Essays On Criminal Profiling

Working a hundred and fifty cases a year, he was on the road constantly, but BTK was never far from his thoughts. “The objective of our session was to keep moving forward until we ran out of juice,” Douglas writes. Douglas continues: I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. Douglas writes, What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with . If there’s a psychic component to this, I won’t run from it. colleague Robert Ressler set out to interview the most notorious serial killers in the country.“Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, ‘Who the hell is this BTK? They would rely on the typology developed by their colleague Robert Ressler, himself the author of the true-crime best-sellers “Whoever Fights Monsters” and “I Have Lived in the Monster.” The goal was to paint a picture of the killer—of what sort of man BTK was, and what he did, and where he worked, and what he was like—and with that scene “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. In the late nineteen-seventies, John Douglas and his F. They started in California, since, as Douglas says, “California has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes.” On weekends and days off, over the next months, they stopped by one federal prison after another, until they had interviewed thirty-six murderers. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.”“Jesus! When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here.

“Moreover, the disorganized killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims,” Ressler writes in “Whoever Fights Monsters.” “He does not want to know who they are, and many times takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.”Each of these styles, the argument goes, corresponds to a personality type.

The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He’s too strange and withdrawn to be married or have a girlfriend.

The more they learned, the more precise the associations became. It’s on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight—high risk.

If the victim was white, the killer would be white. frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman,” Douglas writes. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning?

Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits. In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. Once, Douglas tells us, he drove down to the local police station and offered his services in the case of an elderly woman who had been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfill a specific fantasy.

The detectives working the crime were regular cops, and Douglas was a bureau guy, so you can imagine him perched on the edge of a desk, the others pulling up chairs around him.“ ‘Okay,’ I said to the detectives. The recruitment of the victim might involve a ruse or a con. Douglas and Ressler, in their respective books, call that kind of crime “organized.”In a “disorganized” crime, the victim isn’t chosen logically.

If he doesn’t live alone, he lives with his parents.

If he drives at all, his car is a wreck.“The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer’s behavior and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character,” we’re told in a crime manual that Douglas and Ressler helped write.

Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town.

Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European.