Forensic Psychology For Dummies (57 page)

Would be wearing a buttoned double-breasted suit when caught.

Despite Brussel’s rich description, it was an assiduous clerk at Consolidated Edison, Alice Kelly, who led to the bomber’s capture. She read the newspaper reports and decided to look through the company’s special files on those employees who had earlier made threats as part of their requests for compensation. This search drew attention to George Metesky who’d been injured at the factory in 1931. The correspondence in these files showed similarities of wording to the anonymous letters the bomber had been sending to the police, leading the police to him and his eventual conviction.

So, although much of what Brussel proposed about the bomber turned out to be quite accurate, it didn’t really assist the investigation. The crucial point was that the bomber was an angry ex-employee, which investigators had assumed from the beginning (derived from what the bomber had written in his letters and where he had put bombs). Brussel’s claim that Metesky had sexual desires for his mother was far less useful in finding the bomber than Alice Kelly’s diligent search through the records that contained details of employees who had openly threatened the company. In addition, most men in those days wore double-breasted suits, generally worn buttoned!

The railway murderer

This case is the one that set me on the path to writing this book, when I produced an ‘offender profile’ for a major investigation into many rapes, and three murders, that took place near railway stations, and were committed across London between 1982 and 1985.

The police claimed that they had a number of possible suspects but only one, John Frances Duffy, fitted my ‘profile’. They therefore put him under surveillance and obtained enough evidence for a conviction. The success of the ‘profile’ that helped to identify John Duffy as the offender thus opened the way to the new science of investigative psychology, which I describe in the later section ‘Delving into Investigative Psychology’.

Here’s the ‘profile’ I produced to assist the police investigation:

Lived in the area of early offences in 1983.

Arrested after October 1983 for violence, not necessarily sexual.

Lives with wife/girlfriend – childless.

Aged mid- to late 20s.

Light hair.

5 foot 9 inches tall.

Right handed.

He has an ‘A’ secretor blood type (this was in the days before DNA).

Semi-skilled.

No public contact.