Dark Side: Sources

 

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 systems. They help investigators search along user-defined fields to identify similar cases. They were created based on ideas suggested by Pierce Brooks, a retired captain with the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Robbery Homicide Division. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, Brooks was a visionary who realized that to solve some of his most bizarre and perplexing homicides he had to search for similar cases outside the insular confines of Los Angeles.

The sole and initial purpose of VICAP [THE VIOLENT CRIMINAL APPREHENSION PROGRAM] was to provide homicide detectives with information on the possibility of murder cases being linked to the same offender. It was a well-known fact that certain types of serial offenders trolled for their victims and often felt compelled to travel outside their immediate neighborhoods when their comfort zones became unstable  due to police presence. But police agencies were often reluctant to ask even neighboring jurisdictions for help locating similar types of crimes, because agencies sometimes jealously guard their respective turfs. Therefore, in order to formalize the possibility of searches for similar offender patterns across jurisdictions, the FBI created VICAP. VICAP, a national data center housed at the FBI Academy, Quantico,  is designed to collect, collate, and analyze information regarding the following:

Ø  Solved or unsolved homicides or attempted homicides, especially those that involve an abduction, are apparently random, motiveless, or sexually motivated, or are known to be part of a series.

Ø  Unidentified dead bodies where the manner of death is known or suspected to be homicide.

Ø  Cases in which the offender has been arrested or identified should be submitted to the National Center to permit unsolved cases in the VICAP system to be evaluated for possible linkages with known offenders.

The recognition of patterns of murders is made by analyzing similarities or changes in MO, victimology, physical evidence, suspect description, and suspect behavior exhibited before, during, and after the crime. It is the objective of VICAP to provide all law enforcement agencies reporting similar pattern violent crimes with the information necessary to initiate a coordinated multiagency investigation so that they may expeditiously identify and apprehend the offender(s) responsible for the crimes.

Now, imagine applying the specifics of this case to a serial murder case in which there are a number of living witnesses, and victims who survive the attack but who give different descriptions of the attacker and his MO. Imagine the frustration of detectives trying to pull together a composite of the attacker, but who have no database of similar attacks in nearby or contiguous jurisdictions and have to rely only on information from within their own department. 

The handicaps they must bear in order to investigate the case prove frustrating and may ultimately paralyze their investigation, even though they may have DNA evidence as well as descriptions from witnesses and victims. Cases are not buried, but can be queried and sifted, enabling investigators to constantly review facts of cases as new information is collected.

Acknowledgements:

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

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

 

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