Free The Profiler by Pat Brown

on in Alaska. On the show, Douglas theorized that when they found the perpetrator, he would have a stutter, and he did! Now how in the world would anybody—I don’t care how much training you’ve got—figure out that a guy who committed a particular crime stutters? From where do you get
that
? Well, Hollywood twisted the story around like they so often do.
    It turned out that the police already had a suspect in mind, and they asked Douglas if he thought that the man they had in custody could be the serial killer, this man who owned a small plane and stuttered. Douglas profiled the crime and, since the profile matched thepolice suspect, he said the killer would be a stutterer. He already
knew
that the guy stuttered, but the television show didn’t make that clear. In his book
Mindhunter
, Douglas points out that he knew the suspect stuttered, but Hollywood made him seem like he could pick this trait out because of his brilliance.
    While the Hollywood spin on profilers makes for exciting reading, students of profiling are often mystified and discouraged because they can’t understand how they could ever possibly figure the same things out—what color car the suspect drives, that he likes to watch the news, that he is a sports lover. I have news for them. I can’t figure those things out, either.
    SOMETIMES, A PROFILER applies inductive profiling to a case.
    A sexual homicide is almost always committed by males. How often do you see a woman convicted of sexual assault? Almost never. It’s an extremely unusual crime. A profiler could take statistical information and say, “If you have a girl who’s been raped, then I’m going to say it was by a man.” Anyone can guess that. And most males who commit crimes are between twenty-two and thirty-two. We can start creating a profile by staying with the safe bets: “The sexual assaults were committed by a man between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two.” Then if a guy committed a number of poorly planned crimes, all locally, I could say what he’s not doing well in his life: he’s probably unable to maintain a job or a relationship. And he’s not very clever. I bet I will still be batting close to a thousand with this profile.
    But unusual guesses, like a stutter, could not possibly be known logically or statistically.
    As I learned about profiling, I discovered that there was a great deal of mythology about the field—promoted by profilers themselves—to make profilers seem like some kind of gods. They want the police and general public believing there are only so many people in the world who could ever do this, because they’re so brilliant and gifted. They can simply look at a scene and—voilà!—they know all the answers. It’s ridiculous.
    Brent Turvey pushed for establishing an increasingly scientificpractice of criminal profiling. I support his efforts and have continued to promote the deductive method of criminal profiling—one based on evidence, the scientific method, and solid explanations for profile determinations.
    A profiler has to spend a long time studying autopsy reports and crime scene photos, doing crime role plays, crime reconstructing, and crime analysis. It is hard work. Deductive profiling isn’t as “sexy” and “mystical” as profiling that makes amazing conclusions through inside information or luck, but it is a much better tool for homicide investigators, and that is the only thing that really matters.
    IN 1995, FIVE years after the Anne Kelley murder, I still believed Walt Williams should be a suspect.
    Now having greater knowledge and training, I went back into Walt’s history to question once more whether I was right about him, and if he could be connected to any other homicides in the area.
    Starting anew with the Anne Kelley homicide, I found it hard to believe that a crime of this nature would be a perpetrator’s first and only crime. Kelley was bludgeoned and strangled. She was sexually assaulted and brutalized. The