Free Why We Love Serial Killers by Scott Bonn Page A

on arrival at police headquarters in New York City on January 22, 1957. (photo credit: Associated Press)
What I would do is sit down and look through cases where the criminals had been arrested. I listed how old [the perpetrators] were, whether they were male or female, and their level of education. Did they come from broken families? Did they have school behavioral problems? I listed as many factors as I could come up with, and then I added them up to see which were the most common. 8
    Dr. Schlossberg, who developed profiles of many unknown criminals during the formative years of profiling, including the infamous Son of Sam, stated that profiling is far from an exact science. “In some ways, [profiling] is really as much an art as a science,” said Dr. Schlossberg, as reported by the APA Monitor on Psychology . This statement suggests the value of individualized knowledge and interpretation of evidence, but also indicates that some professionals are more gifted in this regard than others.
    The Birth of Modern Day Profiling
    In recent years, many psychologists, together with criminologists and law enforcement officials, have begun using statistical and researchmethods to bring more science into the art. While Dr. Schlossberg was refining his psychological techniques, major developments were also taking place within the law enforcement community, particularly at the federal level. In 1974, the FBI formed a Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Quantico, Virginia, to investigate serial rape and homicide cases. Two supervisory agents within the FBI, John Douglas and the late Robert Ressler, set out on a mission to interview incarcerated serial predators to obtain information about their motives, planning and preparation, details of the crimes, and the disposal of evidence, including the bodies of victims. Their goal was to compile a centralized database in which the motives of serial offenders were matched with crime scene information. Between 1976 and 1979, Douglas, Ressler, and several colleagues interviewed a total of thirty-six serial predators and collected massive amounts of data.
    Douglas and Ressler soon faced the problem of how to analyze and share the data they had collected with their law enforcement colleagues nationwide. The answer came in the form of a $1 million research grant that facilitated the design of a computerized database system called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). This system allowed the FBI for the first time to cross-reference information from open cases involving serial predators to closed cases in the database in order to match behavioral characteristics and patterns. More specifically, VICAP was designed to aid investigators in narrowing the search for an unknown subject (or “Unsub” in FBI terminology) and create a likely offender profile by matching the details in an open case to the details in closed cases. Although FBI profilers began working in the field around 1979, VICAP profiling research and analysis were not formalized until 1984 when the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) was created within the agency.
    Ever since the introduction of the VICAP system, a local police department anywhere in the US or Canada can fill out a request form and submit it to the NCAVC for analysis of a series of unsolved murders, people missing under suspicious circumstances, or unidentified human bodies. The VICAP data is then entered into the Profiler computer system. VICAP is an artificially intelligent system, meaning that the computer software has been programmed to reason like a human being using “if-then” scenarios. For example, “if the victim was found at the scene of the crime with no apparent attempt to conceal the body, then the offender is likely to be a spontaneous killer who doesnot meticulously plan a murder prior to committing it.” The system is constantly updated so that every time the NCAVC research team learns something new about the behavior of