Low Down

  Most detectives rely on traditional means, such as the teletype, telephone calls, bulletins, letters, and discussions at seminars or meetings. Finding murders in that fashion was far too inefficient and slow. As it turned out, seven victims from that list were eventually connected to the Ted Bundy murders. We needed to know that   information as soon as possible. Unfortunately, ten years later the process of finding similar murders had not changed; there was still no central repository of homicide information to query. County, state, regional, and federal violent crime information systems are beginning to crop up and be extremely useful in linking similar crimes for investigative purposes. There are several noted examples, such as the FBI’s   Violent Crime Apprehension Program (VICAP), the Washington State Attorney General’s Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS). These important database storage, query, and retrieval programs are investigative decision support...

  Finding similar cases is just for investigative purposes, enabling detectives to network about their cases; getting them assembled to discuss similar cases to determine if investigating them in concert will lead to a killer sooner. It is not an attempt by detectives to conclusively link two or more cases together as in the case of signature analysis. Linking cases through crime scene and psychological signature analysis. When detectives finally do realize that a murder might be the work of a   serial killer, what drives these investigators to search for similar murder cases? Call it gut instinct or, perhaps, a sixth sense. Experienced detectives look for other cases because they hope that information from those distant cases may hold the key to solving their own. But at exactly what point does an investigator turn the switch and actively search for similar case(s)? And how is linking one case to another actually accomplished? The ability to recognize that another case is...