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  • apparently they are finding some weird stuff in his house.. along with a huge cache of guns, a sound proof room in the basement and a large doll in a glass case. like his wife didnt think any of this could be a red flag? especially since the media was constantly reporting that the LISK lived on Long Island specifically with links to manorville, and probably worked in manhatten? really?!?
    "Is all that we see or seem
    but a dream within a dream?"

    -Edgar Allan Poe


    "...the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn
    quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him."

    -Frederick G. Abberline

    Comment


    • Wife says not. She has filed for divorce. She's not been charged with anything in connection to the murders.

      I'm wondering if he abused (physically or emotionslly) his family, leading them to avoid asking any questions. Also, apparently her job had her travelling frequently.

      The sound-proofed room is certainly disturbing. Usually it's not needed legitamately unless your business involves a home recording studio, right?
      Pat D. https://forum.casebook.org/core/imag...rt/reading.gif
      ---------------
      Von Konigswald: Jack the Ripper plays shuffleboard. -- Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut, c.1970.
      ---------------

      Comment


      • Originally posted by Fiver View Post

        To the best of my knowledge, no criminal has been caught by profiling.
        Hi Fiver,

        That's a bit of a non-point though because profiling is not intended to "catch" a criminal. To be clear, I'm not exactly a fan of behavioural profiling for a lot of reasons I've mentioned elsewhere and won't go into here. It does make for good TV though. Anyway, that aside, the utility of a profile is supposed to be as an aid with regards to "priority listing" during the investigation. It is always the investigation that catches the criminal, find evidence, link it to a suspect, and so forth. However, in any investigation there may be hundreds, or even thousands, of people on the "suspect" list (meaning, people who need to be looked at over the course of the investigation, tips that come in about people, and so forth). In a serial case, thousands of names are not unheard of. For example, if evidence is found that the offender drove a "white van", then the investigation might compile a list of all white van owners within some distance of the crimes, resulting in thousands of names. Those names might be cross checked with "which of those vans could have these tires, which we found tread marks at the scene", narrowing the list to some degree.

        However the names of people to question are obtained (I just listed some possible ways that do generate names for the police, tips, vehicle registrations, etc), the police have to devote time and resources eventually to sort through those people. If the offender is one of those many people, how are they to know? To the extent profiles provide useful information (and I admit, that is not entirely clear, and certainly nowhere near the level implied in TV and movies), they give the police an idea of what to look for when they interview people to rule them out of the investigation. If, during those searches, they come across someone who has enough characteristics that correspond to the profile, then that would suggest this person should get a closer look. It doesn't mean that must be the offender, rather, this person shouldn't be dismissed too quickly. Most of those people will, of course, eventually get cleared as there's only one offender and there's many people who could match the profile - but there will be many who won't too. So if a profile helps narrow the search, and if it does so accurately (i.e. you are unlikely to dismiss the real offender because the profile is way off base, combined with you are likely to include the real offender because they match it), then they are useful. They don't "catch" the offender, but they help increase the efficiency of how to delegate the limited resources the police have at their disposal.

        Now, that being said, the key question is whether the profiles in general actually do that. I'm not talking about showing a single example, or even a collection of examples, where profiles were way off base, nor showing single example or a collection of examples where the profiles were bang on perfect. Those are cherry picked examples, picked because they "prove a point". For example, "Mind Hunter" (the book), only includes examples that turned out to be bang on. Sometimes people bring up the Sniper case, where the profiles were way off base to declare profiles entirely wrong.

        What I would like to see, is a complete evaluation of all the profiles the FBI have generated, and an objective comparison with the offenders, combined with an objective comparison with people who were at one time considered suspects and later deemed not to be. If the profiles tend to be better matches with the actual offender than they are with some random person who early on was on the "POI list" if you will, then we would have an idea of their utility. But as far as I know, nothing like that has ever been done. A lot of behavioural profiles are also pretty "boiler plate": i.e. male, mid to late twenties, same ethnic group as victim, etc. Those things aren't profiles specific to any particular case, they are just basic summary statistics of offenders. But, other points are where it would be interesting to know if the profile description is actually useful (i.e. the single loner vs in relationship social type of things).

        My suspicions, born mostly out of ignorance due to the lack of information on profile efficacy, is that behavioural profiling is probably a bit better than chance, but not all that much. I suspect most of the "matches" are on pretty routine stuff, like age range, simply because most offenders will be in that age range, not because there was anything about a particular crime that "signaled" the offender is that age range. Simply committing an offence means the offender is likely male and in their twenties, for example.

        Anyway, that's a long winded way of saying, which I share your implied skepticism of profiles, their purpose isn't really to "catch" an offender per se, but rather to suggest how to make most of the limited resources of time and money the police have when confronted with a huge amount of information to deal with. It still requires the police to find the information that eventually "catches" the offender. The profile is just supposed to help them in deciding where that information might be found.

        - Jeff

        Comment


        • Originally posted by JeffHamm View Post

          Hi Fiver,

          That's a bit of a non-point though because profiling is not intended to "catch" a criminal. To be clear, I'm not exactly a fan of behavioural profiling for a lot of reasons I've mentioned elsewhere and won't go into here. It does make for good TV though. Anyway, that aside, the utility of a profile is supposed to be as an aid with regards to "priority listing" during the investigation. It is always the investigation that catches the criminal, find evidence, link it to a suspect, and so forth. However, in any investigation there may be hundreds, or even thousands, of people on the "suspect" list (meaning, people who need to be looked at over the course of the investigation, tips that come in about people, and so forth). In a serial case, thousands of names are not unheard of. For example, if evidence is found that the offender drove a "white van", then the investigation might compile a list of all white van owners within some distance of the crimes, resulting in thousands of names. Those names might be cross checked with "which of those vans could have these tires, which we found tread marks at the scene", narrowing the list to some degree.

          However the names of people to question are obtained (I just listed some possible ways that do generate names for the police, tips, vehicle registrations, etc), the police have to devote time and resources eventually to sort through those people. If the offender is one of those many people, how are they to know? To the extent profiles provide useful information (and I admit, that is not entirely clear, and certainly nowhere near the level implied in TV and movies), they give the police an idea of what to look for when they interview people to rule them out of the investigation. If, during those searches, they come across someone who has enough characteristics that correspond to the profile, then that would suggest this person should get a closer look. It doesn't mean that must be the offender, rather, this person shouldn't be dismissed too quickly. Most of those people will, of course, eventually get cleared as there's only one offender and there's many people who could match the profile - but there will be many who won't too. So if a profile helps narrow the search, and if it does so accurately (i.e. you are unlikely to dismiss the real offender because the profile is way off base, combined with you are likely to include the real offender because they match it), then they are useful. They don't "catch" the offender, but they help increase the efficiency of how to delegate the limited resources the police have at their disposal.

          Now, that being said, the key question is whether the profiles in general actually do that. I'm not talking about showing a single example, or even a collection of examples, where profiles were way off base, nor showing single example or a collection of examples where the profiles were bang on perfect. Those are cherry picked examples, picked because they "prove a point". For example, "Mind Hunter" (the book), only includes examples that turned out to be bang on. Sometimes people bring up the Sniper case, where the profiles were way off base to declare profiles entirely wrong.

          What I would like to see, is a complete evaluation of all the profiles the FBI have generated, and an objective comparison with the offenders, combined with an objective comparison with people who were at one time considered suspects and later deemed not to be. If the profiles tend to be better matches with the actual offender than they are with some random person who early on was on the "POI list" if you will, then we would have an idea of their utility. But as far as I know, nothing like that has ever been done. A lot of behavioural profiles are also pretty "boiler plate": i.e. male, mid to late twenties, same ethnic group as victim, etc. Those things aren't profiles specific to any particular case, they are just basic summary statistics of offenders. But, other points are where it would be interesting to know if the profile description is actually useful (i.e. the single loner vs in relationship social type of things).

          My suspicions, born mostly out of ignorance due to the lack of information on profile efficacy, is that behavioural profiling is probably a bit better than chance, but not all that much. I suspect most of the "matches" are on pretty routine stuff, like age range, simply because most offenders will be in that age range, not because there was anything about a particular crime that "signaled" the offender is that age range. Simply committing an offence means the offender is likely male and in their twenties, for example.

          Anyway, that's a long winded way of saying, which I share your implied skepticism of profiles, their purpose isn't really to "catch" an offender per se, but rather to suggest how to make most of the limited resources of time and money the police have when confronted with a huge amount of information to deal with. It still requires the police to find the information that eventually "catches" the offender. The profile is just supposed to help them in deciding where that information might be found.

          - Jeff
          yes, except when you read books like mindhunter by douglas, who act like their profiles caught many offenders, thats my problem with it. imho take them with a grain of salt. i lived through the beltway sniper shootings and they couldnt have gotten that profile more wrong. but yes, they can help point police in tje right direction some time.
          but imho it gets waaaaaaay more ink than it deserves.

          Its really the fbis codis database that helps catch criminals.
          "Is all that we see or seem
          but a dream within a dream?"

          -Edgar Allan Poe


          "...the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn
          quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him."

          -Frederick G. Abberline

          Comment


          • Originally posted by Abby Normal View Post

            yes, except when you read books like mindhunter by douglas, who act like their profiles caught many offenders, thats my problem with it. imho take them with a grain of salt. i lived through the beltway sniper shootings and they couldnt have gotten that profile more wrong. but yes, they can help point police in tje right direction some time.
            but imho it gets waaaaaaay more ink than it deserves.

            Its really the fbis codis database that helps catch criminals.
            Hi Abby,

            I couldn't agree more! Books, TV, and movies, are all for entertainment purposes, and they are not sources of objective information. As you say, Douglas's book is presented as if the profiles "caught" the offenders, or at least that is what the impression is. To be fair, Douglas himself does say many times that profiles do not solve cases, the detectives on the ground solve the case. The problem is, to make the books popular the profiling side of things gets magnified in how they are presented, and so that message gets lost. The press, of course, are worse because they magnify that misperception even more. The Beltway Sniper case is the same, but for the opposite reason, it was so far off it gets mentioned as if all profiles are that bad. The thing is, if they were all that bad there would be a long list of profiles that were just as far off, but we don't hear of those? Why? Is it because it is rare for a profile to be as bad as that? If it is rare for them to be that far off, then they could still be good most of the time. Again, single examples, or even a selection of examples, are not good evidence upon which to evaluate profiles because one can always find the "really good fits" if you look for good fits and you can always find "really bad fits" if you look for bad fits. What we need is to look at all of them, and see the whole range of fits and do more of them fall towards good than bad or more towards bad than good?

            Personally, I doubt either extreme view is right, but rather the truth is somewhere in the middle ground between them. I don't think they're useless, but I don't think they are the be all and end all either, so if a good lead comes up and the suspect it points to is nothing like the profile, ignore the profile! But when you don't have a good lead, profiles may help to prioritize who to look at when you come across them. I just don't know how strongly that last "priority" should be simply because a good, proper, objective study of all the profiles (or at least a large random sample) hasn't been done.

            It's the same thing I say about the spatial analysis stuff (geographical profiling). It's not useless, and it does provide a good way of indicating "where to look" for case related information, helping to prioritize zones in the search space. And that information is much better than chance performance. But it also has a high enough error rate that it should not over-ride actual evidence based leads. It's like getting a list of people known to a victim, because that list more often than not will probably contain the offender, so start your search there with those with the closest ties (spouse, ex-spouse, family etc) and work down the list (work colleagues, friends, associates) and then (class mates, people who go to the same club, gym, etc). If you search that list of "social distances" in that order you will find the offenders faster than if you just randomly search people in the city. That's because that list contains useful, general information. Same as spatial analysis, search the areas in the order, and more often than not you will find locations that are tied to the offender (or the victims in some cases - and quite possibly the JtR case, unfortunately - the "geoprofiles" may be picking up on spatial commonalities of the victims, rather than spatial aspects of JtR per se) that are important to the case. Again, the spatial profile doesn't "solve" the case, it is just a way to help sort or prioritize areas to be investigated, and it should be ignored if the investigation finds actual evidence that leads away from the spatial profile (because the profiles do get it wrong in some cases, and in some cases horribly wrong!)

            Behavioural profiling really does need a very thorough and proper examination of its utility. A lot of it is very subjective. Douglas himself describes it as intuition, and that some people seem better at it than others. That to me is a huge red flag, and until those "intuitive" decisions can be turned into more objective decisions, it means the utility will in part depend upon the luck of the draw (did you get a profiler whose intuition guesses right for your given case?). Until a proper efficacy study is done, I tend to view behavioural profiles as curiosities, and not much more than that. At the same time, I can't say they are definitely bogus either, because again, that requires the same study. Basically, a proper study of them is what we need to know if they are spot on mostly, generally good, mediocre, random, or even worse, misleading!

            I just don't see that study coming out any time soon though. The FBI would lose face if they turned out to be garbage because they've invested time and money for all these years, and if they turned out to be great, they aren't going to want that sort of information to become available to the public because then criminals, at least the smart ones, could use that information to their own advantage. Interestingly, Gary Ridgeway did that in one of his crimes. Apparently he left a trout on one of his bodies in part to try and mislead the police into looking for some sort of ritualistic cult/satanic link. So he was trying to leave details at the crime scene that pointed away from someone like himself. Profiling wasn't as well known at the time, but he was trying to misdirect the investigation and the FBI was involved, so maybe he had heard about that?

            Anyway, your points are all good ones and we're certainly in the same range of opinion.

            - Jeff

            Comment


            • I think that many of the indicators that profilers use to 'predict' a serial killer have to be updated. I think historically the indicators had merit in that they could probably apply to people born prior to world war II, but enough changes have occurred in the intervening years to justify a revision.

              Profilers have the default position that serial killers are white. The explosion of serial killers in the 20th century coincides with car ownership. The automobile is the greatest tool in a serial killer's arsenal. Similarly owning property or having access to a private dwelling is another aspect of life that benefits a serial killer. As imperfect as society is today in the last generation or so more visible minorities have entered the middle class and have access to cars and homes, so the whole 'white male' cliche is largely a thing of the past.

              Absent father.... at one time there was a social stigma if you were born outside of wedlock. As the kid grows up he will often be ostracized, judged and teased. Also, in earlier periods there were less employment opportunities for women so the child would grow up in poverty and suffer its inherent hardships. In short I think the impact of these secondary factors are stronger contributors than the simple absence of a father.

              Abusive home life..... I think this was actually a good predictor in the days of Albert Fish when most people left school before reaching high school. I think that the present serial killers have suffered more from their peers during the ages of 12 to 18. The exclusion, rejection, isolation and general cruelty that some people have to endure in this period of their life can be excruciating. Fortunately the majority, even if they continue to carry the emotional scars, don't become killers. In many ways I would say that a good portion of the serial killers from the last 50 years are 'proto-incels' and their experiences during high school strongly contributed to their broken psyche and later crimes.

              Comment


              • Gilgo Beach killer hunt slowed by infighting between prosecutors, police

                The Gilgo Beach investigation was hampered by political battles, local resistance to federal investigators, and apparent apathy toward victims who sell sex.


                ​Article about how detectives working on the Gilgo Beach murders in 2021 basically objected to the lead detective's handling until he was removed. Meanwhile, a clue about a pickup truck went ignored. It turned out to belong to the suspect in custody.
                Pat D. https://forum.casebook.org/core/imag...rt/reading.gif
                ---------------
                Von Konigswald: Jack the Ripper plays shuffleboard. -- Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut, c.1970.
                ---------------

                Comment


                • Two weeks after announcing the arrest of the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer, authorities in New York on Friday revealed the identity of a woman whose remains were among those found during the course of the investigation over a decade ago.


                  Murder victim from 1996 previously known as "Fire Island Jane Doe" identified and attributed to Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect.
                  Pat D. https://forum.casebook.org/core/imag...rt/reading.gif
                  ---------------
                  Von Konigswald: Jack the Ripper plays shuffleboard. -- Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut, c.1970.
                  ---------------

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by Pcdunn View Post
                    https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/04/us/in...ers/index.html

                    Murder victim from 1996 previously known as "Fire Island Jane Doe" identified and attributed to Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect.
                    thanks for posting this pc

                    but am i missing something?the article dosnt say the police are atributing this victim to huermann or even as any part of series, only that tje remains were ided, no?

                    also, lets just keep all future discussion of this to this thread, no need to have two concurrent threads on the same thing, and just saying the same thing.
                    "Is all that we see or seem
                    but a dream within a dream?"

                    -Edgar Allan Poe


                    "...the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn
                    quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him."

                    -Frederick G. Abberline

                    Comment


                    • <iframe loading='lazy' width='560' height='315' src='https://www.nbcnews.com/news/embedded-video/mmvo193938501716' scrolling='no' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

                      This video report on the Gilgo Beach murder suspect states investigation is widening as new bodies are found. He's charged with three murders, suspected in a fourth. Says he spends 2 to 3 hours daily in jail reviewing the evidence against him. Lawyer refutes his client's guilt, on basis of his being a family man and a productive member of society; also refutes the connection of the hair to his client. Report mentions the wife and family members attended a recent court hearing, but declined to comment.
                      Pat D. https://forum.casebook.org/core/imag...rt/reading.gif
                      ---------------
                      Von Konigswald: Jack the Ripper plays shuffleboard. -- Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut, c.1970.
                      ---------------

                      Comment

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