Can criminal profiling identify a killer?

Criminal profiling promises a lot — being able to piece together a picture of a suspect through clues, intuition and psychology sounds great. But how reliable is it? In our first episode of Forensic, a four-part series unpacking the psychological tools used to solve crimes, we examine the history of criminal profiling. How it got popular in the 1950s after bombings in New York City, its shortcomings when scrutinised by researchers, and the techniques it is built on that police deploy today (but with a lot more data). Guests: Michael CannellAuthor, Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling https://www.michaelcannell.com/incendiaryFormer Editor, The New York Times Professor Craig JacksonProfessor of Occupational Health PsychologyBirmingham City University Dr Victoria BerezowskiLecturer, Forensic Science, Deakin University Credits: Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Isabella TropianoYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Further Information: Incendiary - Michael Cannell https://www.michaelcannell.com/incendiaryThe Organized/Disorganized Typology of Serial Murder: Myth or Model? https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-17816-004Is criminal profiling dead? Should it be? Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/real-criminal-minds/201904/is-criminal-profiling-dead-should-it-beGeorge Metesky, the ‘Mad Bomber’ – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MeteskyUnmasking the Mad Bomber – The Smithsonian, 2017 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unmasking-the-mad-bomber-180962469/A 16-Year Hunt For New York’s ‘Mad Bomber’ – NPR, 2011 https://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136287845/a-16-year-hunt-for-new-yorks-mad-bomberAn overview of offender profiling – International Journal of Police Science and Management, 2024 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14613557241298825Offender profiling: a review of the research and state of the field – Police Psychology, 2021 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128165447000188The Grit, Glamour and Gall of Criminal Profiling – The University of Arizona, 2021 https://www.uagc.edu/blog/grit-glamour-and-gall-criminal-profilingCasebook of a Crime Psychiatrist – James Brussel, 1968 https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7197601W/Casebook_of_a_crime_psychiatristDangerous Minds - The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds

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  Let me take you to 1950s New York City. The town is being terrorised by a so-called mad bomber who's setting off explosives up and down Manhattan.

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  He was setting the bombs off in subways, in a phone booth, in the New York Public Library, in department stores. He placed one in the Empire State Building, which has never been found. So in theory, it's still there somewhere.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Yikes, okay, good to know. But casting back to the 1950s, this mad bomber, he hasn't killed anyone yet, but a bunch of people have been injured and many more are terrified of going out in case they become a victim.

• 1:23Speaker 05

  You know, as it approached the holiday season, the police realised that they had a very serious problem on their hands, because New York, of course, is flooded with people during the holiday season. And so they were desperate to catch him before he killed anybody.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  This is Michael Cannell, non-fiction author, journalist and former editor of The New York Times.

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  I can tell you that I was not born, but my older brothers were born. And my own mother said that she would not take my brothers outside at the height of this bombing campaign. I mean, hysteria might be too strong a word, but people were scared to go to department stores. And the anxiety about the bombs co-mingled with the Cold War anxiety about the Soviet Union and nuclear bombs and so forth.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  So, at the end of 1956, a lot of anxiety among the general public, and still more bombs are going off. And it's getting worse.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  He set off a bomb in a movie theater in Brooklyn, and he seriously injured several people. Nobody died, but they very easily could have died. And this was a kind of precipitating event for the police. They knew that the next time, they might not be so lucky. In those days, police work in New York, anyway, what it really meant was roughing up suspects and roughing up informants and leaning on informants. And it was, it was street work. And the police had never availed themselves of the help of any kind of experts. In fact, they were kind of contemptuous of the idea of going to somebody with a college degree or a doctor.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  But this time, desperate and out of leads, the police would turn to a new source of help. And that turned out to be a fateful decision. Because what happened next popularized a compelling but controversial police practice for decades to come.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  The head of the crime lab, a man named Howard Finney, went to see Dr. James Brussels, who was a psychiatrist. His job was to run psychiatric hospitals in New York City. And because he ran the psychiatric hospitals, Dr. James Brussels had seen every emotional affliction in the world, I think. He'd seen it all. And so the police showed up at his office in downtown Manhattan with a couple of duffel bags of evidence, with the bomb parts, with the letters that he had written to the newspaper.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. This bomber had been writing letters to newspapers and demanding they publish them. In the letters, he'd complain about the dastardly deeds of a company that he claimed had cheated him out of compensation for injury on the job. Stuff like...

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  Bombs will continue until the consolidated Edison Company is brought to justice. I have exhausted all other means. I intend with bombs to cause others to cry out for justice for me.

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  The bomber would sign these letters, only with the initials FP.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  And Dr. Brussels spent a couple of hours going through all of the evidence. And Dr. Brussels considered himself to be a scientist, but also there was a kind of mystic aspect to his interests. And he believed that he could conduct what he called reverse psychology, which is essentially what we call criminal profiling today. And his feeling was, rather than observe the behavior of an individual and predict their future behavior, it might be possible just to observe the behavior of some unknown person and pinpoint the individual based on their behavior.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  It's a pretty tantalizing prospect. Start with the characteristics of a crime and trace things back to the person who did it.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  So Dr. Brussels looked at all the evidence, and then he looked out his window, looking over City Hall Park in downtown Manhattan. And he thought about it, and he let his subconscious work on this. I mean, this is, I think, a kind of Jungian idea, right? So he let his mind, his subconscious, just conjure an image of the bomber. And he said to Captain Finney, "The man that you are looking for has never had a girlfriend. He lives with an older female relative." He's from a Slavic background. He has a history of workplace disputes. And when you catch him, he'll be wearing a double-breasted jacket.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  It was such a wildly specific prediction. Could it possibly be correct?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  I'm Sana Qadar, and from All in the Mind, this is Forensic, our new series on the psychological means and methods used to solve crimes. Once you get away from the glossy depictions on television, how reliable is eyewitness testimony? Can anyone really reliably tell when someone is lying? And why do people confess to crimes they didn't commit? These are all questions we're tackling over the next four episodes, but today, episode one, Criminal Profiling.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Okay, so James Brussels makes his prediction as to the identity of FP, based on the letters he sent to the newspapers and photographs from the crime scenes. As Dr. Brussels recounts in his very own memoir, "Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist",

• 7:17Speaker 06

  Middle-aged, a loner, single, living alone with an older female relative, neat and tidy, foreign-born, and one more thing, when you catch him, he'll be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Based on that description, the police published the profile in major newspapers, hoping to goad FP into identifying himself. FP sends several other letters, most of them mentioning his grudge against the utilities company Con Edison, which, to be fair, is already known. And meanwhile, Con Edison staff are searching their workers' compensation files, trying to find someone who might hold a grudge. Then, on Friday the 18th, January 1957, a clerk named Alice Kelly finds a file that is marked "Injustice" and "Permanent Disability". There are letters in it complaining that the worker was treated unfairly. It's the file of a man named George Meteski,

• 8:16Speaker 04

  a Con Edison worker from 1929 to 1931, who was hurt in an accident at one of their plants, leaving him with permanent injuries and out of work. Four days later, police visit the house of this George Meteski in the middle of the night with a search warrant.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  When they visited his house, of course, he denied that he was FP at first. They found bomb materials in the house. He eventually came clean. One of the detectives visiting the house said to him, "What does FP stand for?"

• 8:54Speaker 04

  The man replied that FP stands for "Fair Play".

• 8:58Speaker 05

  He was wearing his pyjamas, because it was midnight. They asked him to get dressed, and he came out of his bedroom wearing a double-breasted jacket.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Incredibly, exactly what the profile predicted.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  He shared his home with two older sisters. He was from a Slavic background. He did have a history of workplace disputes. And so, I mean, it sounds almost made up, but it's all true.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  The man they'd found did match pretty closely to the predictions of psychiatrist James Brussels. After they found the bomb materials in his garage, he confessed.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  His name was George Meteski. And he had worked here in New York City, Con Ed is a utility company. And he had worked at Con Ed power plant. And he had been injured in a furnace explosion. And he had a legitimate grievance against the utility company because they really kind of cheated him out of any kind of workers' compensation. But because he was a paranoid schizophrenic, his grievance inflated in his mind into a kind of dark and grandiose paranoid scheme against all the workers in the world.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  And he took on this campaign with a kind of crusade mentality, almost a kind of Christ mentality, that he was going to strike back against the forces of evil and darkness.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Michael Cannell is also the author of the book Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, The Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling. And we're going to come back to the story of George Meteski, the so-called mad bomber. But first, let's jump a little further into the future to look at the practice of criminal profiling that this case helped kick off.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  Criminal profiling, in the way that it's portrayed in movies and TV, is essentially the idea that offenders, particularly violent offenders and serial offenders, whether that's murder, rape, sexual assault. The idea is that those offenders leave a pattern behind in the way they offend, the way they select their victims, and more importantly, the things they do at crime scenes.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  This is Professor Craig Jackson from Birmingham City University. He spent years looking into the effectiveness of criminal profiling and how the practice has influenced investigations of crime.

• 11:42Speaker 07

  And one of the quotes I remember from one of the proponents is the idea that the way a crime scene is left, it's telling of the offender in the way that the soft furnishings in your home are very telling about your personality and what you like. So it had such great promise theoretically that the study of crime scenes could help us identify individual offenders.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  While psychiatrist James Brussels was one of the first to pioneer looking at a crime's characteristics to find the culprit in the Mad Bomber case, Craig says it was the FBI who formalized the practice in the early 1970s.

• 12:22Speaker 07

  So the FBI were tasked with trying to find what is behind these sex-based stranger serial murders, a new kind of crime that had been developing. When the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI at Quantico was formed, and the idea was that they would speak to and almost interrogate a couple of dozen of the worst violent sexual offenders held in the American penal system or in their secure psychiatric units. And this literally meant that a small number of field agents or special agents from the Behavioral Analysis Unit went to prisons

• 13:02Speaker 07

  and hospitals to talk to people like Ed Kemper, Charles Manson, and a range of other high-profile, serious murderers.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  This happened in the late 70s.

• 13:15Speaker 07

  And essentially, the FBI tried to gold them into emotional responses to make them talk about their crimes and their childhood and their background and their motivations. And the FBI used, they say, a very large, long questionnaire, and they tried to ask the same questions of each of the offenders they spoke to. The problem we have is that the FBI never released their data from this exercise to the scientific community, so it could never be scrutinised to see how valid it is or how reliable the findings were. But the FBI came up with a number of things that they thought were common to all of these heinous, violent sexual offenders, such as, they would all come from backgrounds where

• 13:59Speaker 07

  mum was overbearing and where father was absent or weak, where the offender had a history of wetting the bed up to the age of 12 or 15 in some cases, where the offender had a history of fire-starting or arson in childhood, and where the offender had been cruel to animals or taken unnatural interest in dead bodies or, you know, dead animals and road kill.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Those were some of the key indicators that the FBI came to believe were common in violent sexual offenders, based on these interviews.

• 14:33Speaker 07

  Now, already I can tell you that's flawed, because many of the offenders they spoke to don't map on to those backgrounds. They didn't all have terrible mums and weak fathers and were bed wetters. But for a good couple of decades, that view, that belief about commonality between serial murderers and violent sexual offenders really stood firm, and the FBI stood by that. And that became the basis for when they undertook profiling exercises in crimes where they needed to find the unknown subject or the unsub. So already, their building blocks or profiles were based on 20 or so interviews that were

• 15:14Speaker 07

  never scrutinised by the scientific community, who could maybe help or nudge it in particular ways. On the basis of that, the FBI's crime scene analysis training began, training field agents what to do with a crime scene, and to treat it essentially in the same way that you would the physical forensic evidence, also do the same thing with the psychological evidence that may be at a crime scene. So, an example being, off the top of my head, if a dead body had been tied up, the hands were tied together. The FBI agent would take that as an important psychological factor that the offender needed to restrict or restrain their victim.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Like, were the hands tied at the front or the back? What was used to tie them up?

• 16:04Speaker 07

  Was it some tape that was found at the crime scene? Or did the offender take some handcuffs or shackles with them? And although this seems quite trivial, the field agent would make some assessment based on something as simple as hand restraints. And they would say that if the offender took handcuffs with them, then they were clearly prepared and organised and methodical. But if the offender had panicked and had to improvise at the crime scene by using some tape that was laying around, then that would show the offender wasn't organised, they were disorganised, they weren't planning ahead, they were spontaneous.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Now, that kind of makes sense, that the crime scene would tell you something about the killer.

• 16:47Speaker 07

  And it can to some extent, but it only tells us so much. Profiling means that you take every piece of evidence at the crime scene, you log it, you catalogue it, and then you try to work out a narrative based on all of the behaviours that have been observed and recorded at the crime scene. The profiler then tries to come up with an idea or a range of scenarios of what could have happened and in what order, and what led to the victim being found this way. And it is basically a creative process where they come up with a number of scenarios and try to see which is the best one that fits with their crime scene knowledge, their expertise, and what most rationally explains what must have happened at the crime scene.

• 17:32Speaker 07

  But on many occasions, that's not accurate. It makes a lovely story and it makes a great idea for an MO, but often it's far from reality. And there are many, many cases of high-profile serial murders and lesser-known cases of one-off homicides, where the profile has been completely way off from what actually happened at the crime scene.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  One example of that, Craig says, is the Green River Killer.

• 18:02Speaker 07

  The Green River Killer was a serial killer who'd murdered between 50 and 60, possibly more, young women in the northwest of the United States, in Oregon.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  This was between the 1980s and 1990s?

• 18:14Speaker 07

  And many, most, but not all of his victims were deposited in watery areas and around the sort of Green River area basin. And the actual Green River Killer, a chap called Gary Ridgway, who was responsible for these murders, and they were sex-based murders, he actually wrote to a local newspaper and described some of the killings and the victims in great detail, in a way that only the killer would possibly know. These were details that hadn't been released, et cetera. And so the local law enforcement got hold of this letter and they sent it to the FBI for their help in not only forensically examining the letter, you know, for palm prints or any

• 18:57Speaker 07

  kind of forensic element, but they asked the behavioral analysis unit two questions: is this letter likely to be from the killer and how can we use this to help catch the killer?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  The FBI wrote back to local law enforcement and said, in short, "This is not your killer. This is somebody who's trying to inject themselves into the proceedings."

• 19:19Speaker 07

  They essentially said the real killer would not tell you all of these details and the real killer would not correspond in such detail. And it turns out, unfortunately, that years later, when Gary Ridgway was arrested, it was a genuine letter by him.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  From ABC Radio National, you're listening to All in the Mind with me, Sana Qadar.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Now, that organized disorganized pattern that Craig mentioned, the belief that offenders fall into one or the other, it came out of that original FBI work. But holes have been poked in it over time.

• 20:02Speaker 07

  David Cantor, who's probably the most well-known criminal psychologist in the UK, I would argue, he reviewed a number of homicides, serial homicides and less high-profile homicides. And he tried to apply the organised and disorganised application to each offender. And in the end, he found that it didn't hold water, that the idea of organised offenders behaving in this way and disorganised offenders behaving in that way didn't map out onto the reality of how crimes were committed. And when you think about it, the FBI were being incredibly ambitious. We are many things and we're not all either organised or disorganised in our lives.

• 20:47Speaker 07

  So you may be very organised in your finances and your dishwasher may be stacked very tidily and organised well, but your den could be an absolute mess and your car could be full of papers and crumbs and crisp packets. So we are both organised and disorganised in our lives. Why would offenders be any other way?

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Okay, so to recap where we're at, the people we spoke to for this episode, as well as the broad literature in this area, isn't that positive about this kind of criminal profiling? As you can hear, it's been criticised as broad brush and unscientific, leading investigators away from the offender as often, or maybe more often, than it points towards them. But there are other approaches built on some of the ideas within criminal profiling that are still in use today, like investigative psychology.

• 21:43Speaker 07

  Investigative psychology basically allows psychologists to research and hopefully inform investigations, both live ones and cold case investigations, to give likelihoods or probabilities about certain offenders' involvement in those cases, or also helping to guide what kind of individual the unsub may be in a live investigation. The big difference is it doesn't have this intuitive element that the FBI's profiling originally did. So it's data that we've amassed from, you know, unfortunately, thousands and thousands of violent crimes and sexual crimes that allow

• 22:26Speaker 07

  us to now confidently say, most offenders who do this tend to come from this background or have this kind of current ongoing situation. So it's much more data driven.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Another really data driven approach, sometimes said to be part of investigative psychology, is called geographic profiling.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Geographic profiling essentially leverages geography, crime and behavior to try to figure out where an offender lives or where one of their anchor points are.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  This is Dr. Victoria Berizowski, a lecturer in forensic science at Deakin University.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  And an anchor point is something, a location where someone frequents often, like every day. So work could be an anchor point, or if someone goes to the gym every day religiously, then the gym could also be an anchor point. But essentially what geographic profiling does is it amalgamates geographical information, criminological theory information and psychology, as well as some maths to try to figure out where that offender could possibly live. It's essentially an investigative tool to narrow down the search for someone.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Like criminal profiling, its history goes back decades to the 1970s.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  So geographic profiling is rooted in three criminological theories: crime pattern, rational choice, and routine activity. Crime pattern theory posits that what an offender does is not random, but their crimes happen in a space that they know usually really well and a space that they feel comfortable in. Rational choice, kind of it's the, a bit of an opposite to crime pattern theory is that while offenders offend in a space that's familiar to them, it can't be a place that's Too comfortable because then the chance of detection is increased. So you have to weigh up the pros and cons. And then the third one is routine activity.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Victoria says this refers to when there are three elements in play. A suitable target, a motivated offender, and the absence of a guardian. Now, a guardian doesn't necessarily mean a physical person standing there. It can mean CCTV.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  But essentially, when those three elements converge, crime can happen.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  So while you start with a few assumptions about human behavior, these aren't leaps of reason, like in some elements of criminal profiling. They're patterns that humans fairly consistently follow at a population level. Armed with these pieces of information about how people behave and how crimes occur, it can be really useful to map out certain locations during a criminal investigation. Obvious stuff like the crime scenes themselves, but also where victims and suspects worked. The restaurants they liked, their gym, their friends' houses. All of this builds up the geographical picture of their lives.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Essentially, what mapping all of these locations does is it creates two spaces. One is called the activity space. And a great way to describe your activity space is anywhere that you can go without a map. So your house, the grocery store, the gym, even your friends' houses. If you can go there without a map, that's in your activity space. The second space is what we call an awareness space. And it's just outside of the activity space. It's just areas that they might not know as well. Using a geographic dispersal of crimes to try to figure out either where they're going to hit next or where they can be found is very common.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Victoria says that in Australia, the AFP, the Australian Federal Police, have a geographic profiling capability.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  So they'll use it on all kinds of serial crimes. Could be serial homicide, which is obviously really rare in Australia, but could be also any like financial crimes that are serial in nature.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  But if we go back to criminal profiling, like Craig, Victoria isn't convinced that that approach is useful.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  People commit crimes for very rational reasons. And you can group offenders in their motivations.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  I think human behavior from a pure motivational standpoint, that's probably the chaotic part. Whereas when we're actually thinking, like, we have to make a decision of where to bury this body, it's not chaos. It's rational thoughts that almost every person, every other person is going to make that same decision. But not every person is going to make the decision to kill someone in the first place. So whereas offender or criminal profiling will try to find a person based on their motivations and, you know, why they act and how they act. With geographic profiling, it's based in geography. You have more data points. It's more, more set in theory, more rooted in theory

• 27:32Speaker 02

  than I think criminal profiling is.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Like, I, I get students all the time saying they want to be a profiler. And I have to tell them that it's actually not a real job. Forensic psychologists are used a lot to decide if someone is fit to stand trial. Like, they'll assess a known offender, but very rarely are their skills actually used to work backwards to find an offender. Like, that's a TV thing and maybe a US thing. Not a, it's, it's not a thing here.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  In recent decades, criminal profiling has fallen out of favor among many police units worldwide. Critics who research it argue that it doesn't stack up. Profiles don't perform better than those who don't use the approach, and the science is shaky. But techniques grounded in data and statistics have grown in popularity at the same time.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Now, remember FP, who we heard about at the start of the show, the mad bomber George Meteski? What happened to him? And what happened to the psychiatrist James Brussels? Well, for George.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  He never really does go to trial. It is determined that he is criminally insane. He had a pulmonary injuries from the furnace blast. And he almost died on the eve of a trial. And then he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. And one of the many ironies of this story is that he really outlived everybody else in the story and was eventually released. He lived a long life as a free man.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  George died at the age of 90 in 1994. As for psychiatrist James Brussels, author Michael Cannell says he became a kind of quirky, eccentric celebrity. He was involved in finding the man who had been dubbed the Boston Strangler.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  A man who was strangling single women in Boston. And Dr. Brussels played an important role in figuring out, in criminal profiling, in figuring out who the culprit was, and so on and so forth with several other cases.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  He spoke to the FBI and told them about his approach, which informed their development of criminal profiling. Though, as we've heard, it's changed a lot since.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  The FBI depends on so much data. It's a data-driven discipline now. Although I have noticed that if you, if you speak to profilers now, FBI profilers, they will acknowledge that there is still this element of intuition, which is what Dr. Brussels originally was about. He was about the intuition. There are people who will say, you know, that profiling is a, you know, is a kind of phony science. I guess what I would say is that in the cases that Dr. Brussels worked on, it's hard. I think they would have eventually caught these offenders, but it certainly shortened the amount of time.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  That is it for episode one of Forensic, our new four-part series on the psychological means and methods used to solve crimes. Next week, we're diving into false confessions and how they can be planted or coerced if police aren't careful. In this episode, you heard from Michael Cannell, author and former editor of The New York Times, Professor Craig Jackson from Birmingham City University, and Dr. Victoria Barazowski, lecturer in forensic science at Deakin University. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Isabella Tropiano. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next week for episode two of Forensic.

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