From Right to Left it Had No End: Meat-and-Potatoes Police Work!

 

While some aspects of police work have been studied in depth — for example, police decision making in connection with an arrest — very little is known about the way in which detectives work toward identifying suspects in serial murder investigations. In order for the classification of serial murderers to be more than educated guess work, conclusions must be based on empirical research of consistencies in criminal behavior, and the relationship of those actions to aspects of an offender that are available to the police in an investigation.

 

A serial murder, whether committed for sexual sadistic purposes or revenge, is just a label for what is, in fact, quite complex behavior. However, this label tells us little about the individual who carries out that behavior. For example, current models of serial murderers are embedded with demographic statistics, offender self-reports, and offense descriptions mixed in an intuitive manner to create groups that conform to the researchers’ preconceptions. Another drawback to such serial murder typologies is that they tend to put the sexual serial murderer in the same classification as killers who act on emotional impulses by suggesting that sadistic sex is the dominant focus in all serial murders. In reality, though, is it not clear how to decide which type a particular serial murderer is.

 

 The non-metric multivariate statistical analysis procedure, Smallest Space Analysis (SSA), is used to analyze a certain amount of victims. The SSA results supported a four-theme classification model, reflecting offenders’ modes of interaction with their victims. The present study has a number of practical consequences for police investigations, and if replicated with other data sets could form the basis of a powerful investigative support tool for building a computerized linking system. Since its emergence, several terms have been used to describe the technique of offender profiling — for example, psychological profiling, criminal profiling, criminal personality profiling, and criminal investigative analysis. However, despite the descriptive label applied, profiling as an investigative tool today represents a less than educated attempt to provide law enforcement agencies with detailed information about the behavior of an unknown individual who has committed a crime. 

 

In the past decade, social scientists have turned their attention to profiling serial murderers by grouping their crime scene actions into theoretical categories. Yet despite the significant loss of life and the cost of extended police investigations, an empirical examination of the crime scene behaviour of serial murderers has never been carried out. A few anecdotal illustrations have been recorded by retired agents from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit in their memoires, acknowledging that the interaction between offender and victim is an important factor in serial murder investigations; however, these have not been related to any empirical studies testing hypotheses. As a consequence, a fuller understanding of serial murderers’ behavior has academic merit and will facilitate more effective law enforcement. Profiling serial murderers should proceed on the assumption that to understand crimes of this nature, we need to consider psychological issues relevant to behavior in general — for example, the offender’s perception and interpretation of his actions and their likely consequences, and the emotional framework within which the person operates. Crime scene behavior, like any other behavior, is a function of the whole personality of the individual. Human behavior does not take place in a vacuum, but occurs in a concreto social situation. Hence, the specific circumstances of a set of actions between offender and victim need to be understood in order to give a useful account of any related behavior.

 

The crime scene presents a large amount of information about the perpetrator’s actions. In order for the classification and linking of serial murderers’ offenses to be more than educated guesswork, conclusions must be based on empirical research of consistencies in criminal behavior and the relationship of those actions to aspects of an offender that are available to the police in an investigation. Therefore, a model of any violent crime, especially that of serial murder, should be built on the central hypothesis that offenders differ in their actions when committing crimes and that these differences reflect different interactions between the offender and victim. However, most published literature on variations in serial murderers’ behaviors have neglected victim/offender interpersonal actions that occur during a crime. Rather, research has tended to combine accounts of crime scene actions with explanations of motivations, intentions, personality attributes, and other inferred offender characteristics. 

 

 

The theoretical model divides serial murderers into two types according to the interplay of aggression and sex. The first serial murderer type is one who struggles against his impulses. Ressler and his colleagues suggest that his crimes are disorganized, and he often leaves his crime scenes in disarray. His driving motive is sexual gratification. The disorganized serial murderer has an aggressive aim — a displaced anger murderer. In this type, sexual and aggressive impulses are not well differentiated and feed off each other. The second serial murderer type is labeled a sociopath. Ressler and his colleagues point out that this type of killer is driven by sadistic sexual urges, seeking to humiliate his victims. The offender’s actions are organized; that is, the crimes have been planned to a degree, and the offender rarely leaves forensic clues at the crime scene. These offenders are often referred to as lust murderers. Other research also points out that sex is an integral part of the serial murderer’s attack. Conversely, some researchers argue that it is not aggression and sex that drive the serial murderer, but rather power and control. Groth and his colleagues suggest that sex in the crime of serial murder is pseudo-sexual, not a true sexual act. Originally developed as a clinical model for rape, the Groth model has been theoretically related to serial murderers by Keppel and Walter. Keppel and Walter point out that the serial murderer has inherent doubts about his general adequacy, including sexual adequacy, and seeks to control victims through intimidation. To alleviate these feelings of sexual inadequacy the offender seeks revenge on women for wrongs believed to have been done to him in the past. Other studies, also from a clinical perspective, attempt to classify serial murderers based on the degree of sadism in the crime. However, clinical approaches make little distinction between overt crime scene behavior as it occurs in an offense and the psycho-dynamic processes that produce that behavior. Hence, there is little attempt to differentiate aspects of the offender’s motivations and life-style from aspects of his offending behavior.

 

The classification model of serial murder does not carry direct implications for the internal dynamics of the offenders. Rather, it attempts to derive inferences about the crime scene behavior of serial murderers from the details of the way their crimes were committed. The propos is that more objective accounts of what really happens in the course of a serial murder will relate in part to the link between the offender and the victim. of the material available in police records. The basis for developing a classification system of serial murder was the fact that variables derived from a crime scene will not have random interrelationships, but rather would reveal grouping of offenses with consistently related actions. Deriving groups of consistently related crime scene actions is important from the perspective of building a crime linking system. Empirically determining the salient behaviors of serial murderers can assist police investigators in prioritizing suspects and linking crimes. There are a number of ways in which associations between crime scene behaviors of serial murderers can be established. The framework adopted in this study is characterized as a psycho-social behavioral approach, in which the offenders’ interactions with their victims will tell us how they carry out their crimes, and subsequently how consistent they are from one offense to another. Crime scene actions that show associations between offenses will help classify behavior into common themes. Implicit is the need to identify those behavioral traces at a crime scene which can be used as variables for this research. Such traces of behavior may be seen as discrete acts, which constitute one element within a series of actions which combine to form an underlying structure to a crime scene.

 

The central task is to establish whether there were any interpretable themes within the co-occurrence of the actions across all the serial murder cases. In order to represent the relationship of every variable to every other variable, the data will be subjected to Smallest Space Analysis (SSA-I), one of a series of non-metric multidimensional scaling procedures. Smallest space analysis (SSA) is a multidimensional scaling technique that finds the best fit within a specified dimensionality between a matrix of association and a geometric representation of those associations as distances in a Cartesian space (i.e., the axes have no external reference). The advantage of SSA over other algorithms lies in its robustness and rational step-size.

 

 

Acknowledgements:

www.aivd.nl    AIVD ©

Algemene Bestuursdienst – @Erik Akerboom ©

www.politie.nl  Politiekorpschef  @Janny Knol©

www.politie.nl WEB Politie - @Henk van Essen©

https://english.marechaussee.nl  Royal Netherlands Marechaussee    @Willem-Alexander King of the Netherlands©

PolitieAcademie - https://www.politieacademie.nl/en©

Author: W.R. Łaskawiec ©

 

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