Former FBI Agent Explains Criminal Profiling | Tradecraft | WIRED

People often ask if it is nature or nurture that creates a serial killer. Well, actually it's both and more. I like to say that genetics load the picture of personality and psychology of the gun and your experiences pull the trigger. Your genetics give you the potential to be a killer, but your personality. and psychology are the filter through which you experience and can change the way you come out of any event in your life. I'm Jim Clemente, I'm a retired FBI supervisory special

agent

and a profiler in the Behavioral Analysis Unit as a profiler, my job was to hunt down child kidnappers, rapists and serial killers, we help where forensic analysis fails if we look at how the crime was committed. crime, that leads us to why the crime was committed and that leads us to who committed the crime.

The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit is part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and as such we study all violent and sexual crimes in this country and much of the world so that we can then train law enforcement to be able to benefit from our research in our training the original FBI profilers, John Douglas Roy Hazelwood, Robert Ressler, Pete Merrick, they gain this body of knowledge by going to prisons and interviewing convicted serial killers, they interview them in great detail about what what they did and also about how they grew up and how they felt throughout the time that they were killing people who developed this

criminal

experience and that they got away with these crimes, for example, when Ed Kemper found out that he had a very difficult relationship with his mother, so he started killing surrogates instead of her and then killed his mother David Berkowitz showed how sexual frustration can be taken out on innocent people on the streets of New York thanks to Ted Bundy.

They learned that he was a sexual sadist who got his kicks from causing and witnessing the pain and suffering of others, but Lo did many times using his psychopathic charm to lure victims and pretended to be hurt so that he would end up killing the people who wanted to help him, so now we have an astonishing volume of institutional knowledge about these

criminal

s and that tells us how they killed and why they killed and helps us hunt them down. Criminal

profiling

is basically reverse engineering a crime. We look at victimology. The choice of victims. We observe the crime scene.

We look at the level of organization and then before and after. behavior after the crime and together all those things tell us the type of person who committed the crime victimology is the study of the victim his life his desires his education his daily routine because a criminal chooses a particular victim in a particular place in a particular time in a particular way for a particular purpose and all of those options leak information about the offender about his abilities and capabilities about his desires and can lead us directly back to the offender the location of the crime can tell us a lot if the crime occurred in a farm in the middle of Iowa, where the only potential witnesses are a bunch of cows and pigs, or it happened in Times Square in New York City, where at any given time there may be between fifty and one hundred thousand potential eyewitnesses perpetrating a crime in Any of those locations tell you a lot about the criminal at the crime scene.

We observe the behavior of the offender. How much time did you spend there? What was his interaction with the victims and what was his level of criminal sophistication? The choice of weapons that a criminal uses in a crime. The scene reveals a tremendous amount of information about whether the criminal used a gun and killed someone from a distance or if he got up close and used a knife. It is a different type of person who is usually engaged in different types of profession than someone we will not approach personally then we look at the level of organization of the criminals.

The two types of criminals we see are on a spectrum between organized and disorganized. The organized criminal will plan ahead. He will fantasize about committing the crime and then bring all the implements. necessary to commit the crime and then takes them away after the crime, while the disorganized offender is impulsive, does not plan crimes in advance, may have lowered his inhibitions due to drug or alcohol use, and basically picks up the implements along with he. the path and may leave them behind, leaving a wealth of forensic evidence for authorities to find. If a criminal does not have a very high skill level in terms of access to victims, he will choose victims who lead very high-risk lives, prostitutes. and drug addicts, while a very sophisticated criminal will be able to obtain victims in the privacy and safety of their own homes, it takes a very different level of criminal sophistication to be able to commit those two different crimes, the next level of analysis of criminal behavior is looking at pre- and post-crime behavior, if they are organized criminals, they probably conducted pre-crime surveillance to verify location, perhaps even surveilling potential victims and stalking them.

We also found that criminals, after committing a serious crime, will have behavioral changes that people around them could see, for example, if a criminal has committed a kidnapping and murder, they would probably leave the area making an excuse in case of emergency to leave the city and they would not return until everything calmed down and they felt it was safe to return. building a profile is simply taking all of those five factors and looking at what information the criminal filters out by behaving on those particular waves. When I analyze a crime scene, I look at various types of evidence, some of which we have here images inside the house where the crime occurred photographs of the crime scene images from the autopsy, as well as an affidavit that summarizes the facts of the case and the description of the crime scene.

Typically, I would like to ask a lot more questions and get a lot more data, but I think at least we have enough now. To begin a preliminary profile, I am looking at a case of a double homicide of a man and a woman. The man appears to be in his early 20s. He was shot about five times. He has an unknown relationship with the female victim he appears to have. She was pregnant and was shot seven to eight times in the face, head and upper torso. It also appears that the man may have scrawled in grease several letters that he found on the floor of the back room next to the back door that she found in an adjoining room. half hanging from the bed with her head resting on a sofa that is right next to the bed, it appears that she was first shot while lying on her back in bed and that she rolled over to try to escape or someone turned her over and was shot again, where he died at the scene.

My first impression is that the male victim was killed first and that it was a practical murder to get him out of the way, while the female victim was shot several times in the chest and at least once in the face and once in the head she appears to be the main objective of this attack so if we start with the victimology we know that the first victim, the man grew up in this town and had left the town for several years and returned. He still has no known criminal record in this house $11,000 in cash was found Three and a half pounds of marijuana was found and a powdered substance that appeared to be drugs was also found which tells me that they were engaged in a high-risk activity of drug trafficking. drugs but The fact that the drugs and money were left behind tells me that there is a high probability that this was not a drug related hit.

I think if drug dealers had been involved in this, they would have taken the drugs and taken the cash. It tells me that there is a level of immaturity in this criminal, someone who didn't have the presence of mind to look for these things or didn't even think they might be there. I would put the offender's intelligence level at medium to low because they made a feeble attempt to clean up his act and that could also mean that his inhibitions were lowered by drugs or alcohol. Something that is particularly unusual about this crime scene is the letters scribbled on the ground apparently by the greasy male victim who was thrown to the ground, they try it, it appears to spell a name jmf and then below that appears some sort of statement of last death, this could indicate a person or some type of motive.

As a criminal behavior analyst, I want to determine if this is a real message left by the dying man or if this is staged to mislead investigators, so I would like to know if he had grease on one or more of his hands or fingers and whether he was left or right. with the hand and whether or not that was the hand that had the grease, the organization committed this crime is quite low, even though the criminal brought the weapon that he used to commit the murders, he left forensic evidence and that tells me that no It does not have a high level of forensic or criminal sophistication.

We look at pre- and post-defense behavior, as it doesn't appear to be very criminally sophisticated. This might be one of the only times he committed a crime like this and I think he might. If I had panicked afterwards, I would think that somewhere between where he committed these crimes and where he went, you would find the gun in a container of garbage, a body of water, or a place where you thought it would be hidden. I would also expect someone like that to make up an excuse to leave the area or leave town for a period of time until everything calms down, so in this case I think the way the victims were killed tells us a story.

I think he was a practical murder and she was the target of this. Double homicide and the fact that she was pregnant may indicate that the motive was jealousy and that there was another person as a kind of love triangle here and that the person responsible was the third person in this love triangle or a family member in the DC sniper case. The entire Washington DC area was terrorized for 23 days. A random number of people were shot dead or injured. Turns out this was a longer wave that started in Washington state and spread across the country, so I got involved in the case because I worked in the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the time and we consulted on the investigation immediately, This case was presented as if it were a murder spree with six murders in the space of 27 hours, so we don't think it was targeting a particular type of group.

The victimology was completely random. Usually in Spri cases, the criminal is on the run and commits murder after murder after murder, but he makes up for it during that time. The adrenaline rush, the excitement and fear of escape, all of those things can make a criminal do more. errors as time passes, but in this case that was not happening, the shots themselves indicated that there was surveillance prior to the attack, this criminal planned and executed six murders in the space of 27 hours, he was a ghost that no one saw and he told us well. Far from being that he had a certain level of calm, cool and collected, news that he was probably in his 40s and had police or military training, but more than that, he must have had experience on the streets as a police officer or in the battlefield. because pulling the trigger on a paper target is one thing, but taking the life of an unknown individual is another thing, so when we started the profile we based it only on statistics and statistically the snipers are white men between 40 and 50 years old and They have a grudge against society or someone in particular that they take out on their victims.

Another thing about snipers is that they have a god complex. They want to take life from afar and above to feel omnipotent like God and that is why it is very important to appease them, not challenge them. Unfortunately that's not what the authorities were doing at the time they called them cowards and said the streets are safe and the schools are safe so the sniper shot a boy walking to school the next day , but they left a tarot. card the death card and in that car there were signs of duality first of all it said call me God which reinforced our opinion that the sniper had a god complex and he continued saying this is for you sir policeman and it seems that the The writer admires the police calling them Mr.

Police. It also has its origins in several reggae songs, so it could mean that the offender had a Caribbean influence, but then he said not to release it to the press, and press is an older word. that older people use, which is consistent with the level of sophistication of the planning and execution of these crimes, but not consistent with admiring the police, so for the first time we had to consider whether this criminal was calm, collected and calm when he plans and executes his murders but decomposes when he writes or for the first time in US history.We have a team of snipers, an older one around 40 years old and a younger one around 40 years old, but the fact is that we know that since snipers have a god complex, they don't.

They work well together so I theorize that the older one was actually controlling the younger one and I even went so far as to say that he might be controlling him through sexual victimization because that would give him complete control over the younger person, in fact, 10 years after they were. Malvo, captured and convicted, revealed that Mohammad had been sexually victimizing him all along, so in the end our profile was that of two snipers working together, both African-American, one in his 40s with police or military training and one experienced in his teens once we released him. that profile and because of other work that the FBI was doing that reinforced our profile Muhammad and Malvo were arrested within 24 hours that the profile was developed in the DC sniper case was groundbreaking because in the vast majority of cases of Previous sniping in the United States of America were committed by lone criminals who were white men in their 40s and 50s with a particular grudge and this case blew that profile to pieces.As criminal behavior analysts, we look at how the criminal committed the crime and we determine why he committed it and that leads us to know who committed the crime.

In many of these cases, local authorities have absolutely no idea who committed the crime and have no leads other than criminal leads. Behavioral analysis can generate clues about the type of person who committed the crime, and in many cases across the country, criminal behavior analysis has led to the identification, arrest, and conviction of criminals.