If the Police Had a Modern Understanding of Serial Killers

[Sam Flynn]

Profiling would have made an enourmous difference to the police trying to find the Ripper. We must remember that in 1888 phrenology was still considered to be a perfectly reasonable method of determining a persons personality.

I strongly suspect that profiling will come to be seen as the 20th Century's equivalent of phrenology. Some may wish to persist in trying to find the Holy Grail of predicting human behaviour, but that ain't going to happen. We can't even predict the behaviour of something as basic as a flipped coin, except in the most general probabilistic terms. The degrees of freedom enjoyed by the human mind, as well as the number of possible environmental/experiential variables that shape our personalities, are significantly more numerous than the binary simplicity of a "head" or a "tail".

[Jeff Leahy]

Yeah, I have to be careful about the ‘D’ word incase the ‘Dyslexia Inquesition’ are watching in…

As you know I’m a victim adder rather than a subtractor but hey, I can see arguments both ways…psychologically however I’m not keen on Tumbelty, there are just so few cases of homosexual serial killers attacking women. Chapman would require a major change in MO….while Druit, is actually most likely statistically (Manic Depressive) to be a serial killer. Do I think he did it? Well he’s a good suspect as people say ‘one of the best’ …but only number two.

Pirate

PS An aside: Does anyone know if there is a picture of James McWilliams (City Police) on casebook? or a picture of the Marginalia? ta

PS Hi Machael...the 'S' on end of THAT'S was a misstake, it should have read 'THAT SAID MICHAEL' ie in agreement with your post and PS PS perhaps we have one viable suspect?

Hi Pjack,

I wasnt sure, so thanks for clearing that up.

On the notion of one viable suspect....for all 5 murders? I dont believe there is one. Not with the conflicting murder scene and victim data within that 5.

I think one filter might be interesting to apply to some of the better known ones, Chapman, Druitt, Tumblety....which of these men had known enviromental factors that existed in their youth, that we know of, that are among the deviant forms of activities found by researching known serial killers?

I do recall that Tumblety sold pornography to boats on the river near his home when he was a child. Perhaps indicating an early predisposition to seeing women as "objects" rather than people, and a skewed idea of what relationships between the sexes entails. That might be re-enforced by his later predilection towards homosexual activities. Those might be relevant characteristics with his candidacy.

All the best.

[Jeff Leahy]

Profiling would have made an enourmous difference to the police trying to find the Ripper. We must remember that in 1888 phrenology was still considered to be a perfectly reasonable method of determining a persons personality. It seems the police of the time were truly looking for the mad man covered in blood with eyes rolling backward in his head. The simple fact of the matter is that JTR probably was a seemingly low key, good natured individual (ala Ted Bundy, John Gacy, Jeffer Dahmer) when he wasn't killing. He probably held down steady work and had a place located within close proximity to the Nichols murder. Even today the strongest ally of Violent Criminals is anonimity, you would never suspect them. Honestly when is the last time you ever heard an aquaintance of a Killer say: "Oh absolutly, I always thought they were a violent pervert." And this is because they are predators, they must blend in; Bundy: Law Student, Raider: President of Church council, Gacy: Business Man and Political Activist. And failing all of this there were 1 million + people living in London, not exactly a small number of potential suspects.

While this might be true when considering psychopathic Serial killers they are not the only category of Serial killers. In fact true psychopaths are amongst the rarest with most Serial killers being Sociopath’s or manic-depressives. And of course what if the serial killer like ‘Sutcliff’ was suffering Paranoid Schizophrenia…there we go again

PS Hi Machael...the 'S' on end of THAT'S was a misstake, it should have read 'THAT SAID MICHAEL' ie in agreement with your post and PS PS perhaps we have one viable suspect?

... And failing all of this there were 1 million + people living in London, not exactly a small number of potential suspects.

Therein lies the point, any potential profile that could be created by the known data without a known person... would include 10's of thousands of men. And not just East Enders either...transients, Greater London men who could walk to and fro the sites within reason,...from 30 to 40 years of age....

Thats why I suggest without knowing using a known strong suspect, the tools they employ would be to general to create any real, usable profile. They would have had equal chances to narrow a search, by as you say, reading head bumps.

Best regards

[FutureM.D.]

Profiling would have made an enourmous difference to the police trying to find the Ripper. We must remember that in 1888 phrenology was still considered to be a perfectly reasonable method of determining a persons personality. It seems the police of the time were truly looking for the mad man covered in blood with eyes rolling backward in his head. The simple fact of the matter is that JTR probably was a seemingly low key, good natured individual (ala Ted Bundy, John Gacy, Jeffer Dahmer) when he wasn't killing. He probably held down steady work and had a place located within close proximity to the Nichols murder. Even today the strongest ally of Violent Criminals is anonimity, you would never suspect them. Honestly when is the last time you ever heard an aquaintance of a Killer say: "Oh absolutly, I always thought they were a violent pervert." And this is because they are predators, they must blend in; Bundy: Law Student, Raider: President of Church council, Gacy: Business Man and Political Activist. And failing all of this there were 1 million + people living in London, not exactly a small number of potential suspects.

That’s said Michael

I don’t see why using psychological profilers to look at known suspects cant help us to form an opinion about whether that person was capable of being or might have been Jack the Ripper.

Pirate

Hi Pirate Jack,

I agree with you, theres no harm applying some of the profilers screening methods to known suspects...for whom we have enough data about to make the exercise really useful.

But that would be the limit of a profilers value here I would think, identifying which among the suggested suspects, known by name, carry the x-factor "serial" signatures.

That assumes the killer was within the known "viable" suspects...something I seriously doubt myself.

Cheers Pjack

[Jeff Leahy]

That’s said Michael

I don’t see why using psychological profilers to look at known suspects cant help us to form an opinion about whether that person was capable of being or might have been Jack the Ripper.

Pirate

Hi cd,

The only serial killers we know about are the ones that were caught, confessed and/or killed themselves, or surrendered themselves. I know a few people here who could list a coupla dozen off the top of their head.

I dont think any of them behaved or killed exactly like the others did. It seems the commonalities are in their formative development years,... some kind of trauma....and the actual functioning of their brains, as seen using MRI's and various scans. And so few of them are actually caught by police efforts alone.

Do modern serial killer profilers catch criminals? No. But they can categorize the killer by the time he is caught, or after, through interviews. There is a show on TV, maybe the History Channel, where serial killers are interviewed and analyzed..then rated in terms of their psychopathy from 1 to 24 I believe, 24 being the type without any conventional guilt/pity/remorse kinds of emotions. The ones who like killing, like seeing and causing suffering.

I think they know a bit about the core causal environments and biology, and what some killers feel about their work, but I dont see that anything that they use to gather information from would be present in these Ripper cases, or could be used to help locate the killer.

Not unless they went through every East Enders childhood history first.

Cheers cd

[protohistorian]

methodological consequence

Profile wise I think the police had a pretty good idea of who they were looking for - but actually catching them is hard now, never mind then. Steve Wright was able to kill five women even though his DNA was already in the database!

Absolutely. Serials are harder to detect because so much of law enforcement theory is centered on motive, which in the case of most serials, is known but to them. Another feature of disorganized serials that complicates the issue is relationship to the victim. Theres not really a more effective method of halting modern investigations than not being able to tie victim to criminal. This is in large measure why the study of things how the victims body was disposed of became an issue. Because early on it was realized that there exists a weak correlation between how the victims body was treated post mortem, and potential relationship to the killer. Live Strong Dave

[DarkPassenger]

Profile wise I think the police had a pretty good idea of who they were looking for - but actually catching them is hard now, never mind then. Steve Wright was able to kill five women even though his DNA was already in the database!

[protohistorian]

Interestingly, Diana, I suspect that as "profiling" matures, it will move further and further away from its popular perception of "nailing" specific types to an acknowledgement that aberrant human behaviour (much like normal human behaviour) is just too diverse to categorise in any predictive sense, at least as far as the individual suspect is concerned.

The data may well get finer-tuned over time, but all that will mean is that Jack ends up under an increasingly wide, and ever more fuzzy, region of a probability curve. Even then, the end result will become increasingly more descriptive and less predictive. I sense that we're already seeing the FBI move away from the "horoscope" sort of profile beloved of Hollywood to a more pragmatic, statistical approach.

I agrre, the survey of serials in 1995, the one that spawned the organized and disorganized nomenclatures, was based on a data set of just 21 known serials. Much of the statistical gap was filled with data from fields like cognitive psychology,

[Sam Flynn]

Can the profiling of today tell us much about JTR? Probably not as much as the science of ten years from now.

Interestingly, Diana, I suspect that as "profiling" matures, it will move further and further away from its popular perception of "nailing" specific types to an acknowledgement that aberrant human behaviour (much like normal human behaviour) is just too diverse to categorise in any predictive sense, at least as far as the individual suspect is concerned.

The data may well get finer-tuned over time, but all that will mean is that Jack ends up under an increasingly wide, and ever more fuzzy, region of a probability curve. Even then, the end result will become increasingly more descriptive and less predictive. I sense that we're already seeing the FBI move away from the "horoscope" sort of profile beloved of Hollywood to a more pragmatic, statistical approach.

[Bulldog]

The capture of Dennis Rader was in no small part because of the advice given to the Wichita police by the FBI behavioral unit.

The reason why Rader was identified is that he sent the Wichita Police Dept. a floppy disk containing a document created in Microsoft Word. He wasn't aware that starting with Office 97, Microsoft began embedding the license number of the application software as hidden metadata when the file is saved. The police sent the diskette to Microsoft who were able to identify the registered owner of the licensed software. It was the Lutheran Church where Rader served as a deacon.

It was high tech that brought him down, but not the "FBI behavioral unit".

[diana]

Profiling is in its infancy and as such there will be many trial and error scenarios, slip ups etc.

I believe that as the science matures with more experience and more data accuracy will grow.

The capture of Dennis Rader was in no small part because of the advice given to the Wichita police by the FBI behavioral unit.

Can the profiling of today tell us much about JTR? Probably not as much as the science of ten years from now.