people with whom he had worked. The past is the first place to look for psychopathic tendencies. Many times on television, an interviewer says to me of a crime suspect, “Well, everybody says he’s a great guy.” I say, “No, no, they’re saying that now, before they have had a chance to reflect, but look back into his past—really look—and you’ll uncover all his psychopathic behaviors. They were there for years and years, ever since he was a kid.”
The prospects of interviewing people made me nervous, because I had never conducted an investigation before. I had never knocked on strangers’ doors and I didn’t know how people would respond to me. I felt kind of silly, actually, like a new salesperson making cold calls to advertise some product. Even when I was a Girl Scout, I didn’t like selling cookies.
I had now completed all of my studies and had reached a point where I considered myself a criminal profiler, whether anybody else wanted to consider me one or not. I designed my first business card and off I went to test the response.
I decided to start with Walt’s former employers, and the response I received was incredible.
I went to a law office in D.C. where he worked as a clerk just before he moved into my house. When I got there, I said, “I’m a private investigator,” and I handed my P.I. license to the receptionist. “I would like to talk to somebody who Walt Williams would have worked under. I’m looking into some of his past work history.”
The receptionist went away and a fellow came running from the back room and actually leaped over the counter. No kidding, leaped.
“Walt Williams?” he cried. “Oh, my God, that guy?”
He hauled me back to his office, and he couldn’t stop ranting and raving. “That guy was trouble. He would come to work wearing a black fishnet shirt. I’m like, ‘Walt, it’s a law office. What are you doing in a black fishnet shirt?’ Or he’d be dressed like a comic book character. He was obsessed with comic books, Spider-Man and other juvenilia like that. He was a twenty-three-year-old guy enamored with this kid stuff.”
According to this attorney, Walt behaved inappropriately with women in the office. They were uniformly uncomfortable around him. And he was always coming up with excuses for not getting things done.
“Why did you hire him?” I asked.
“Have you ever tried to hire somebody for a job as a mail clerk? You get pond scum,” he said. “But Walt came in, he was dressed in a suit, and he had a great résumé—”
“Which was a pack of lies,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “I know that now.”
He handed me Walt’s résumé—it was quite amusing to read, and I was also amazed that this man still had the paper in his files so many years later; Walt must really have gotten his goat. I said, “How come, when his next employer called you up to get a recommendation, they were told he was a great worker?”
He shrugged.
“I just wanted to get rid of him.”
As we all know, many people lie about their ex-employees these days. They don’t want to get sued for telling the truth, which is why recommendations have become rather useless. When I told my friend Kim, who hired and dated Walt, she was furious. She said, “Oh, that’s just great. They sicced him on us knowing darn well he was a terrible employee.”
Reading Walt’s résumé for the first time I learned some fascinating tidbits. He wrote that he did “secret work” for an air force colonel. Really? I actually located the “colonel.” He laughed when I called. “Walt worked as a mail clerk in my office in Virginia,” he said. “I’ve been in the military, but I’ve never been a colonel.” That was a gross exaggeration.
Walt worked for a department store, as a security guard, so I went there.
“Oh, that guy?” his supervisor said. “Geez, he was so creepy. He was the only person who worked for me to whom I wouldn’t give my pager number. I didn’t want to be contacted by him. Walt told me once that he was going to snipe me on the way into work, ‘joking’ about gunning me down. Once he said that he had gloves that had stun guns in them so he could knock people out. Another day, Walt told me that he got a girl pregnant, and I said, ‘Is she going to get an abortion?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it myself.’ That totally freaked me out.”
I drove two hours south to meet with his father. I honestly didn’t expect him to speak with me. I rang the doorbell and when he answered, I explained who I was.
“I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m trying to learn a little bit more about your son, because he’s either committed a serious crime, or he’s gotten himself into trouble by making himself look like he committed the crime.”
Walt’s father looked at me and rolled his eyes.
; “Come on in,” he said.
We spent the next two hours talking and he told me all kinds of things about Walt from way back when he was a child. “He’s always been a problem,” he said. “I had a difficult time with him. I’ve had problems with him constantly lying, and one time he stole a bunch of quarters from me, I think it was a jar.”
He told me Walt couldn’t keep a job, had no ambition, and all he wanted to do was play Dungeons & Dragons with his loser friends. He was a disappointment as a son.
His dad said that Walt served in the air force, but that he was discharged because the military said he was schizoid. He used the word “schizoid.” Walt later told me himself that he was let go because they also said he had a personality disorder. I thought that was interesting, because I believed he had a personality disorder and not a mental illness. How long did it take the air force to discover and make this evaluation? Four months.
When our interview ended, Walt’s father said, “If you need any more help, you let me know.” He could have slammed the door in my face, but he didn’t. In fact, he gave me new insight into his son.
My confidence was building with regard to my ability to run a background interview, and my suspicions about Walt were growing. Next I tracked down his sister.
She also invited me into her home and I sat down with her for two hours. At one point her husband and kids joined the conversation, and everybody had something to say about Walt.
She cried and said, “I’ve never understood what was wrong with him. All my life, I’ve had problems with him.”
Her husband said, “He creeps me out completely.”
And the kids added, “Uncle Walt creeps us out, too.”
They described incident after incident in which Walt struggled with the people around him and displayed peculiar behaviors.
Everyone I asked for an interview agreed. The family did not seem shocked or shaken that I was investigating him in connection with a sexual homicide. How many families would not object to a stranger sitting in their living room and questioning them as to whether their son, brother, brother-in-law, or uncle might be a murderer? Walt’s family members weren’t upset at all. Not one of them.