How FBI Serial Killer Profiling Works

Because of the growing number of requests for profiling services in the 1980s, the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit made their services available to law enforcement nationwide through their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP)--which maintains a nationwide network of computer databases dedicated to taking violent offenders off the streets as quickly as possible.

The VICAP Crime Analysis Report runs for ten pages of detailed law enforcement reporting for each murder. Factors such as age, gender, occupation, intelligence, acquaintance with the victim, residence, mode of transportation, modus operandi, ritualistic behavior, victim characteristics, and offender characteristics are recorded and entered into their database.

When two or more murders have been committed over time by the same person(s), a dynamic synergistic comparison can give investigators a systematic look at the presence or absence of evidence, the crime scene signature, the comfort zone of the killer, and the possible motives for the murders. Other indicators such as emotional intensity, the rationale for the murders and any number of factors that stand out to investigators can help law enforcement identify offenders. Criminal profiling gives investigative agencies the ability to connect details, recognize patters of offender behavior, and review national fingerprint and DNA databases which facilates the work of narrowing down suspects.

The intent of crime scene investigation and psychological profiling is to identify the key elements of the scene and the behavioral factors related to serial killers--enabling homicide investigators to prioritize leads and apprehend offenders before they can kill again. A developing composite profile does not provide the identity of the offender but merely indicates the type of person most likely to commit such a crime having these characteristics. One researcher, Geberth (1981), found that a murderer’s behavior and personality is reflected in the crime scene “much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character.” Sexual homicide crime scenes reveal information about the killer’s behavior and how he furnishes his mind.

When crime scene characteristics are combined with profile characteristics, a composite picture of the behavioral traits of the offender begins to take shape. With serial killers, the profile comes into sharper focus with each new victim. From these elements, investigators are able to draw assumptions about the killer, but they need to be always on guard against tunnel vision—making conclusions that place limitations upon the investigation.

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The FBI’s Behavorial Science Unit (BSU) researchers found that serial killers suffer from antisocial personality disorder, a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others. They have no conscience and usually show a history of petty crime. Serial killers make the leap from sociopaths to psychopaths when the predatory urge overwhelms them.

The BSU study discovered that most serial killers share many of the same formative experiences growing up: 

• They had a history of being bullied or socially isolated as children and adolescents.
• They often engaged in petty crimes like theft, fraud, or vandalism.
• They are practiced liars.
• Many come from unstable families and have experienced a serious family disruption like divorce, separation, or a breach in the parent/child relationship.
• Many have a history of being abused emotionally, physically, and/or sexually in their youth by a family member.
• They often manifest attachment disorder due to early childhood trauma like violence, neglect, rejection, or pervasive alcohol or drug use in the home.
• They suffer from low self-esteem and retreat into a fantasy world where they are safe and in control.
• They are fascinated by fires and fire starting.
• And they often show cruelty to younger children and/or small animals.

Additional common traits of serial killers documented by the BSU were:

• A serial killer’s motivation is usually psychological gratification of some sort.
• They have a compulsive need for power and control over their victims.
• They suffer from mental illness with psychotic episodes and have mental illness or alcoholism in their family backgrounds.
• They have a passion for throttling which leads to overkill.
• They often display a blood lust by mutilating, dismembering, or disemboweling their victims.
• They have an overwhelming desire to inflict pain and terror, and many violate the bodies of victims with foreign objects.
• They are predators of victims weaker than themselves: children and defenseless women in particular.
• They lack remorse or guilt and project blame upon their victims.
• They suffer from impulsivity and are oversexed with intense sexual frustration.
• They have fits of self-pity and resentment.
• They often begin their crimes with peeping in windows and home burglary--which often escalates to rape and murder.
• They are compulsive liars and petty thieves.
• They usually stalk their victims but will take advantage of crimes of opportunity.
• They often take trophies from the crime scenes, photos, or body parts as souvenirs to relive their orgies of depravity.
• They often wear a mask of sanity in public for protective coloration.
• Their boundaries between fantasy and reality are lost.
• Their fantasies turn to dominance, control, sexual conquest, violence, and finally murder.

Not every serial killer fits each one these traits, but it is striking how consistently many of these traits appear in the profiles of every known serial killer.

These common characteristics help investigators form a composite picture of an offender. Drawing conclusions about a suspect from profile characteristics is as much art as science, and it takes a trained eye and a bit of luck to pay dividends, but when done properly, the likelihood of catching a serial killer is greatly enhanced. 

Rise In Sex-Slayings--in the 1960s and 1970s--Prompts Creation of FBI's VICAP Data Base

Beyond our instinct for survival and self-defense, most humans in modern society do not become killers. If we did, there would soon be none of us left. In fact, most cultures have provisions against murder in their written canons. “Thou Shall Not Kill” is a common moral precept found in one form or another in most of the world’s cultures and religions--that said--murder has been a part of civilization since before the beginning of human history.

The oldest known written story of murder is the five thousand year old tale Gilgamesh. In this Babylonian work based on even more ancient Sumerian fables, King Gilgamesh and his half-brother Enkidu conspire to murder the Guardian of the Forest--the giant Humbaba. Their goal was to help establish Gilgamesh’s fame throughout the world. The reality of this story probably owes much to the struggles of these ancient people to import the cedars of Lebanon for their ambitious building programs in the flat, treeless desert plains of the Fertile Crescent.

Cain and Abel

Over twenty-five hundred years later, The Old Testament of the ancient Hebrews tells the story of Cain and his brother Abel. Cain wanted the land and its water to raise cattle. Abel wanted the land and its water to raise crops. For this reason, Cain slew his brother Abel. As the biblical story goes, the human race has had the Mark of Cain upon it ever since. The sacrament of baptism in the Catholic religion symbolically washes away this original sin.

In our modern world, the question of why people murder one another has been a topic of much study and debate. Despite psychologists and criminologists having new tools and techniques available to them, there is still much to learn about why some humans are compelled to kill. The tide of violent killers has not abated and society feels more fearful than ever. Understanding what motivates a person to commit an act of murder is one thing, to prevent it from happening in the first place is another. Murder increases as the population increases; it is the grim logic of statistics.

Sexual homicide has long been studied by various professional disciplines. Sociologists want to study sexual homicide as a social phenomenon that occurs within the context of the greater society. Psychologists are most interested in the psychiatric diagnosis of these murderers and developing techniques for treating sex offenders. Law Enforcement is interested in studying sexual homicide from the standpoint of identifying and apprehending suspects quickly and protecting the public from further senseless carnage.


Although serial killing and sexual homicide are not new phenomenon, FBI statistics revealed a sharp upward turn for this type of murder in the 1960s and 1970s. Serial killing gained widespread exposure from intense media coverage of cases like Richard Speck, the Chicago nurse murderer; the San Francisco Bay area Zodiac Killer; John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown; the Charles Manson family, Tate/LaBianca Helter Skelter slayings; Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler; and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killings, just to name a few.

 

In their study, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, written by FBI Special Agents Robert Ressler, John E. Douglas, and Dr. Ann W. Burgess, Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health, they give the rationale for their work. “In the 1960s and 1970s, FBI researchers noticed a rise in serial killer cases across the nation. During the 1970s, Special Agents of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSK) began profiling serial killers on an informal basis by studying crime scene information to deduce certain offender characteristics and behaviors.” After the informal criminal profiling program began to show promise, the study was formalized during the Reagan administration in 1982 with a grant from the National Institute of Justice. 


This initial FBI study was the first to examine sexual murderers collectively as a sub-population. The data was collected from 1979 through 1983 on thirty-six offenders responsible for a minimum of one-hundred and eighteen victims, mostly women. All of the interviews were conducted within the Michigan Department of Corrections prison system, from willing participants of the project.  
 

The first data for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) crime report was entered into the FBI’s mainframe computer at the FBI Building in Washington D.C. on May 29, 1985. It marked the pioneering use of artificial intelligence technology in crime scene analysis and criminal personality profiling. Today, the VICAP database is massive and linked to other crime fighting organizations throughout North America and databases worldwide.

The criminal profiling project paid particular attention to physical evidence found at crime scenes that may reveal behavioral traits of serial murderers and profile characteristics that are variables which identify the offenders as individuals. Together, they help to form a composite picture of a suspect. Over the life of the study--1976-1986--homicide data was placed in the database in one of five categories: felony murders, suspected felony murders, argument-motivated murders, other identifiable motive (circumstance) murders, and unknown motives for murders.

What investigators discovered was that for every category of murder except unknown motives, there was no more than a 1.5 % increase within that ten year period.  Unknown motives--that comprise both serial murders and sexual murders--had a disturbing 14 % increase over the same decade. That is a tenfold increase over the other categories of murders.

According to the late FBI profiler, Robert Ressler, “Apprehension of the sexual murderer is one of law enforcement’s most difficult challenges…. Sexual homicide particularly causes a heightened fear for the community because of its apparent random and motiveless nature. This places public pressure on law enforcement officials to make an arrest in these cases as early as possible.”

FBI Behaviorial Science Unit's Serial Killer Characteristics - Part Two of Four

Profiling serial killers is as much art as science. The complex psychological factors that make up the motivation, justification, and rationalization within the minds of disturbed individuals is difficult for a sane person to fathom. That said, recognizing those psychological behaviors helps law enforcement apprehend these predators and limit the damage they do to families, the communities where the murders occur, and the general well-being of society at large.

Before the FBI's VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) study on profiling serial killers in the 1980s, previous violent crime models categorized these multiple murders cases generally in groups like sexually orientated killings, power and control killings, greed or gain killings, nuisance killings, cult killings, and revenge killings. 

The basic problem with grouping these murders by type is that it doesn't address the crime scene details or the signature characteristics of the assailant. These murder taxonomies are of limited value to law enforcement when trying to learn the motivation or the identity of an unknown serial killer.

These categories of murders are general indicators that may have some descriptive value, but they fail to provide homicide investigators with the necessary tools to evaluate a crime scene effectively and to capture the perpetrator quickly. These static descriptions do not address the issues of the offender's identity and do not affect his or her apprehension.

To learn how serial killers think and to study their behavior, FBI Special Agents conducted exhaustive interviews and collected data on thirty-six incarcerated multiple murderers from their prison confines. The logic behind the study was self-evident, interview convicted serial killers to learn how they think and what motivates them. After all, they are the experts in what they do.

FBI researchers had a captive audience but studied only willing participants. Serial killers who did participate in the study did so for several reasons:

1. Some confessed killers wanted the opportunity to clarify other people's conclusions about them.
2. Some wanted to point out why it was impossible for them to have committed the murders.
3. Others wanted to teach the police how the crimes were committed and motivated.

With these men serving life sentences in maximum security portions of various prisons, they look forward to opportunities to get out of their cells and maybe get a warm cup of coffee and a stale doughnut out of it. As for the prisoners' candor, most had nothing left to lose and they answered freely. Other prisoners took longer to establish a rapport with investigators before they were comfortable talking about their crimes to FBI researchers.

Once this new data was entered into the Bureau's computer system, some common characteristics of these sexual predators began to take shape:

• Their motivation is usually psychological gratification of some sort (sex, anger, thrill, gain, or simply attention).
• They often suffer from mental illness with psychotic breaks.
• They lack remorse or guilt and project blame on their victims.
• They have a compulsive need for power and control.
• They exhibit impulsivity and predatory behavior.
• They often wear a mask of sanity in public for protective coloration.
• Their boundaries between fantasy and reality are lost.
• Their fantasies turn to dominance, control, sexual conquest, violence, and finally murder.

Researchers found that serial killers suffer from antisocial personality disorder, a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others. They have an impoverished moral sense (conscience) and usually a history of petty crime. These killers seamlessly make the leap from sociopaths to psychopaths when the predatory urge overcomes them.

The FBI study further discovered that most serial killers share many of the same formative experiences growing up:

• They had a history of being bullied or socially isolated as children and adolescents.
• They often engaged in petty crimes like theft, fraud, or vandalism.
• They are compulsive and practiced liars.
• Many come from unstable families and have experienced a serious family disruption like divorce, separation, or a breach in the child/parent relationship.
• Many serial killers have a history of being abused emotionally, physically, and/or sexually in their youth.
• They frequently manifest attachment disorder due to early childhood trauma like violence, neglect, rejection, or pervasive alcohol or drug use in the home.
• They suffer from low self-esteem and retreat into a fantasy world where they are safe and in control.
• They show a fascination with fire starting.
• They show cruelty to younger children and/or small animals.

The above listed traits form a composite picture of common characteristics of many serial killers and their crimes, but they are only useful after the capture of the perpetrators. They are of little or no use in capturing them. 

Sexual homicide has long been studied by various professional disciplines and perspectives. Law enforcement came late to the party. Sociologists want to examine sexual homicide as a social phenomenon that occurs within the context of the greater society. Psychologists are most interested in the psychiatric diagnosis of these murderers and developing techniques for treating sex offenders. 

Law enforcement is interested in the study of sexual homicide from the standpoint of how best to investigate these crimes, how to identify suspects quickly, how to apprehend and convict suspects, and how to protect the public from further senseless carnage.

The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) was able to expand on the work of researchers, Robert D. Keppel and Richard Walter, previous developers of rapist categories for the FBI. The BSU entered their research data on rape murderers into that database and revised the dynamic characteristics of the four existing classifications to provide a more discerning and functional view of serial killers.

In my next two posts, I'll review the FBI's four rape/murder classifications and go into more detail on how they form a composite profile of Washtenaw County serial killer John Norman Collins.

The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and Serial Killer Profiling - Part One of Four

In the 1960s and into the early 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) noticed a rise in serial killing cases across the country. Special agents of their Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) began profiling criminals informally using crime scene information to deduce common characteristics and behaviors of serial killers.

After this informal criminal profiling program began to show promise, the study was formalized during the Reagan administration in 1982 with a grant from the National Institute of Justice. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) studied thirty-six convicted and incarcerated sex slayers from a law enforcement perspective. Extensive data was collected from 1979-1983 of one-hundred and eighteen crime scenes and victims (mostly women) from these thirty-six serial killers.

In 1985, the first data was entered into the VICAP computer system, and it was operational on June 1, 1985. It marked the pioneering use of artificial intelligence technology in crime scene analysis and criminal personality profiling. Today, the FBI's VICAP database is massive and linked to other crime fighting database institutions worldwide like the International Police (INTERPOL) in Europe and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Linkage Analysis System in Canada.

The data in the VICAP study focused on characteristics consisting of physical evidence found at the crime scenes that may reveal behavioral traits of the serial murderer and profile characteristics which are variables that identify the offender as an individual. Together, they help to form a composite picture of the suspect.

A VICAP Crime Analysis Report runs for ten pages of detailed law enforcement reporting. Factors such as age, gender, occupation, intelligence, acquaintance w/victim, residence, mode of transportation, modus operandi, ritualistic behavior, characteristics of the victim, and crime scene signature of the offender are noted and entered into their database. Criminal profiling gives investigative agencies the ability to connect details, recognize patterns of offender behavior, and review national fingerprint and DNA databases which makes manageable the work of narrowing down suspects.

When two or more murders have been committed over time by the same person(s), a dynamic synergistic comparison can give investigators a systematic look at the presence or absence of evidence, the crime scene signature, the comfort zone of the killer, and the possible motives for the murder. Other indicators such as emotional intensity, the rationale for the murder, and any number of factors that stand out to investigators can help make connections.

The intent of crime scene investigation and psychological profiling is to identify the key elements of the scene and the behavioral factors related to the killer, enabling homicide investigators to prioritize leads and apprehend serial killers before they can kill again.

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More detailed information on the BSU's groundbreaking study can be found in Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives co-written by Robert K. Ressler, former FBI Profiler and late director of Forensic Behavioral Sciences; John E. Douglas, former Unit Chief of the FBI's investigative support group; and Ann W. Burgess, Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health at the University of Pennsylvania.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Sexual_Homicide_Patterns_and_Motives_Pap.html?id=j2rdEgUIMLcC