Chapter 4 Chapter 1 The Psychology of the Murderer

Put yourself in the position of the hunter. This is what I have to do.Imagine that there is such a film reflecting nature: a lion stands on the plains of Africa.It found a large herd of antelope by the pond.But for some reason, from the eyes of the lion, we can see that it has been staring at one of the thousands of antelopes.The lion has been trained to spot the weaknesses of an antelope in the herd, making it the most likely victim due to these distinctive features. This is the case with some people.If I were a murderer, I would go out every day to hunt for prey, looking for opportunities to kill.Let's say I'm working in a shopping mall with thousands of customers.I walked into the game arcade, and at a glance, there were more than 50 children playing game machines.At this moment, I must become a hunter, I must become a profiler, I must be able to profile the potential prey.I had to figure out which of the fifty or so kids here was vulnerable, a potential victim.I must observe the child's attire.I had to train myself to take cues from the child's gestures, expressions, postures.Also, I have to do it all in a split second, so I have to be good at it.Then, once the decision is made, once the strike is made, I have to figure out how to get the kid out of the mall quietly, without causing any panic or suspicion, since his or her parents are likely to be nearby in the shop.I can't afford any mistakes.

It's the thrill of the hunt that drives those guys to do their best.If you were able to get an electrocution score on the skin of one of them while they were staring at a potential victim, I think you would get exactly the same response score as a lion in the field.Whether we're talking about a murderer whose prey is a child, or a young woman, or the elderly, or whores, or any other definable group, or whether we're talking about a murderer who doesn't seem to have any particular preferred prey in advance , the situation is the same.In some respects, they are the same breed.

But it's their different modus operandi, it's the traces of individuality they leave behind that give us a new kind of weapon that can be used to interpret certain types of violence and to hunt down, arrest and prosecute the murderer.I have spent most of my professional life as an FBI agent trying to develop this weapon, and it is what this book is about.Every horrific crime since the dawn of civilization has involved a grim, fundamental question: What kind of man would do such a thing?The kind of profiling and crime scene analysis that we do in the FBI's Investigative Support Section tries to answer that question.

Behavior reflects personality. Putting yourself in these guys' shoes, or trying to figure out what's going on in their minds, was never easy or fun.But that's what my colleagues and I had to do as a last resort.We had to try to feel what it was like to be each of them. Everything we see at the crime scene gives us an idea of ​​the perpetrator.By studying the widest variety of cases possible and talking to the insiders—the perpetrators themselves—we've learned to decipher those clues in the same way a doctor evaluates different symptoms to diagnose a particular disease or condition.And just as a doctor can make a diagnosis after recognizing the symptoms of certain diseases he or she has seen before, we can draw conclusions when we see patterns begin to emerge.

At one point in the early 1980s, I was actively conducting in-depth research by interviewing prisoners.I was sitting next to a circle of violent criminals in the old Gothic stone Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore.Everyone's case has a background, which is interesting: killing the police, killing children, drug trafficking or gangster murder.My main concern, however, was the practice of rape and murder, and I asked the prisoners present whether there were such prisoners in the prison. "Yeah, Charlie Davis is one," one of the murderers told me, but they all agreed he wasn't going to talk to the FBI.Someone went to the prison courtyard to find him.Surprisingly, Davis came to talk to us, probably out of curiosity or boredom.One factor that favored our research was the fact that prisoners had a lot of free time and didn't know how to spend it.

Usually when we go to the prison to conduct interviews, we must learn as much as possible about the prisoner's relevant situation in advance, and we have indeed done this from the beginning.We rummaged through police files as well as crime scene photos, autopsy reports, interrogation transcripts—anything that would help clarify the motives and personalities of the criminals.Only in this way can you be sure that the murderer is not playing a game of personal gain or self-enjoyment with you, but is telling you the truth directly.But in this case, it was obvious that I hadn't prepared anything, so I acknowledged it and tried to make it work for my interview.

Davis was a stocky man, about 6-foot-5, in his early thirties, clean-shaven and groomed.As soon as I came up I said, "You've got an advantage over me, Charlie. I don't know what you've done." "I killed five people," he replied. At my request, he described the crime scene and what happened to the victim.It turned out that Davis was a part-time ambulance driver.His modus operandi was to strangle a woman, dump the body beside a road in his ambulance area, make an anonymous phone call, and return the call to pick up the body.Who would have guessed that the murderer was among them when he loaded the body onto the stretcher?Single-handed control of the situation and on-site planning really excited him and gave him the strongest stimulation.Such modus operandi that I can learn about always proves to be extremely valuable.

This method of strangulation told me that he was an impulsive murderer whose main thought was rape. I said to him, "You're a real police fan. You want to be a police officer and be in a position of power, not some menial job that doesn't make the most of your talents." He smiled and said that his father was a Police lieutenant. He described his usual approach at my request.For example, he follows an attractive young woman as she drives into the parking lot of a restaurant.Through his father's connections in the police, he managed to check the car's license plate.When he got the owner's name, he would call the restaurant radio and ask her to turn off the lights.As soon as she walked out of the restaurant, he hijacked her, forced her into his or her car, handcuffed her, and walked away.

He described the five murders in sequence, as if lost in memory.When it came to the last episode, he mentioned putting her under cover in the front seat of the car, a detail he recalled for the first time. When it came to this, I further changed my interview strategy.I said, "Charlie, let me tell you a little bit about you: You have problems with women. You were in financial trouble the first time you committed a crime. You were in your late thirties and you know your problems very well. A job doesn’t allow you to use your talents, so you feel like your life is a mess and things don’t go your way.”

He just nodded.Everything I've said so far has been true.I did not say anything incomprehensible or purely speculative. "You were drinking," I went on, "and you were in debt. You lived with women who were arguing a lot. (He didn't tell me who he was living with, but I'm pretty sure.) On the worst nights , you'd be out hunting. You wouldn't lay hands on the old mistress, so you'd have to torture someone else." I could see that Charlie's body language was gradually changing, and his emotions were beginning to show.So, relying on what little information I have, I continued: "However, you were far less vicious when you struck the last victim. She was different. You raped her and then clothed her. You put her Your head was covered. You didn’t do it the first four times. You didn’t feel as good this time as you did the first four times.”

You'll know you've hit a point when they start listening carefully.I learned this from interviewing prisoners and was able to repeat it in interrogation situations.I could see that by this time I had completely captured his attention. "She said something to you that made you feel bad about killing her, but you killed her anyway." Suddenly, Charlie's face turned red.He seemed in a daze, and I could tell his thoughts had returned to the scene of the crime.He hesitated before telling me that the woman said that her husband was very ill and she was very worried.He is seriously ill and may not be far from death.It may or may not have been her plan to say this, and I have no way of knowing.But it clearly had an effect on Davis. "But I didn't wear a mask, she knew what I looked like, and I had to kill her." I paused for a moment, then said, "Did you take something from her?" He nodded again, then confessed that he had pulled out her wallet.He pulled out a Christmas photo of her with her husband and children and saved it. I hadn't seen the guy at all before, but I was beginning to have a definite impression of him, so I said, "Charlie, you've been to the cemetery, haven't you?" He blushed.I'm sure he was very concerned about the newspaper coverage of the case because he wanted to know where his victims were buried. "You went there because you were deeply guilty of the murder. And you took something with you to the graveyard and put it in the grave." The other prisoners present were silent, listening obsessively.They had never seen Charlie like this.I repeated: "You brought something to the graveyard. What did you bring, Charlie? You brought that group photo, didn't you?" He just nodded again, and dropped his head. It was not witchcraft at all, or at all the conjuring of a rabbit out of a hat, as the prisoners present might have supposed.Obviously I'm guessing, but those guesses are based on the vast amount of background information, research, and experience that my colleagues and I have kept in our journals and will continue to collect.For example, we found that the stereotype that murderers visit victims' graves is often true, but not necessarily for the reasons we originally thought. Behavior reflects personality. One reason our work is necessary is the changing nature of violent crime itself.We all know the drug-related murders that plague most cities, and the gun crimes that are frequent and nationally embarrassing.However, most crimes in the past, especially violent crimes, have been committed by people who knew each other in some way. This is less common today.As recently as the 1960s, the murder detection rate in this country was as high as 90%.Now we can't do that anymore.Despite today's impressive technological advances, the advent of the computer age, and even though more police officers are better trained and better equipped, the murder rate has been rising and the detection rate has been falling.In more and more crimes, the perpetrator and the victim are "strangers", and in many cases we lack a traceable motive, at least an obvious or "logical" traceable motive. In the traditional sense, most murder and violent crime law enforcement officials are relatively easy to understand.They arise from extreme expressions of emotions we all experience—anger, greed, jealousy, love of money, revenge.Once this emotional issue is resolved, the crime or criminal urges will cease.People get killed, but that's the way it is, and the police usually know who they're after and what their motives are. In recent years, however, a new type of violent criminal has emerged: the serial criminal.This kind of person will not stop committing crimes until he is arrested or killed; this kind of person is good at learning from experience, and his modus operandi is getting better and better, always perfecting his plan in the process of committing crimes.I say "outcropping" because in a sense he may have been with us all along, long before Jack the Ripper appeared in London in the 1880s.Jack is often considered the first modern serial killer.I use "he" because almost all real-life serial killers are male, for reasons I will explain later. In fact, the phenomenon of serial murder may be much older than we realize.The stories and legends that survived about witches, werewolves, and vampires may have been a way of explaining the horrific atrocities that no one in the tight-knit small towns of Europe and early America could understand what we have today. Common perverted behavior.Monsters are necessarily supernatural beings.They can never be like us. Of all violent criminals, serial killers and rape-murderers are often the most inconceivable, most frightening, and most difficult to catch.This is partly because the motives that drive them are often far more complex than the basic factors I have just listed.This, in turn, makes their criminal patterns even more confusing, making them less likely to develop emotions like sympathy, guilt, or remorse, which are commonplace. Sometimes the only way to capture them is to learn to think like them. Lest there be any misconception that I am giving away the secrets of a closely guarded investigation in order to give would-be murderers a primer, let me reassure you now.What I will describe is how we develop behavioral patterns into offender profiling, crime research, and prosecution strategies.Even if I wanted to, I couldn't turn it into an introductory course.First, we spent up to two years training already experienced and accomplished agents who were selected to join our unit.Furthermore, no matter how capable the murderer thinks he is, the more he tries to avoid detection or lead us astray, the more clues he will leave for us to solve the case. As Sir Conan Doyle said decades ago through the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: "Specificity is almost always a clue. The more common and uncharacteristic a crime is, the more difficult it is to detect." In other words In other words, the more behavioral clues we have, the more complete the profile and analysis we can provide the local police.The more profiling the local police have when handling a case, the more they can narrow down the suspects and focus on finding the real murderer. Having said that, I would like to make a statement about this book.Investigative Support is part of the FBI's National Center for Violence Analysis in Quantico, and we're not in charge of catching killers.Let me repeat: we are not responsible for catching the killer.It was the local police who caught the killer, and most of them did a pretty good job considering the unbelievably intense pressure they were under.What we do best is to help the local police to focus their investigation and then suggest some proactive techniques that might help unearth the killer.Once they've caught the killer—and, again, they, not us—we try to devise a strategy that will help prosecutors bring out the defendant's true personality during the trial. The reason we can do this is because we have done research and we have professional experience.When faced with a serial murder investigation, a local police department in the Midwest may have seen such horrific atrocities for the first time, yet my officers have probably handled hundreds if not thousands of similar cases. case.I always tell my agents: "If you want to know an artist, you have to see his work." Over the years, we have seen a lot of "works", and most of the "established" "artists" had extensive conversations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we began systematically working with the FBI's Behavioral Science Section, which was later renamed the Investigative Support Section.Although most of the books that celebrate and dramatize our accomplishments (such as Tom Harris' unforgettable) are somewhat imaginative and prone to dramatic exceptions, our predecessors did indeed The truth relies more on the fiction of the crime than on the fact of the crime.In Edgar Allan Poe's classic 1841 novel "Murder in the Mortuary," the amateur detective August Dupin is the first-ever behavioral profiler.In that story, for the first time, the profiler used the proactive method to force the real murderer to reveal himself, and at the same time proved the innocence of the person who was thrown into prison as the murderer. Like the men and women who have served our department 150 years later, Poe recognized the value of profiling when forensic evidence alone was not enough to crack a case where the methods were brutal and the motives seemingly lacking. "In the absence of general clues," he wrote, "analysts will allow themselves to enter the minds of their opponents, imagine themselves to be the murderers, and often see at a glance that the only means of solving the case may be tempting He's making mistakes, or it's driving him to hasty misjudgment." There is one other small similarity worth mentioning.Mr. Dupin likes to work alone in his room, with the windows closed and the curtains drawn tightly to keep out the sunlight and the outside world.My colleagues and I have no choice at this point.Our offices at the FBI Academy in Quantico are several floors below ground, without a single window, because they were originally designed to serve as the secure headquarters for federal law enforcement in the event of a national emergency.We sometimes jokingly refer to ourselves as working in the National Violent Crime Analysis Cellar.We joked that because we were 60 feet underground, we were 10 times deeper into the ground than Dead Man's Dirt. British novelist Wilkie Collins continued profiling in such works as The Lady in White (based on a true case) and The Moonstone.However, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal character, Sherlock Holmes, who introduced the world to criminal investigative analysis in the dark, gaslit world of Victorian London.It seems like the highest compliment any of us can get is being compared to this fictional character.A few years ago I solved a murder in Missouri when a headline in the St. Louis Globe Democrat dubbed me "the FBI's modern-day Sherlock Holmes," which I saw as a a real honor. Interestingly, at the same time that Holmes was solving those intricate and confusing cases, the real-life Ripper Jack was killing prostitutes in the East End of London.On opposite sides of the law, on opposite sides of the line between reality and imagination, these two men have captured the public's attention so deeply that several "modern" Sherlock Holmes novels written by admirers of Conan Doyle have made the detective They went to solve the unsolved Whitechapel murders. In 1988, I was invited to dissect a murder case on national broadcast television.I will speak later in the book of my conclusions about the most famous murderer in history. It was not until 100 years after the publication of Poe's "Murder in the Mortuary" and 50 years after the appearance of Sherlock Holmes that behavior profiling broke away from literary works and entered real life.By the mid-1950s, the "crazy bomber" was rampant in New York City, allegedly responsible for more than three dozen bombings over a 15-year period.His targets were iconic buildings such as Grand Central Station, Penn Station, and Radio City Music Hall.I was a kid living in Brooklyn.I still have vivid memories of this case. At their wit's end, the police called in Greenwich Village psychiatrist Dr. James Brussels in 1957.He studied photographs of the bombing site and dissected derisive letters to newspapers from the bombers.From the observed overall behavioral patterns, he drew several detailed conclusions.Among them: the killer suffers from paranoia, hates his father, loves his mother, and lives in a Connecticut city.At the end of his written profiling report, Brussels instructed the police: Look for a well built man.middle-aged people.Born in a foreign country.Believe in Roman Catholicism.bachelor.Live with a brother or sister.It's possible he was wearing a double-breasted suit when you found him.The buttons are fastened. From the content of some of the letters, it seems likely that the bomber was a disgruntled current or former Con Edison employee.Police used this profile to identify the suspects and identified George Metelsky, who had been working for Edison in the 1940s before the bombing.One evening, the police went to Waterbury, Connecticut, and arrested the burly, foreign-born, middle-aged Roman Catholic bachelor.The only difference from the profile is that he lives not with a brother or sister, but with two unmarried sisters.The police told him to put on his clothes and go to the police station.He emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later, wearing a double-breasted suit that was buttoned. Explaining how he came to this remarkably precise conclusion, Dr. Brussels explained that psychiatrists typically examine a person before attempting to make reasonable guesses about how the person might react to certain particular situations.Dr. Brussels said that in formulating the profile, he reversed the process, trying to infer the person's characteristics based on clues from his behaviour. Looking back at the bombing spree with our level of understanding 40 years later, it does appear to be easy to detect.At the time, however, the case represented a major breakthrough in criminal investigative methods and a true milestone in the development of behavioral science.Dr. Brussels, who later assisted the Boston Police Department in solving the Boston Strangler, was a true pioneer in his field. While the method employed by the discipline is generally considered deductive, the work undertaken by Dupin and Holmes in detective fiction, and in real life by Brussels and those of us who came after us, is actually more inductive—that is, observational. A particular element of a crime from which important conclusions are drawn.When I came to work at Quantico in 1977, lecturers in the Behavioral Sciences Department, such as Howard Turton, were beginning to use Dr. Brussels' ideas to solve cases that had been referred to them by police professionals.However, at the time, this subject was regarded as a myth, with no solid research to back it up.This is what happens when I get into the role of a story. I have already talked about the importance of getting into the murderer's place and understanding his psychology.Through our research and our actual casework, we have found that putting ourselves in the victim's place is equally important, and perhaps equally painful and terrifying.Only by knowing exactly how a particular victim reacted to the horrors that befell her or him can we truly understand the actions and reactions of a murderer. To understand a murderer, you must examine the crime. In the early 1980s, the police department of a small rural Georgia town presented me with a disturbing case.A beautiful 12-year-old girl who worked as a bandleader at a local junior high school was abducted from a school bus stop about a hundred yards from her home.Her disheveled body was found a few days later, about ten miles away, along the wooded Lovers' Trail.She was sexually assaulted and died from blunt force trauma to the head.Beside her was a big blood-stained stone. I must know the little girl as well as I can before I can offer an analytical opinion.I found that although she was beautiful and cute, at the age of 12, she looked like a 12-year-old child, not like some teenage girls who looked as mature as 21 years old.Anyone who knew her assured me that she was not a flirt or flirt, never used drugs or alcohol, and was warm and friendly to anyone who approached her.A post-mortem analysis revealed she was a virgin when she was raped. This was extremely important information in my opinion, because it led me to understand how she would react during and after the kidnapping, and how the killer would behave in the specific situation between the two of them. response.From this, I concluded that the murder was not the result of premeditation, but his panic reaction when the little girl did not greet him with open arms (the attitude of the little girl was different in the attacker's twisted and delusional fantasy. It should be like this).This in turn led me to a better understanding of the killer's personality, and my profile led the police to focus on a suspect in a rape that had occurred in a large neighboring town a year earlier.Understanding the victim allowed me to devise a strategy for the police to use when interrogating this difficult suspect.As I surmised, this person had already passed a polygraph test.I will discuss this fascinating and heartbreaking case in detail later.For now, though, suffice it to say that the man finally confessed to the murder and the previous rape.He was convicted and sentenced.As of this writing, he remains on death row in Georgia. When we teach the basics of criminal profile and crime scene analysis to special agents or law enforcement professionals attending the FBI National Academy, we try to get them to think through the full history of a crime.My colleague Roy Hazlewood, who taught the basics of profiling for several years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide this analysis into three distinct questions and short sentences—what, Why, who. what's going on?It includes any situation in which the crime in question may be behaviorally significant. Why did the case happen in this way?For example: Why do postmortems happen?Why were no valuables taken?Why is there no mandatory trespass?What was the reason for any meaningful element of behavior that occurred during the crime? It then leads to: Who would commit this crime for these reasons? That's the question we want to answer.

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