Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  The dependence on individual profiler talent is not conducive to the investigative cooperation that complex multijurisdictional cases often require. For example, the profile used by the Unabomb task force to investigate a series of bombings for which Ted Kaczynski would be eventually charged suggested that the serial killer was in his midthirties to early forties, perhaps with some college education but most likely a skilled blue-collar worker. FBI profiler Bill Tafoya dissented, suggesting that the killer probably had a graduate degree, perhaps even a Ph.D., in a “hard” science—something like electrical engineering or mathematics—and would be in his early fifties. Tafoya claims that tremendous pressure was put on him to “get with the program” and amend his profile to one consistent with the task force’s then current investigative strategy focused on blue-collar aircraft workers around age forty.226 When Kaczynski was arrested he was fifty-three years old and held a Ph.D. in mathematics, as Tafoya’s profile suggested.

  Most recently, profiling has again come under question, over the speculations offered on the Beltway Snipers who terrorized the Washington, D.C., region in the autumn of 2002. Although it is unclear what the official FBI profile on the sniper was, former FBI profilers and private profiling consultants almost unanimously ventured that the sniper was an organized white loner, in his mid- to late thirties, killing for the “thrill” of it and not for political or ideological motives. Instead police ended up arresting two black suspects: forty-one-year-old John Allen Muhammad and seventeen-year-old John Lee Malvo, whose motives are still unclear. Despite the fact that several witnesses described “dark-skinned” suspects and an earlier witness reported two “Hispanic” men, police continued to focus on what is known as “RWG”—regular white guys. One Beltway Sniper task force officer responded to the witness reports, “Anybody could put makeup on . . . we don’t want anyone to give up on the fact that it could be a white guy.”227

  Former FBI counterintelligence agent I. C. Smith explained, “First you start with the statistic that 80 to 90 percent of all (serial) shooters are white guys. Then you back out the guys happily married. That leaves the introspective loner types.” This is exactly the primary weakness of profiling: its basis in statistical probability. Indeed, the majority of snipers in the past have been white antisocial male thrill killers. But a profile collapses the moment an offender does not conform to the statistical norm. Since numerically serial snipers are still a relatively rare phenomenon, there is a high probability of a profile being invalidated by the appearance of a single anomaly. Criminologist Robert Keppler commented, “In a macabre way, looking at the changing face of a serial killer is like looking at the changing face of America . . . Because serial offenders exist at the margins of society, and not in the mainstream, even though they can camouflage themselves in the mainstream of their victim pool, it is at the margins where one sometimes has to look to find the truth about what is taking place in society.”228 While this might be less of a critical issue in a dead-end investigation, in a rapidly unfolding case like that of the Beltway snipers, an inaccurate profile could have misguided investigative efforts and jeopardized lives.

  Researchers are only now beginning to explore the scientific veracity of criminal profiling. This is difficult, because most practicing profilers have refused to cooperate in controlled tests of their profiling abilities, no doubt fearing for their personal and professional credibility should they score unfavorably. Two recent studies on profiling, while not necessarily putting profiling itself under question, looked into the question of what kind of practitioners were most accurate in their profiles.

  The first test, the results of which were reported in 2000, compared the profiling skills of a group of professional profilers (those known to have been retained by police departments to submit profiles), a group of psychologists with no training in forensic or criminal psychology, police officers with five or more years of experience, psychics, and sophomore science and economics students.229 The drawbacks of this study were that the group of profilers were not law enforcement officers, the way FBI profilers are, and that only five profilers volunteered to participate in the test. The other groups consisted of twenty to thirty-five volunteers each.

  Each participant was given the same investigative file of a closed case for which the offender’s identity and pathology were known to the researchers, and asked to assemble profiles describing the offender’s physical characteristics, cognitive processes, offense behaviors, and social history and habits. They were then scored on how accurate their profile was compared to what the researchers knew about the actual offender.

  The psychics scored at the bottom of the scale. The profilers scored at the top for most accuracy. The psychologists with no criminal training followed them. In some categories, such as offense behaviors and physical characteristics, the psychologists actually scored marginally better than the profilers. Notwithstanding the fact that only five profilers were participating in the test, it did indicate that professional profilers did best at what they say they do best—criminal profiling. That psychological insight was a primary factor in the accuracy of this type of profiling was confirmed by the fact that psychologists scored second best. What was surprising, however, were the results from the other groups. In terms of accuracy, students, then police, and finally psychics followed the profilers and psychologists. That untrained science and economics students scored better than police was troubling, because FBI profilers are law enforcement officers first, and profilers second. Moreover, the FBI stresses that the primary qualification of their profilers is a long career as a criminal investigator prior to subsequent training as a profiler-analyst.

  In 2002, the same team of researchers tackled the issue of the effect of investigative experience on profiler accuracy. This time they gathered six groups: thirty-one senior detectives with a minimum of ten years investigative experience; twelve seasoned homicide detectives; nineteen trainee detectives, all with a minimum of ten years of general police duties; fifty police academy recruits with less than six weeks’ training; fifty police academy recruits with less than three weeks’ training; and thirty-one sophomore chemistry students. Each participant was given a similar task as in the previous test.230

  The results were astonishing: Sophomore chemistry students outperformed all the police groups across the board. Among the police groups, police recruits scored higher than experienced homicide detectives and outperformed the other police groups on some of the questions. These results contradict the FBI’s assertions that investigative experience is the highest qualification that successful profilers can bring to the job.

  The researchers suggest that paradoxically, the more experience an investigator has, the more that experience gets in the way of interpreting data for the purposes of profiling. Investigators, they propose, develop over the years a set of commonsense “heuristics”—impressions about criminals and crime that are based not necessarily on fact but on subjective experience and perceptions. Thus college students and police recruits with no such prejudicial experience produced more accurate profiles. The other factor that might be taken into account is the educational requirements of senior police officers at the time when they were originally recruited, which may account for their poorer performance in comparison to current police recruits. Formal education, it seems, is most valuable for effective profiling, instead of long police investigative experience. In that context, it should be noted that many FBI profilers hold MAs and Ph.D.s in behavioral sciences, which may account more for the BSU’s effectiveness than their investigative experience.

  In the end, however, before jumping to conclusions, one needs to remember that these tests presented only one case for profiling, and the nature of that particular case could perhaps favor the performance of one group over another. Nonetheless, we can see that if profiling is based on statistical probability, the more experienced investigators are, the more likely they are going to base their profiles on their perception of probability, as was the cas
e with the Beltway Sniper.

  Other Profiling Systems: Diagnostic Evaluation and Investigative Psychology

  The FBI’s crime scene analysis approach is not the only kind of behavioral profiling system. There is also diagnostic evaluation (DE), an adaptation of largely Freudian psychotherapeutic theory to crime analysis that depends on the diagnostic conclusions of the individual profiler. This was what Dr. James Brussel was practicing in his profile of the Mad Bomber in the 1950s. DE is highly individualistic from practitioner to practitioner and not used often now as an investigative tool.

  There is also investigative psychology (IP), used often by profilers in England, which is based on a collection of theories founded on the premise that a crime can be analyzed as an interpersonal transaction in which criminals are performing actions in a social context between themselves and their victims. IP was developed by David Cantor, an environmental psychologist, and first applied to the investigation of serial killer and rapist John Duffy, dubbed “The Railway Rapist” in London in 1986.

  Cantor structured four broad approaches to creating an IP profile:

  Interpersonal coherence: Actions performed by criminals make sense with the criminals’ own psychology. Victims, for example, are selected for reasons important only to the offender.

  Significance of time and place: Crime scenes are chosen for reasons relevant to the personality of the offender and his residence and place of work. Certain personalities prefer a familiar ground in which to commit their offense, while for others it is irrelevant.

  Criminal career: Criminals, while they may escalate their crimes, do not change a basic way they commit their crimes throughout their career.

  Forensic awareness: A criminal’s awareness of evidence and attempts to destroy it indicates experience and extent of prior record.

  It is obvious that IP is similar to the FBI’s criminal investigative analysis in many ways. The primary difference is the FBI’s dualistic categorization of offenders as organized or disorganized.

  GEOGRAPHIC PROFILING

  Criminal investigative analysis and psychological profiling are not the only types of profiling available to analyze the patterns of a serial killer. The most recent studies in England are proposing a very simple so-called circle hypothesis, which suggests that serial offenders live within a circle whose diameter is equal to the distance between the offender’s two farthest offenses. On the average, this equals an area of approximately ten square miles. Various studies confirmed this hypothesis: Eighty-seven percent of forty-five serial rapists in the south of England resided in this range; 82 percent of serial arsonists and 70 percent of serial rapists studied in Australia; and 86 percent of 126 U.S. serial killers as well.231

  The most recent advances in computer-driven geographic profiling of serial offenders has been made in Canada, where a radically new dimension has been added to profiling systems. A system called Orion, developed by former Vancouver police constable D. Kim Rossmo, operates on the principle of geoforensic profiling. What makes this system extraordinary is that it goes beyond identifying a hypothetical personality of the suspect—it ferrets out where the suspect lives and even his possible identity.

  Kim Rossmo was fascinated by accounts of a particular type of rural crime that has been plaguing India since 500 B.C., called a dacoity. A dacoity is when a gang of five or more members of one village raids and robs another village. The dacoity is always committed at night and always when the moon is new, because with little electrical lighting in rural India, the new phase of the moon provided almost complete cover of darkness for the raiding party.

  The Indian police developed a systematized geographic profiling system for capturing dacoity gangs. The police calculates the speed at which a person could travel on foot cross-country and plot a distance radius. Because farmers working in the fields at dawn would observe any strangers moving through their territory, the police knew that the gang had to get into the territory of their own village before dawn. Thus the probable village from where the gang came was quickly identified. As dacoity gangs followed a tradition by which they would not attack a member of their own caste, the police, once they identified the village, could further narrow down suspects by caste. From that point on, standard police investigative techniques could focus on the narrowed list of suspects.

  Rossmo also listened to stories of his fellow officers who pursued suspects with dogs. They told him that suspects almost always did the same thing when attempting to flee on foot: Right-handed suspects, when turning, tended to turn left; when encountering obstacles, they moved to the right; when throwing away incriminating evidence, they threw to their right; and when hiding in large buildings, they kept to outside walls.

  Rossmo studied cases in which geoforensic profiling was attempted. When Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi were dumping bodies on hillsides in Los Angeles, the LAPD measured the distances between each site and then, using a computer, plotted circles on a map. The center of each circle represented victim availability; the circumference represented capacity; while the radius represented ability. Vectors drawn from the various sites narrowed down an area of about three square miles, which the Los Angeles Police then saturated with uniformed officers in an attempt to frighten off the serial killers. Later, when Buono and Bianchi were apprehended, it turned out that Angelo Buono’s residence and upholstery shop, where some of the victims were raped and murdered, was near the center of the plotted zone.

  Rossmo’s Orion system takes into account not only geographical factors, but traffic flow factors, urban zoning, census data, and offender personality profiles to emerge with a highly probable offender location. Although Orion does not work with all types of personalities, it is highly effective with nontraveling serial offenders—rapists, bank robbers, child molesters, and killers who live in the same territory where they commit their crimes and do not change residences.

  Orion mathematically plots zones that an offender is likely to strike in, known as jeopardies, taking into account that most criminals tend not to strike too close to their own home but not too inconveniently far away either. From the jeopardies, depending on the personality of the criminal as profiled, Orion begins to calculate his or her probable place of residence by measuring “decay” from each crime site—where a convenient crime site becomes too close to a possible residence of an offender. To be practical, the system needs several crime scenes to triangulate an accurate rate of decay—which is precisely why it is so powerful a tool with serial offenders. Orion becomes more than 90 percent accurate with six or more crime locations entered into the system.

  When Orion went online in Vancouver, it quickly proved itself in catching a child molester who was attacking children in different parts of the city. The police had a vehicle description, but little else. After determining the traffic patterns at the times of the attacks, Orion plotted jeopardies, eliminating industrial, commercial, and other nonresidential areas. Based on census data and reflecting the probable socioeconomic background of the offender as identified by psychological profiling, Orion calculated a list of postal codes, in order of probability, where the offender likely resided. These postal codes were then filtered through motor vehicle registration and driver’s license files to match to the suspect vehicle described. A very short list of suspects was identified and subsequently investigated by standard police procedure, quickly leading to the arrest of the child molester.

  As powerful and as automated as all these systems are, Profiler and Orion are no better than the information fed into them. The geographical targeting done by Orion depends on the quality of the psychological profile of the suspect, as different profile types behave differently in geographical space. Likewise, Profiler’s ability to analyze data is only as good as the artificial intelligence rules written for it by human programmers. Furthermore, if police on the scene do not recognize, note, and identify certain crime scene characteristics, there is nothing to input into Profiler. Finally, the output of these computer systems
only provides high probability rates—it still remains up to human officers to interpret the data and fit them into their investigations in an effective manner.

  TEN

  SURVIVING A SERIAL KILLER:

  Escaping the Monster’s Clutch

  Take it from one who knows: It pays to be paranoid.

  —DANNY ROLLING (The Gainesville Ripper)

  People should learn to see and so avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, one should not make friends with evil men.

  —BUDDHA

  Profiling still remains very much a human activity, because while a computer might process information faster than a human, the depth and flexibility of human thinking power exceeds that of the computer—including the mind of the offender. The criminal imagination is creative in ways that often can escape the strictly defined rules of a computer’s artificial intelligence—only the human mind can keep up. Profiling is as much an intuitive art, unapproachable by a computer, as it is a precise science. The information in this chapter is based on FBI interviews with serial offenders and their victims who survived. This not a “how-to” guide to survival—as much as there might be similarities between serial killers and their behaviors, in the end, each one is an individual capable of exhibiting entirely new and unknown characteristics. The information here is presented with the purpose of identifying some of the options available and the risks involved with each. They are not foolproof measures and if you choose any of them, you do so at your own risk.