Behind every criminal act is the criminal mind. It sounds like a simple enough concept, and in seeking to probe the motivations of that mind (and thereby improve their "clear-up rate"), detectives have increasingly turned for assistance to what is popularly known as psychological profiling. No other forensic technique has aroused such controversy, particularly in Britain. At the heart of psychological profiling is the belief that criminals leave psychological clues at the scene of the crime. By carefully sifting through these clues, skilled interpreters build a character sketch of the culprit. Common sense, observation, and geographical considerations play as big a role in this process as psychology, for only by studying all facets of the crime can the profiler hope to succeed.

The concept of psychological profiling is far from new (a rudimentary attempt was made to profile the kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh Jr. in 1932), but only recently has it been embraced by the law enforcement community. Time and cost constraints dictate that it be used for only the most serious of crimes. As an adjunct to traditional investigative techniques, its uses are manifold, but a few early and spectacular successes promoted a dangerous overconfidence in its effectiveness. British police, in particular, have felt the sting, culminating in the spectacular abandonment of a 1994 murder trial after it was discovered that the prosecution had no evidence, just a profile.

For all the controversy, psychological profiling is clearly here to stay. Knowing the type of criminal one is seeking has many obvious advantages, but with the advantages comes danger. Maintaining objectivity on a caseby-case basis is not easy. By its very nature, profiling tends to be retrospective, and although solutions to crimes of the present may be suggested by crimes of the past, the shrewd profiler has to remain aware that humankind's capacity for evil innovation is seemingly infinite.

George Metesky

DATE: 1940

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: Profiling's first major success came with the capture of a bomber who had terrorized New York City for years.

One of the most extraordinary and longest-running one-man crime waves ever began on November 16, 1940, with the discovery of an unexploded bomb on a window ledge at the Consolidated Edison building in Manhattan. Wrapped around it, a hand-printed note read, "CON EDISON CROOKS— THIS IS FOR YOU." Police attributed the amateurish device to someone with a grudge against the company that supplies New York with its electricity and filed the case away.

In September 1941, another unexploded bomb was found lying on 19th Street; its alarm-clock fusing mechanism had not been wound. Three months later, following Pearl Harbor, an odd letter was received at police headquarters in Manhattan. Postmarked Westchester County, it read, "I

WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMB UNITS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR—MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS— I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE—THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS. . . . F.P." As before, the letter was printed in ink on plain white bond paper.

Between 1941 and 1946, some sixteen similar letters were received by newspapers, hotels, and department stores, and Con Ed itself. Then, on March 29, 1950, a third bomb turned up on the lower level of Grand Central Station. This, too, failed to explode, but it showed ominous signs of improvement in its construction. The next bomb did work, devastating a phone booth at the New York Public Library on April 24, 1950. More followed; some exploded, some did not. Miraculously, there were no injuries, despite one being planted inside a theater seat. Eager to allay public concern, the authorities downplayed the bomber's activities, a reticence that aroused fury in the letter writer, who threatened to step up his attacks on theaters.

Between 1951 and 1952, four more bombs exploded, making it impossible to conceal the activities of the man branded the Mad Bomber. Another four devices exploded in 1953. The following year, more were detonated, including one stuffed inside a cinema seat, which injured four people, two seriously. In 1955, there were six bombs; two of those that failed to explode were found in cinema seats. The letters became longer, more vitriolic. One to the Herald Tribune boasted, "SO FAR 54 BOMBS

PLACED—4 TELEPHONE CALLS MADE—THESE BOMBINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL CON EDISON IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE." Again it was signed "F.P."

Public Outrage

The next bomb, on December 2, 1956, was the most powerful thus far. It blew apart several seats in Brooklyn's Paramount Theater, injuring six people, and it triggered a major campaign to catch the Mad Bomber. To this end, Inspector Howard E. Finney enlisted the aid of Dr. James A. Brussel, a psychiatrist in private practice who also served as New York State's assistant commissioner for mental hygiene. Brussel was noted for his ability to analyze the facts of a case and arrive at some remarkable deductions. Finney, who had a degree in forensic psychiatry, provided Brussel with copies of every letter the bomber had written, together with all other salient information.

Brussel's conclusions were as follows: "It's a man. Paranoiac. He's middle-aged, forty to fifty years old, introvert. Well proportioned in build. He's single, a loner, perhaps living with an older female relative. He is very neat, tidy, and clean-shaven. Good education, but of foreign extraction. Skilled mechanic, neat with tools. Not interested in women. He's a Slav. Religious. Might flare up violently at work when criticized. Possible motive: discharge or reprimand. Feels superior to his critics. Resentment keeps growing. His letters are posted from Westchester, and he wouldn't be stupid enough to post them from where he lives. He probably mails the letter between his home and New York City. One of the biggest concentrations of Poles is in Bridge-port, Connecticut, and to get from there to New York you have to pass through Westchester. He has had a bad disease—possibly heart trouble." As an afterthought he added, "When you catch him, he'll be wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned."

When Brussel suggested that publicizing his theories might flush the attention-hungry bomber out, a New York paper eagerly took up the challenge, printing an open letter that urged the bomber to give himself up and offering a forum for his grievances. Three letters, all excoriating Con Ed, arrived in quick succession. One read, "I DID NOT GET A SINGLE

PENNY FOR A LIFETIME OF MISERY & SUFFERING—JUST

ABUSE." Another actually included the date of the incident that had so enraged the author—September 5, 1931.

A search of the Con Ed archives hit pay dirt. In a file that had been sealed since 1937, office assistant Alice Kelly found a letter from a disgruntled former employee that included several of the same stilted phrases used by the bomber. It came from a George Metesky, who had been knocked down by a boiler explosion while working at a Con Ed plant on September 5, 1931. Although he had complained of pains and headaches, doctors were unable to find any physical injuries. Metesky was given sick pay and other insurance benefits for twelve months; then he was fired. When he tried to sue Con Ed, he was advised that his action was too late—all compensation claims had to be filed within two years of the date of the injury. For years, Metesky had brooded over this perceived injustice, and then he began planting bombs.

Profile Comes to Life

Detectives who arrested Metesky at his home in Waterbury on January 21, 1957, discovered a bomb-making workshop in the garage. They also found a well-proportioned man, fifty-four, of Polish extraction, unmarried, living in a house with two older sisters, and wearing a double-breasted suit —buttoned! It was a stunning success for psychological profiling.

Metesky freely admitted to being the Mad Bomber, revealing that the initials "F.P." stood for Fair Play. On April 18, 1957, beaming delightedly, he was found unfit to plead and was committed to Matteawan Hospital for the criminally insane. In 1973, he was pronounced cured and released. All charges against him were dropped.

Brussel was modest about his astonishing triumph, attributing it to simple deductive reasoning, experience, and playing the percentages. His reasoning went as follows: Because paranoia takes a considerable time to develop— often as much as ten years—and the first bomb had been planted in 1940, he felt the man's illness would have started around 1930, making him middle-aged in 1956. Why a paranoid? Because they are the champion grudge holders; feel themselves intellectually superior; and are neat, obsessive, and tidy to a fault—hence the meticulous printing and the double-breasted suit.

Although the wording in the notes suggested an educated mind, they contained no slang—native New Yorkers say "Con Ed" instead of "the Con Edison"—and read as if they had been translated into English. Also the phrase "dastardly deeds" hinted at a foreigner. Why a Slav? Because historically, bombs have been favored in Central Europe. Well proportioned? In a broad-based study, German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer had demonstrated a correlation between a person's build, personality, and any mental illness that might develop. Kretschmer found that 85 percent of paranoiacs have an athletic build. Here, Brussel was going with the averages. Why single? Because of all the neatly printed capitals, only the W was curved, like two Us joined together—similar to a woman's breasts. This hinted at a sexual problem, quite possibly someone who had never married.

In fact, just about the only thing Brussel got wrong was the heart disease, but even there he didn't miss by much. The Mad Bomber actually suffered from a tubercular lung.

Conclusion

The uncanny accuracy of Brussel's profile did much to raise public awareness of the need to expand the parameters of detection. Detectives thereafter had to probe not only the physical evidence but the psychological ramifications as well. Crime solving would never be the same again.

Richard Chase

DATE: 1978

LOCATION: Sacramento, California

SIGNIFICANCE: FBI profilers painted a devastatingly accurate portrait of a bewildered and malevolent psyche.

On Monday, January 23, 1978, the city of Sacramento was jolted by one of the most brutal murders in living memory, when David Wallin came home in the early evening to find his twenty-two-year-old wife, Theresa, butchered in their bedroom. Wallin ran screaming from the house, incoherent with terror, unable to speak of the horror he had just witnessed. When homicide detectives arrived, they fully shared his revulsion; no one could recall such carnage. Apart from the appalling injuries inflicted on Theresa Wallin, a crushed yogurt container by the side of the body showed signs of having been used by the murderer to drink the blood of his victim. Clearly this crime was far beyond the scope of most homicides, and for that reason a call for assistance went out to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia.

Robert Ressler, a longtime FBI instructor in the art of criminal profiling, joined his California-based colleague Russ Vorpagel, and togetherthe two men compiled a provisional profile of the killer, based on the skimpy facts already known. It read as follows:

White male, aged 25-27; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.

As events unfolded, the accuracy of this profile would assume almost eerie proportions, and yet there was a sound basis for each of these observations. Although there had been no obvious sexual assault, experience strongly suggested that the killing was sexual in motivation. This gave the profilers their starting point. At the heart of each profile is a thorough knowledge of criminal statistics. In this case, they knew that data from several years show that most sexual homicides are intraracial—that is, a white killer slays a white victim, or a black killer slays a black victim—and that most sexual killers are white males in their twenties and thirties. Thus the conclusions about race and age were easy to come by. Additionally, the Wallins lived in a white residential neighborhood where any minority figure would have attracted immediate interest.

Illumination about the killer's possible appearance and residence came from the crime scene photographs and police reports. Most killers fall into one of two categories: organized and disorganized. The former are more cunning and are likely to plan their crimes, whereas disorganized killers are creatures of reflex, impulsive and senseless, with little consideration for outcome or consequence. Everything about this murder suggested a random act of violence.

The extent and nature of Theresa's injuries convinced the profilers that her attacker was laboring under a full-blown psychosis and had been for several years. A craving for human blood does not appear overnight; in all likelihood, the symptoms had manifested themselves much earlier, probably warranting some form of treatment. They furtherreasoned that such a person would care nothing for his own well-being, skip meals, and ignore personal hygiene; hence the remarks about a disheveled and undernourished appearance. A reasonable extension of this hypothesis would presume that the killer lived in squalor, would have extreme difficulty holding down a job, and was quite possibly receiving welfare benefits. As can be seen, the art of psychological profiling is very much like completing a human jigsaw puzzle, except that the compilers have no picture to guide them, only the nuances and likelihoods that experience provides. On one point the BSU investigators were adamant—if not apprehended, the killer was certain to strike again.

Quadruple Murder

Just three days later, their prediction came to pass. Barely a mile from the Wallin household, Evelyn Miroth, thirty-six; her six-year-old son Jason; and Daniel J. Meredith, fifty-two, a family friend, were found shot to death. Also, Evelyn's baby nephew, Michael Ferreira, was missing, presumably abducted by the killer. From the blood-drenched playpen, detectives held out little hope that the infant would be found alive. Of the three bodies at the crime scene, only Evelyn Miroth's had been mutilated. This time the signs of sexual assault were ugly and obvious. Again there were indications that the attacker had drunk his victim's blood. After glutting himself, the killer had made off in Meredith's red Ford station wagon, which was found abandoned a short distance away.

The circumstances of this crime allowed Ressler and Vorpagel to finetune their profile. In all probability, the killer had been heavily bloodstained, yet he had abandoned the car in broad daylight and then just walked away. Such recklessness suggested someone even more unhinged than previously suspected, almost certainly a recent psychiatric facility inmate. Statistics inclined them toward the view that the killer probably had a history of fetish burglaries. Of more direct concern to officers pursuing the murderer, however, was the BSU's belief that he lived close to where the car had been dumped.

Using the car as their hub, detectives fanned out in a half-mile radius, asking questions, combing apartment complexes, searching for anyone who might have spotted anything out of the ordinary. In less than forty-eight hours, a young woman reported being accosted by a man whom she knew from high school. She had been so shocked by his emaciated appearance, sunken eyes, bloody sweatshirt, and thick yellow crust around his mouth that at first she had not recognized him. She gave his name as Richard Trenton Chase.

Records showed that Chase lived less than a block from the abandoned station wagon. As the police closed in, Chase attempted to flee. In his hands he held a cardboard box. When tackled by officers, Chase hurled the box at them. Bloodstained papers and rags, a pin from Michael Ferreira's diaper, and pieces of the baby's brain tissue flew out. When finally subdued, Chase was carrying a loaded pistol and Daniel Meredith's wallet.

Chase's apartment was abominable, as predicted. Feces and bloodstained clothing lay strewn about the floor, while in the refrigerator a half-gallon container held body parts and brain tissue. Judging from the contents of three food blenders, Chase had continued to slake his craving for blood. Shortly afterward, the brutalized body of Michael Ferreira was found nearby.

Once in custody, Chase divulged that Theresa Wallin had not been his first murder victim. On December 28, 1977, Ambrose Griffin had just returned from a visit to the local supermarket. As he was carrying groceries indoors, Chase had driven by in his truck and fired two shots. One hit Griffin in the chest and killed him. Analysis of the fatal bullet matched it to Chase's gun.

Bizarre Background

The more investigators delved into Chase's background, the more it highlighted the BSU profile's accuracy. He was twenty-seven and white, and had a long history of sexual problems, fetish burglaries, and drug abuse. Also, his bizarre lifestyle precluded any serious attempt at employment, and he lived alone in his apartment, existing on Social Security benefits.

He became obsessed with the notion that his bodily organs were moving around inside him, turning his blood to powder. His only answer to this perceived assault was to gorge on the fresh blood of others. Such aberrant behavior had led to incarceration in a mental hospital, where he so terrified two staff members that they quit after seeing him chew the heads off birds in the garden. Over the strident protests of those who knew Chase well, a psychiatrist had recommended his release to outpatient status in 1977. Just months later, his killing spree began.

At his trial, Chase remained listless and inattentive. Convicted on six counts of first-degree murder, he was sentenced to death and removed to San Quentin. Under the taunts of fellow death row inmates, what little sanity Chase had left gave way, and following a report that diagnosed him as "psychotic, insane, and incompetent, and chronically so," he was transferred to California's facility for the criminally insane at Vacaville. There his deterioration continued, until Christmas Eve 1980, when the demons that tormented Richard Chase were finally silenced by a lethal overdose of antidepressant pills, hoarded from his daily medication.

Conclusion

BSU expertise may have forestalled a homicidal catastrophe. Chase had obviously been keeping score. Scrawled on a calendar found in his apartment, on the dates of the Wallin and Miroth-Meredith murders, was the word "TODAY." Forty-four other dates were similarly inscribed throughout the remainder of 1978. Whether Richard Chase intended to kill another forty-four victims is unknowable; that he didn't get the opportunity is largely due to the efficacy of psychological profiling. 

John Duffy and David Mulcahy

DATE: 1982

LOCATION: London, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This is the first British murder case in which psychological profiling played a significant role.

In 1982 two men embarked on a four-year series of rapes that cut across London and into the adjoining counties. Eighteen times they struck in unison, although an attack on Barnes Common in November 1984 made it clear that one of the attackers, the shorter of the two, was also carrying out solo rapes. His modus operandi was unmistakable: disarmingly amiable conversation designed to put the woman off her guard, a sudden knife threat, binding the victim's hands with string, then violent rape. Because most of his attacks took place close to railroad tracks, he became known as the Railway Rapist. Victims described him as very short and having "laser eyes" that seemed to bore right through them. The frenzy peaked on one terrifying night in July 1985, when three separate attacks within a few hours convinced police that special measures were necessary. This led to Operation Hart, a manhunt that would become the most comprehensive in

Britain since the five-year search for the Yorkshire Ripper that ended in 1981. It was hoped that mistakes made in that investigation—the killer's name cropped up nine different times, but manual cross-referencing had failed to notice it—would be eliminated through computerization, as officers from Scotland Yard joined forces with their colleagues from Surrey, Hertfordshire, and the British Transport Police in a coordinated effort.

The following month, an ex-British Rail carpenter, John Duffy, was arrested and charged with various unconnected violent crimes. Although he was released on bail, his name was entered as a matter of routine in the suspect file of Operation Hart. Meanwhile, the attacks continued.

On December 29, 1985, the Railway Rapist graduated to full-blown murder. Nineteen-year-old secretary Alison Day was dragged from an East

London train, taken to a secluded garage in Hackney, and garroted by having a stick inserted through her scarf and twisted. Afterward, her weighted body was dumped in the River Lea. When it was recovered on January 14, 1986, water had obliterated most of the forensic evidence, apart from a few fibers found on her sheepskin coat.

Second Murder

Not until April 17, 1986, did investigators realize that this killer and the rapist were one and the same. Tragically, it took another death to provide the link; fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Maartje Tamboezer was raped and strangled while cycling to West Horsley, Surrey. Diminutive footprints around the body told police that the killer was a small man, but even though he had stuffed burning paper into the vagina, presumably to destroy any forensic evidence, there was still enough semen to show that the killer was blood group A and a secretor. Although he shared this blood group with 42 percent of the population, phosphoglucomutase (PGM) grouping enabled scientists to further isolate the sample so that four out of five suspects would be eliminated. Another clue lay in the distinctive praying attitude of the victims' hands, tied with unusually wide brown string. All of this evidence pointed to the Railway Rapist; from this moment on, Operation Hart became a hunt for a serial killer.

The urgency of the task became terrifyingly evident on the night of May 18, 1986, when Anne Lock, twenty-nine, recently married, and an employee at London Weekend Television, disappeared on her way home from work. Her body was not found until July, but semen traces confirmed that the Railway Killer had struck again.

Now that they knew the killer's blood group, forensic scientists were able to sift through the more than 4,900 men listed in the Operation Hart suspect file, eliminating candidates until they were left with 1,999 names, of whom John Duffy was number 1,505. When interviewed on July 17, 1986, Duffy declined to provide a blood test—as was his right—and immediately had himself committed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

At this point, police requested that Professor David Canter of Surrey University, an authority on behavioral science, compile a psychological profile of the killer. Combining statistical analysis of witness and victim statements with his vast insight into the vagaries of human nature, Canter drew up a profile of the Railway Killer that suggested that he lived in the Kilburn area of northwest London, was married and childless, had a history of violence, was plagued by domestic discord, and probably had two close male friends.

When details of the profile were compared with the Operation Hart suspect file, one name leaped from the list—John Duffy. To their fury, the police were now informed that, far from being incarcerated in a mental institution, Duffy was back on the streets. He had signed himself out and had already struck again. This time his victim was a fourteen-year-old girl. At one stage during her ordeal, the girl's blindfold had slipped, affording her a glimpse of the rapist. For some reason Duffy let her live; perhaps he knew his time was up. Whatever the motivation, his Kilburn home became the target of around-the-clock surveillance, leading to his arrest at his mother's house. Seventy items of clothing were removed for analysis by technicians at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory. After more than two thousand experiments, they matched thirteen fibers found on Alison Day's sheepskin coat to one of Duffy's sweaters.

Canter's profile proved accurate in thirteen of its seventeen points. Particularly perceptive was his suggestion that the killer was childless; this had, apparently, been a source of great anguish to Duffy, who had a low sperm count.

At Duffy's trial, his only defense was a feeble claim of amnesia. On February 26, 1988, he was convicted and sentenced to seven terms of life imprisonment.

For years, this case was blighted by one dark cloud—the identity of Duffy's accomplice. This was doubly frustrating for the detectives, as they were convinced that they knew the culprit's identity but were unableto amass the evidence to file charges. The game of cat and mouse with Duffy lasted for a decade. Finally, in a conversation with prison psychologist Jenny Cutler, the Railway Killer let slip a name.

David Mulcahy had been Duffy's friend since childhood. Like Duffy, he'd been born in Ireland, but the two had not met until their respective families moved to north London. The same age, they grew up together and grew vicious together. They were obsessed with martial arts and spent hours watching kung fu movies. They would take potshots at passersby with an air rifle, set fire to woodland, and commit burglaries, all the while urging each other on to more outlandish and brutal crimes. When he was thirteen, Mulcahy pulverized a hedge-hog with a plank of wood in the school playground, then trampled on its head. Duffy stood alongside, roaring with laughter.

At the time of the original murder inquiry, Mulcahy, a North London builder, had also figured prominently in police suspicions, but he was made of stronger stuff than his undersized partner and had rebuffed all questions with a sneering disdain. He had watched impassively from the sidelines as Duffy was sentenced to life imprisonment without any hope of release, convinced that the criminal code of silence would be his savior.

But in early 1999 Duffy decided to change the rules. Over a lengthy series of interviews, he painted a terrifying picture of how he and Mulcahy, balaclavas and knives at the ready, would drive around London with Michael Jackson's "Thriller" thundering from the tape deck, hunting down their victims and staking out attack zones with pseudomilitary precision. Once a woman had been snatched, they would flip a coin to decide who would be the first to commit rape. As their sexual cravings became ever more warped, they crossed the line from rape to murder with scarcely a thought. As far as Duffy was concerned, at the time it seemed like a natural progression. Now he just wanted to make a clean breast of it all.

When Mulcahy was arrested in March 1999, this thirty-nine-year-old married man with four children insisted that his former friend was lying through his teeth, prepared to do or say anything to curry favor with the authorities, and he bitterly denied any involvement in either the rapes or the murders. But DNA evidence recovered from the victims' clothing said otherwise. One scientist put the odds of Mulcahy's having been unconnected with two of the rapes at "one billion to one."

When Mulcahy eventually stood trial at the Old Bailey, he listened in malevolent silence as his erstwhile partner spilled the truth about their horrific crime spree. Rarely had murder been so premeditated or so lightly undertaken. On February 2, 2001, Mulcahy was convicted of three murders, seven rapes, and five conspiracies to rape, and ordered to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Conclusion

Without the psychological profile that led to Duffy, it is likely that many more women would have suffered at the hands of these two sadists. Justice might have been a long time coming in Mulcahy's case, but come it surely did.