Forensic Psychology For Dummies (54 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Can people hide how they write?
Criminals sometimes try to hide or distort how they express themselves when writing to avoid detection or a document being used in evidence against them. But trying to hide your style of writing can end up with you revealing more than you want to hide. For example, less skilled writers have difficulty imitating more sophisticated writers and the competent writer often has difficulty in hiding his own particular skill.
Once, in a murder case, I advised the prosecution that a suspect kept a detailed diary in which her visit to the victim was recorded in a very casual manner. Nearly all the other entries in the diary were recorded in careful and precise language that was very different from this particular entry, showing that she wouldn’t normally have expressed visiting the victim in the way she did. A careful analysis of the entries in the diary showed that this key entry was strikingly different, mainly because the style of the entry was so laid-back and unremarkable. What I did was a psycholinguistic analysis, informed by my broader experience as a forensic psychologist who knows something of how criminals may try to hide their activities.
The prosecution counsel drew on this evidence to shape his cross-examination but the diary was never presented directly as evidence. The suspect was convicted of the murder.
Careful reading
The forensic psychologist always has to consider carefully the
content
of a
document:
what
a person’s writing about as much as the style of writing. By careful reading of a document you can explore what’s going on in the writer’s mind as well as how they’re expressing it.
For example, a genuine suicide note often has a distinctly different psychological tone to a faked suicide note. A genuine suicide note is usually longer and more explanatory, showing clearly that the writer has internalised the decision to take their own life. The note’s purpose is to make it clear that this decision is entirely their own and that no one else is to blame.
I’ve sometimes had the job of reviewing anonymous letters, mostly ones threatening or insulting an organisation. From studying the letters I’ve even been able to tell the company the name of the person who wrote it. No, I don’t use magic, just careful reading of the document to identify its purpose, that is after ignoring all the profanities and highly-charged language. When you read of a person having been unfairly treated by the organisation, you don’t need to be blessed with second sight to work out that the person referred to in the anonymous letter is the writer himself. And you know you’ve got your man when the author gives away his identity by offering you so much personal detail that you’re left in little doubt. (Flip to Chapter 6 to see the parallels with the letters sent by the ‘Mad Bomber of New York’.)
Always bear in mind when examining a threatening letter the possibility that the person receiving the letter
is
the anonymous author, especially when details of a very personal nature are revealed.
Chapter 6
Profiling Offenders and Distinguishing the Types of Crimes They Commit
In This Chapter
Discovering the facts about ‘offender profiling’
Understanding different sorts of crimes
In Thomas Harris’s bestselling thriller,
The Silence of the Lambs
, which became a 1991 blockbuster film, Clarice Starling is a novice FBI agent trying to catch a serial killer. To help her she visits the brilliant, but disturbingly violent, Dr Hannibal Lecter in prison, in order to discover from him the likely characteristics of the serial killer. For many people, this film was their introduction to the notion of ‘offender profiling’. Dr Lecter was portrayed as having brilliant insights into the killer’s mind because, well, he was a killer himself and, umm, he was brilliant. The fun bit though is that, if you read the book carefully or look beyond the fabulous acting in the film, very cleverly Harris doesn’t have Dr Lecter give any clear indications about the serial killer that are much help to Clarice. Hannibal just gives hints and does more to psych out Clarice than ever help her catch the killer. Although it’s clear Lecter could have helped Clarice he chooses not to!
Despite Clarice’s lack of real help, the idea of FBI agents using convicted killers as sources to help them solve crimes gained a hold in the popular imagination. Along with this interest came the idea that ‘offender profilers’ were some sort of geniuses able to see into the very souls of criminals and so solve crimes where the police failed.
I like to keep the terms ‘profile’ and ‘profiling’ in quotation marks because there has been a lot of misunderstanding, drawn from fictional accounts of how psychologists could help the police. The term ‘profiling’ implies a very special process carried out by unusually clever people, ‘profilers’, but as I make clear in this chapter a lot of their contributions are much more mundane – and what’s of value to the police is the key guidance offered to an investigation instead of the number of details in a ‘profile’ or pen-picture. As I say at the start of Chapter 1, the notion of ‘profiling’ owes much more to the great granddaddy of fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, than to any real-life sleuths.
In this chapter, you will discover the facts of ‘offender profiling’; the fascinating questions that are at the heart of what psychologists offer to criminal investigations, and how the struggle to answer these questions opens up the new field of investigative psychology. Part of understanding criminals involves understanding the crimes that they commit (and how they do so), therefore investigative psychology is very much part of forensic psychology, drawing from the broader topics that I cover in the rest of this book. However, to contribute to investigations you need to be aware of how crimes and criminals differ, so in this chapter I also guide you through the different categories of crimes.
Investigating ‘Offender Profiling’
An experienced homicide detective used to say to people who asked him for a ‘profile’ of the killer, ‘Do ya want a profile or do ya want me to help you catch the bad guy?’ This statement neatly demonstrates the confusion over what a ‘profile’ is.
The popular notion is that an ‘offender profile’ gives police investigators some pointers as to where to target their investigations, describing the likely personality, lifestyle, motivations and other characteristics of an offender: in other words a sort of speculative pen-picture of the perpetrator. But although that may be fun in fiction it is not a lot of use in an investigation. What detectives need are specific directions to channel their search, or guide how they interview a suspect, not general chat about the unknown criminal’s personality or family relationships. In this section, I provide the facts on ‘offender profiling’, using a number of real-life, often famous, cases as illustration, including the one that dragged me into this whole murky area.
I suppose, if the detectives have no idea at all about where to look or who the criminal is likely to be, a pen-picture may get them started. But look at the issue this way: surely a much more useful approach is to ask, ‘Have you asked around at any local hostels where offenders recently let out of prison are staying?’ Though hardly a detailed ‘profile’ of the possible offender, this suggestion may be the only pointer the police need. Giving such advice on where to find the criminal, rather than describing the individual’s characteristics, has always been a large part of the contributions of experts in helping the police.
Because the useful guidance given to detectives by people who draw on psychological ideas is often much more direct than pen-pictures and personality profiles, many who help the police these days don’t call themselves ‘profilers’, but instead like to be called something like ‘behavioural investigative advisors’, or just ‘crime consultants’. In this guise they can advise on investigative procedures, such as checking carefully through potential suspects, or giving priority to house-to-house inquiries in particular areas (this is particularly assisted by ‘geographical offender profiling’ which I discuss in the later section ‘Locating offenders geographically’).
These advisors may have a background in forensic psychology, but will often not be the sort of qualified forensic psychologists that I describe in Chapter 18. They may even avoid the term ‘psychologist’ altogether and just call themselves ‘behavioural scientists’. Yes I know it’s getting a bit complicated, but the problem is that the term ‘offender profiler’ isn’t a legal or professional label. It has more currency in the mass media and fiction than in any professional gathering. People who want to claim they have some special powers may call themselves ‘profilers’, but that doesn’t mean they’re forensic psychologists or know much about the sorts of things I describe in all the other chapters in this book.
A very brief history of ‘offender profiling’
People have always been ready to draw on their own particular expertise to tell detectives about the criminal they’re looking for, particularly crime writers.
An early instance of someone ‘profiling’ a case was Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his dark stories of murder and mayhem. In 1850, he wrote the
Mystery of Marie Roget
,
which, although presented as a fiction set in Paris, was intended to be a contribution to the investigation of the murder of Mary Rogers in New York in 1842. From the crime scene details, Poe concluded that a gang of villains killed the hapless Mary, which contrasted with the police view that it was suicide. They didn’t take kindly to his suggestions, but as the case was never conclusively solved, it’s still anyone’s guess as to who was correct.Conan Doyle also offered ‘profiles’ on various real-life crimes troubling the police, although no indication exists that they took any notice of his advice or that it was ever much use. Yet this shows, as with Poe, that helping the police was regarded as an act of imagination rather than some scientific endeavour. This belief lingers on, adding to the general mythology that ‘profiling’ is a dark art, which owes more to the brilliance of the person producing the ‘profile’ rather than any systematic procedure.
Jack the Ripper
Perhaps the first true professional ‘offender profile’ in modern times was a report from a medical officer, Dr Thomas Bond, who carried out autopsies and advised the police on the murders that became known as the work of Jack the Ripper (killer of at least five women working as street sex workers in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888). Dr Bond offered the following opinion: