Dark Side: Derailement

Serial murder has become part of the public consciousness even though  most people are not really sure what it is, why it happens, and much less  how to investigate it. This ignorance is as much a part of the professional  circles as the lay public. Federal and local law-enforcement officers have a common interest in how to investigate serial murder cases, but no authority has perfected an answer to investigating these most troublesome  cases. When the acts of a serial murderer are discovered, these very law enforcement officers only share the vaguest of ideas on how to solve them.

Few offenses involve a sole operator. Instead, they often consist of groups or teams of individuals that, to a greater or lesser extent, have to interact to make the offense possible and make it beneficial for the criminals. This is most obvious in what is known as “organized” crime. To understand how these crimes are possible, the implicit and formal organizational networks of which they are a part, have to be understood. What is so troublesome about serial murder investigations is that no formal research has ever taken place that aids police in understanding the serial killer’s landscape and how to solve these types of cases. Worse yet, the social fabric between the investigative team and the serial killers is often intertwined—they do, after all, have some overlapping social concerns. Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals, it impedes and, in the extreme case, even prevents the formation and maintenance of community.  When a disturbed man kills his girlfriend at her home in a rage of jealousy and in a blizzard of bullets, the murder investigation is solved quickly. The boyfriend is present when police officers arrive, possibly more afraid of what he’s done than of the punishment he may be facing. He hands over the gun while he tries to explain the circumstances of the shooting before the police can stop him so they can read him his rights first.

However, when a nude female is found raped, stabbed, and strangled in a remote wooded area, the case takes on a complexity far from the norm. The solution is not imminent. Not only do the investigating officers have a “who done it,” worse yet, they have a “who is it.” Even further complicating this case is that the victim may be one of others by the same killer. Serial homicide investigations succeed or fail on whether the police  know what they have on their hands, how they accept the truth, and how they manage it once they’ve accepted it. Accordingly, it will be explored thoroughly how task forces deal with the key factors of recognition, acknowledgement, and control. In other words, it will be shown that the psychological forces of denial and defeat can easily creep into a task force investigation and do so because agencies fail to recognize what they have on their hands, fail to acknowledge it to themselves and to their constituents even after they know what they’re chasing down, and fail to exercise control over their own data in the case.

Failure to recognize, to acknowledge, and to manage often leads to a collective sense of denial and defeat as you will see this in the Yorkshire Ripper  case. This prevents police from putting together even the most obvious of clues. In the study of how bureaucratic or administrative denial operates, the elements involved in recognizing that there is a serial killer in operation will be shown to come in two phases. You may not recognize the series due to skepticism, but the killer goes on anyway. Those skeptics do not share the instincts of some experienced detectives, and because there are no hard facts, the case is believed to be a single event. But the detectives have to be salesmen to those unbelievers. Secondly, the utility of homicide information systems monitoring the frequency and types of murders will be discussed.

People, and cops are no different from any other group of people, if given the choice tend to avoid those things which cause them pain, create anxiety, make them uncomfortable, or make them look anything less than successful. In the case of a serial murder investigation most detectives are made to look inept by the killer, especially when he’s eventually picked up for running a red light, making an illegal U-turn, or even for driving a stolen car and then confesses to the first uniformed cop he sees. Even catching the killer turns out to be a revelation of all the mistakes the police made during the course of the investigation. Therefore, when they ultimately succeed, they have to face exactly what they did wrong. It’s no wonder that many police agencies typically put themselves into denial about the existence of a serial killer. As the psychology of defeat pervades the investigation, even the small  successes that the police might achieve are not perceived as successes. Maybe the killer was forced out of one comfortable pattern into an unfamiliar one because he sensed the police were on to him.

www.politie.nl  and a Chief Inspector – Mr. Henk van Essen©

www.aivd.nl       AIVD – Mr. Erik Akerboom ©

 

 

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