Criminal personality profiling

DEFINITION: Investigatory technique in which a detailed composite description of an unknown perpetrator is constructed on the basis of crime scene evidence.

SIGNIFICANCE: By providing police officers with descriptive information about what type of individual probably committed an offense, including demographic and psychological characteristics, profiling narrows the range of likely offenders and helps investigators concentrate their limited resources and time in search of suspects.

Criminal personality profiling is based on the notion that serial offenders engage in similar patterns of behavior and that each serial leaves a unique trail of with each crime. Profilers believe that the actions of serial offenders are deeply motivated, however bizarre, random, or senseless those actions might appear to untrained observers. The criminal activities in which these offenders engage are windows into their hidden desires, tendencies, and psychological traits. Conversely, these offenders’ thoughts as well as their emotional and sexual needs drive their criminal behaviors.

Serial Criminals

Profiling is most often employed in cases of serial homicides or rapes. These crimes, which tend to receive widespread media coverage, often involve female victims with common physical characteristics. The general profile of serial murderers, which matches the actual characteristics of most of the persons apprehended for such crimes, is as follows: they are white men with average or above-average intelligence, in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, who have an interest in criminal law and police work. Serial killers also tend to be interpersonally adept; they are typically friendly, charming, and engaging, which explains their success at attracting and luring victims to horrific deaths. Other types of serial criminals have also been the subjects of criminal personality profiling, including arsonists, bank robbers, kidnappers, and child molesters.

Profilers assume that perpetrators leave telltale signs of their psychopathology at their crime scenes (in the case of serial murderers, the locations where they kill, torture, and mutilate their victims) and in the areas where they conceal their victims’ bodies—so-called dump sites. Profilers examine these clues to characterize an unknown (that is, an individual who is likely to have committed the crime given the evidence at the scene). However, they rarely provide police investigators with the specific identity of an actual perpetrator.

Major Profiling Tasks

The three primary tasks of a criminal personality profiler are to generate details about an unknown perpetrator’s personality and sociodemographic characteristics, to predict the items that are likely to be discovered in a suspected offender’s possession, and to recommend various strategies for suspects in custody. In accomplishing the first of these tasks, the profiler provides police investigators with leads that narrow the pool of unknown suspects with respect to age, race, ethnicity, employment, education, and marital status. Profiling unfolds a biographical sketch of an at-large killer or rapist as the number of that person’s crimes increases and more information becomes available to the profiler. Profiling can also give investigators insights into where a perpetrator might live relative to the locations of the crimes.

The most important aspect of the profiler’s first task is to arrive at an educated guess about a likely offender on the basis of police and autopsy reports as well as the consistent elements found at different crime scenes, such as how the victims were killed (for example, stabbing, bludgeoning, strangling, suffocating) and how the bodies were positioned or displayed (for example, naked, partially clothed, posed). Based on these data, the profiler can help police officers to focus their attention on a certain type of suspect. The profiler can also provide police with information on where the offender is likely to live as well as when and where the offender is likely to strike again.

The defining aspects of a criminal’s behaviors are the individual’s (MO) and signature. The modus operandi consists of the steps the offender follows and the techniques and tools the offender uses when engaging in criminal activities. An offender’s MO can evolve. In other words, an individual’s criminal skills are honed and practices are modified with experience. As criminals become more seasoned, their MOs becomes more effective and efficient; they also become less likely to leave clues that will lead to their capture. There are several profiles of rapists and sexual assault perpetrators, and one example of an MO is that of the serial rapist who uses tools to pry open the bedroom windows of women sleeping in basement apartments. He wears gloves and thus never leaves fingerprints, and he enters and exits the apartment through the same window.

This serial rapist might also display a signature—an action taken not to accomplish the crime but to satisfy the perpetrator’s distinctive and perverse psychological needs. For example, the bedroom rapist might force his victims to assume degrading poses while he photographs them following the act of sexual violence. Signatures are unique to specific offenders because they emerge from the offenders’ idiosyncrasies and personal tendencies. MOs can be replicated by other offenders, but signatures cannot. Offenders who appropriate the MOs of fellow criminals are committing so-called copycat crimes. Signatures are often tied to the pathological sexual satisfaction that serial killers obtain from their offenses.

The second profiling task occurs after a prime suspect or person of interest has been identified. Knowledge about the alleged offender’s belongings can reinforce other evidence that ties that person to the crimes. For example, some serial killers collect souvenirs, newspaper clippings, photographs, fetish items, pornography, or other materials that help them remember, relive, and re-create their crimes, providing them with prolonged sexual or other types of gratification. The items taken from crime scenes for these purposes are sometimes referred to as “trophies.” Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, showcased the macerated skulls and bones of his victims in his apartment and consumed pieces of his victims’ flesh to re-create the pleasure he received from sexually violating their corpses.

The third profiling task follows the of the suspect. Based on inferences about the suspect’s personality traits and psychological disturbances, the profiler guides the police in the selection of interrogation techniques that will best elicit incriminating information from the suspected offender. Different strategies must be implemented with consideration of each suspect’s personality and psychological disorders. For example, with some offenders, unrelenting and aggressive questioning is most productive, whereas with others, a more relaxed and conversational tone is most likely to elicit confession. Still other serial offenders respond best in interrogation situations in which they perceive themselves, rather than the police investigators, as being in full control.

Pioneers in Profiling

Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) was among the first criminal profilers. He and many of his contemporaries believed that criminals, unlike noncriminals, could be identified by physical characteristics such as bushy eyebrows or a receding chin. Early profilers also noted criminals’ tendency to wear shabby clothes and to be tattooed.

Dr. James Brussel, a New York-based psychiatrist and the first renowned profiler in the United States, was influenced by these theories in his work with the New York Police Department. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Brussel helped investigators track suspects in cases of serial bombing, arson, and murder. His most famous criminal personality profile, the “Mad Bomber”—who planted bombs in crowded public places in New York City from 1940 to 1956—was uncanny in its accuracy. Despite extensive police efforts, the bomber remained elusive until Inspector Howard Finney enlisted the help of Dr. James Brussel, a psychoanalyst. Brussel created a detailed criminal profile, suggesting the bomber was a disgruntled former employee of Consolidated Edison, paranoid, and meticulous. This profile was publicized, provoking the bomber to reveal his motive in a letter, leading to the identification and capture of George Metesky. Metesky, who fit Brussel’s profile perfectly, was found insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he remained until his release in 1973.

Brussel attempted to systematize and standardize his profiling techniques, working with two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Howard Teten and Patrick J. Mullany. In the 1970s, they created a seminal course in applied that helped to spawn the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, later renamed the Behavioral Analysis Unit, which is now a part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia.

In the 1980s, FBI agents Robert K. Ressler and John Douglas, as well as forensic nurse Ann Burgess, heavily influenced modern criminal profiling by developing behavioral interview and research process through extensive interviews with serial killers. They also created a criminal profiling procedure.

Psychologist David Canter founded the field of investigative psychology in the early 1990s. Specifically, he advocated for the use of empirical, peer-reviewed research to develop criminal profiles.

Types of Serial Criminals

Expert criminal personality profilers trained by the FBI have created several typologies or groupings of serial murderers. One scheme for categorizing these offenders focuses on their mobility. Geographically stable serial killers (examples include Ed Gein, Wayne Williams, and John Wayne Gacy) live in the same areas where they hunt for, kill, and bury their victims. Geographically transient serial killers (examples include Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas), in contrast, move from place to place in search of victims and bury the bodies in areas that are distant from the killing sites. These killers travel to confuse law-enforcement authorities, and they are much less vulnerable to capture than geographically stable serial killers. Another categorization scheme differentiates among four types: visionary serial killers, who have serious mental illnesses and select victims by listening to auditory command hallucinations; mission serial killers, who are driven to certain types of people; hedonistic serial killers, who murder for sexual gratification; and power/control serial killers, who achieve sexual pleasure from dominating and controlling their victims.

One of the most widely known criminal profiling methods was developed by FBI agents Douglas and Ressler. Their system categorizes serial killers on the basis of whether their crime scenes are organized or disorganized. Organized offenders are likely to be average or above average in intelligence, engaged in skilled occupations, married or living with partners, and interested in the media’s coverage of their crimes. In contrast, disorganized offenders are likely to be below average in intelligence, socially awkward, living alone, and uninterested in the media’s coverage of their crimes.

Caveats and Ethical Issues

Criminal personality profiling is more an art than a science. Profilers use a few general approaches that can be readily adapted to fit specific types of crimes, but no tried-and-true profiling techniques have been developed that work in every case. Instead, the formulas that profilers use are based largely on the particular circumstances of each case and the evidence at hand; these yield educated guesses derived from knowledge, practical experience, and clinical acumen.

Despite the fact that profiling has often been glamorized or sensationalized in novels, films, and television programs, it is only one component in a wide range of strategies used by law-enforcement agencies to apprehend serial offenders. Profiling is an adjunctive tool that supplements and complements the investigatory activities of experienced law-enforcement officers. Profilers are consultants to the police; they are generally summoned after officers have failed in their attempts to identify or question suspects. Profilers must be careful not to oversell their capabilities.

Many experienced investigators regard with skepticism and disdain. The field is without a sound scientific basis and relies on weak standards of proof, although psychologists have begun to conduct more research on the validity of profiling techniques. The field of profiling is also lacking in professional standards and minimal educational requirements, and no credentialing bodies exist to govern and oversee the conduct of practitioners. Profilers have an ethical obligation to be unbiased and impartial in their collection and interpretation of evidence, to restrict their opinions to the specific facts of the case, to present their qualifications honestly and openly, and never to use a profile to assert the guilt or innocence of any suspect.

Bibliography

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