How an ex-FBI profiler helped put an innocent man behind bars

[theworldismine13]

How an ex-FBI profiler helped put an innocent man behind bars
How an ex-FBI profiler helped put an innocent man behind bars

Exasperated, Jeffrey Ehrlich paused the true-crime television show every couple of minutes. The same thought kept running through the attorney’s mind: “No, that's wrong.”

The episode of “Killer Instinct” highlighted how the work of a retired FBI profiler had helped convict Ehrlich’s client of killing an 18-year-old woman in a Palmdale parking lot.

There were no fingerprints left behind, no murder weapon. But clues from the crime scene caught the profiler’s attention. The driver’s-side window of the victim’s car had been lowered several inches, suggesting to the profiler that the teen had rolled it down when someone who looked trustworthy approached. And her tube top was askew — a sign, the profiler said, of a botched sexual assault.

“No, no, no,” Ehrlich said, stopping the show again. He thought the episode — titled “Sudden Death” — needed a new name: “Here’s How We Convicted an Innocent Man of Murder.”

Years after the profiler’s testimony helped secure a murder conviction, the case against Ehrlich’s client, Raymond Lee Jennings, has unraveled in dramatic fashion.

After reinvestigating the case, authorities now suspect gang members killed Michelle O’Keefe and that the motive was robbery, not sexual assault. The profiler, Mark Safarik, has withdrawn his testimony. And a judge earlier this year declared Jennings — the security guard who patrolled the lot the night of the murder — factually innocent, putting a capstone on his legal nightmare that included 11 years behind bars.

Mark Safarik, a crime scene and behavioral analyst for Forensic Behavioral Services, gives testimony during the trial of Shadwick R. King during his trial in Illinois in 2015. (Sandy Bressner / Kane County Chronicle)
The wrongful conviction has renewed questions about the credibility of profiling and focused attention on the role played by Safarik, the star of the season-long television show “Killer Instinct,” whose testimony was considered crucial at Jennings’ trial.

In an interview with The Times, Safarik defended his analysis of the crime scene, saying he still harbors doubts about Jennings’ innocence. He agreed to withdraw his testimony, he said, after learning that homicide investigators hadn’t interviewed everyone who had been at the scene of the killing, but having the information wouldn’t have necessarily led him to a different conclusion.

In recent decades, profilers have captured the public’s imagination as the stars of a plethora of television shows and movies. In the real world, they work to help detectives predict the likely characteristics of a criminal in an unsolved case and explain to jurors how evidence left at crime scenes can reveal a killer’s motive or modus operandi.

But there is a deep chasm in legal and academic circles about how much credibility to give profilers. Many detectives credit them with helping investigations, but some researchers have criticized profiling as nothing more than glorified guesswork.

Clockwise from top left: Photo of Jennings' security guard uniform presented as evidence in court, which showed no blood or gun powder residue. Evidence photo of blood spatter that investigators found inside Michelle O’Keefe’s blue Mustang. Photo presented as evidence in court of items found inside her car, and a crime scene photo of the Mustang. (Los Angeles Superior Court)
The murder
It was 2006 and Safarik would soon retire from the FBI, but not before looking into the 6-year-old murder case of O’Keefe. The college student died after bullets tore through her head and neck as she sat in her blue Mustang in a desolate park-and-ride lot patrolled by a security guard.

Michelle O'Keefe.
Safarik spent more than a decade in Quantico, Va., studying crime scene evidence and writing offender profiles in serial killings, sexual assaults and stalking cases. In the O’Keefe investigation, Los Angeles prosecutors wanted two things from him: An assessment of crime scene evidence from the Feb. 22, 2000, shooting and an opinion on the killer’s motive.

Jennings was arrested in 2005, but the case against him was thin, based only on circumstantial evidence. No blood or gunpowder was found on his security guard uniform, and male DNA under the victim’s fingernails didn’t match his.

In a report written shortly after his retirement in 2007, Safarik stopped short of identifying Jennings as the killer but noted some of the same inconsistent statements by the security guard that had initially raised the suspicion of detectives.

Jennings, for instance, initially denied seeing any cars leave the lot after the shooting. Later, he admitted he’d spoken to a female driver who had stopped to ask him what happened as she drove away. The security guard also told investigators he saw O’Keefe’s body “twitching” when he arrived at her car several minutes after the shooting — something a forensic pathologist said was “beyond the limits of credibility.”

A prosecutor argued at trial that Jennings had lied to cover up his involvement in the crime. Two separate juries in downtown L.A. deadlocked before the case was moved to the Antelope Valley for a third and last trial.

Safarik, who testified in all three, was the prosecution’s final witness in the third. He told jurors he’d assessed or reviewed at least 4,000 crime scenes — many of them complex homicide cases — and had written numerous articles and book chapters.

“When you start to look at that many cases,” he told jurors, “you start to see patterns in behavior.”

Safarik explained to jurors how he'd eliminated several possible motives for O’Keefe’s murder.

(Los Angeles County Superior Court)
He stressed there was no history of gang crime in the lot and said it didn’t appear to be a targeted personal attack, noting that O’Keefe didn't have a boyfriend or a criminal record. Robbery didn't make sense, he said, noting that O’Keefe’s wallet containing more than $100 was left in her car, and that her blue Mustang wasn’t taken. And, the parking lot was lighted and patrolled by a guard.

The blood spatter at the scene, he told jurors, showed that the killer had first confronted O’Keefe as she stood outside her car. Her tube top was pulled down, he noted, partially exposing her breasts.

“I believe that the motive for this crime was sexual assault,” Safarik said. “It went bad quickly and it escalated into a homicide.”

The prosecutor argued that Safarik’s testimony explained a clear motive for Jennings to kill O’Keefe: He panicked after attempting to sexually assault her.

During deliberations, jurors asked to be read back Safarik’s testimony. After more than three weeks, the jury convicted Jennings of second-degree murder.

At his sentencing hearing in 2010, Jennings — who always maintained his innocence — was given 40 years to life in prison.

“This is one sin,” he told the court, “that I will not be judged for.”

Raymond Lee Jennings, right, attends a hearing in Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Inside the mind of a killer
The idea of trying to get inside a killer’s mind stretches back centuries, but the modern popularity of profiling began in the 1970s with the creation of an FBI team now known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The unit’s agents — officially called behavioral analysts — are trained to predict the personality traits and actions of an offender during an investigation by drawing on research of past cases and interviews with violent criminals.

There is very little scientific research testing the reliability of profiling, and the few existing studies have led to sharp disagreements over whether profilers can better predict the characteristics of criminals than nonprofilers.

Still, the public holds an outsized view of what profilers can do, said David Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University in England who has written critically about profiling. Due in large part to shows such as “CSI” and “Criminal Minds,” as well as the film “Silence of the Lambs,” the public often views profilers as omniscient Sherlock Holmes-esque experts who can quickly identify a killer and decipher the motive, he said.

“We want to believe in that Holmesian figure that can turn up and magically solve the crime,” Wilson said.

California’s courts generally don’t allow testimony comparing a defendant to the characteristics of a “typical” criminal out of fear that such a profile could easily include innocent people. Judges do, however, often allow profilers to testify about crime scene evidence and what it reveals about possible motives, modus operandi or links to similar crimes by a common perpetrator.

 

[theworldismine13]

We want to believe in that [Sherlock] Holmesian figure that can turn up and magically solve the crime.

— David Wilson, a criminology professor at Birmingham City University, on the public's fascination with profilers

Edward J. Imwinkelried, a professor emeritus at UC Davis who co-wrote the annotated California Evidence Code, said he finds nothing inherently wrong with Safarik’s method of drawing conclusions about motive from clues at the crime scene. But he said jurors shouldn’t give it the same weight as expert testimony that relies on theories supported by scientific tests, such as blood spatter.

“There’s an element of uncertainty,” Imwinkelried said.

Profilers can help detectives narrow a list of suspects during an investigation, but relying on their conclusions at a criminal trial carries a significant risk if they’re wrong, said Simon Cole, who teaches criminology, law and society at UC Irvine and directs the National Registry of Exonerations.

Cole reviewed Safarik’s testimony at Jennings’ trial for The Times and said the prosecution had used expert testimony to vouch for investigators’ theory about the crime.

“I was a little appalled,” he said. “It was police work in the guise of an expert witness.”

The February 2000 killing of Michelle O'Keefe shook the Antelope Valley community where she lived. (Beatrice de Gea / Los Angeles Times)
‘Killer Instinct’
A panel of state appeals justices upheld Jennings’ conviction in 2011, ruling that the trial judge wasn't wrong to allow Safarik to take the stand — in fact, they wrote, his testimony may have been crucial.

“Without it,” they wrote, “there was no evidence from which the jury might infer the motive.”

About a month before the ruling, the “Killer Instinct” episode about O’Keefe’s death debuted on the crime-drama channel Cloo.

“I analyze crime scenes from a unique perspective — inside the mind of the killer,” Safarik tells the audience at the start of each of the 13 episodes, which all focus on a case Safarik worked.

The episode about O’Keefe includes actual footage of a sheriff’s detective confronting Jennings in hopes of getting a confession. Jennings wipes his hand over his brow — a small gesture that Safarik assigns great weight.

“This is what poker players and profilers call ‘a tell,’ ” Safarik says. “So far he’s been bluffing, but Jennings’ body language here says, ‘I’m guilty.’ ”

Toward the end of the episode, jarring piano music pulses in the background as Safarik offers a monologue about Jennings.

“Like other killers I’ve known, he’s also arrogant and narcissistic — fatal traits that led to his demise,” Safarik says. “This was all his doing…. Ultimately, he was responsible for it.”

Attorney Jeffrey Ehrlich, right, said his client's wrongful conviction was based on speculation by criminal profiler Mark Safarik. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
‘Wild, illogical speculation’
Ehrlich watched the show in frustration. Safarik, he said, was relying on “wild, illogical speculation.”

The lawyer hired another profiler, Peter Klismet Jr., to review Safarik’s assessment. In a report later cited by the judge who declared Jennings factually innocent, Klismet sharply criticized Safarik’s conclusions, saying many of his findings were not supported by “accepted principles of criminal profiling.” The crime, Klismet said, had all the signs of a robbery committed by a young offender, who kills the victim and then flees.

The car’s glove compartment was found open and O’Keefe’s cellphone was missing, he said. The killer, Klismet concluded, hadn’t seen her wallet because it was wedged between the seat and the center console.

As for her slightly lowered tube top, Klismet suggests many possible explanations. Perhaps she was in the process of changing into new clothes, as she was headed to a night college class, he said, or maybe her top slid down as she lifted her hands in defense after seeing a gun.

The lack of scratch marks on her chest, he said, suggested an attacker didn’t pull down her top. He argued that Safarik ignored evidence that contradicted his theory and based his assumption almost entirely on the position of O’Keefe’s tube top. The authorities homed in on Jennings as a suspect, Klismet said, and then worked backward and “made the facts fit.”

Ehrlich reached out to Safarik directly, saying there were serious concerns with the case and urging him to reconsider his assessment.

“Ray Jennings is going to be exonerated,” he wrote in an email. “It’s going to be a hell of a story. When that story is told, what will be your role?”

Michael O'Keefe, the father of victim Michelle O Keefe, appeared during of one of Jennings' court hearings. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
New evidence
At Ehrlich’s urging, the district attorney’s conviction review unit began reexamining the case. By June 2016, prosecutors were convinced someone other than Jennings killed O’Keefe and asked a judge to release him from prison.

In a letter to the court, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. John Spillane explained that the woman who spoke to Jennings in the parking lot soon after the shooting was a 17-year-old gang member who is serving a five-year prison sentence for stabbing her boyfriend.

And an 18-year-old gang member, who was in her car that night, was suspected of taking part in a series of robberies and carjackings. He was arrested four months after O’Keefe’s death for a home invasion robbery that included the theft of a white Mustang, the letter said. A 9 mm handgun was used in the crime — the same type used to kill O’Keefe, Spillane wrote.

Read about the new evidence in the murder of Michelle O'Keefe »

At the time of the arrest, the letter said, the man was wearing a single, yellow metal earring with a white stone. O’Keefe was wearing similar earrings at the time of her death, and authorities believe that one might have been missing. The original homicide detectives never interviewed the man, who was sentenced in the home invasion robbery to 31 years in prison, the letter said.

Jennings, the letter said, had no criminal record, had served with the National Guard in Iraq and was helping a friend distribute Christian music around the time of the murder.

After learning of Jennings’ release, Safarik emailed Ehrlich, saying “if he is in fact innocent then that is a good thing.”

Raymond Lee Jennings holds his prison identification card. Now a free man, he spent 11 years behind bars for murder before the case against him unraveled in dramatic fashion. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Two months later, Safarik withdrew his analysis, telling the court that he had relied on information from an incomplete investigation by L.A. County sheriff’s detectives. Had he known about its shortcomings, he wrote, “I would not have been able to formulate a reliable opinion.”

A totality of things
Nevertheless, in an interview with The Times, he said he still doubts Jennings’ innocence and believes the evidence supports his original theory of a sexual assault motive.

“I think it makes sense as I look at everything together,” said Safarik, who now works in private practice as a consultant.

Safarik vociferously denied having worked backward toward a conclusion or assigning too much weight to the positioning of O’Keefe’s tube top. It was the totality of things, he said, that shaped his finding.

For one, Safarik noted, even though it was cold outside at the time of her killing, the window of O’Keefe’s Mustang had been lowered about four inches. Jennings, dressed in uniform, would’ve looked trustworthy, he said. A gang member with a handgun would not.

Mark Safarik, who is pictured here testifying in another case, withdrew his testimony in the murder case against Raymond Lee Jennings but defends his analysis. (Sandy Bressner / Kane County Chronicle)
Safarik said he considered the step of thoroughly investigating everyone at the crime scene so obvious — “Investigation 101,” he called it — that he assumed it had happened. Sheriff’s Det. Richard Longshore, the lead investigator on the case, died in 2013.

Safarik also stressed that he re-created the crime scene and found that Jennings, who said that he hadn’t seen the shooting, should’ve been able to see the killer from where he said he had been standing in the parking lot.

“Jennings has a lot of problems that were never explained and are still very, very problematic,” he said.

After his release last year, Jennings spent time reconnecting with his five children and began to look for work. On June 23 — the anniversary of his release from custody — he exchanged wedding vows with Kim, “my twin flame,” as he calls her. They bought a home together in North Carolina, Jennings said, and both plan to work in real estate.

Asked about Safarik, Jennings said he still remembers the wave of nausea that washed over him as he listened to the profiler testify at trial about attempted sexual assault. Jennings wondered, at times, if he might vomit and he kept his eyes on the jurors.

He wanted desperately to tell them that it wasn’t true, he said, and that it wasn’t in his nature to make an unwanted advance on a woman. As Safarik spoke, Jennings said he felt angry and hurt. He now views profilers with suspicion.

“How things may have happened,” he said, “doesn’t mean it’s how they did happen.”

After 11 years behind bars, Raymond Lee Jennings is a free man. He has gotten married and plans to work in real estate. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

 

[Pressure]

Cops

 

[hashmander]

pigs gonna pig.

 

[Strapped]

A black us attorney put a stop to this bogus attempt on setting up these to chinese nationals

 

[HE_Pennypacker]

Justice system is rife with pseudoscience being believed ahead of actual science.

This lunatic Sessions and his dismantling of the National Commission on Forensic Science says it all. It was telling that all the District Attorneys are so opposed to scrutiny of these things - they know they're weak and unreliable.

 

[TELL ME YA CHEESIN FAM?]

I hope they paid that man millions for all the time he did

 

[Professor Emeritus]

"Hair analysis" - turns out to be pseudoscience

"Fire investigator" - turns out to be pseudoscience

"Lie detectors" - turns out to be pseudoscience

"Psychics" - okay, everyone knew this was b.s., but they used them anyway

"Profilers" - yep, more pseudoscience


The amount of bogus pseudoscience crap in the justice system is unbelievable.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The Difficulties of Criminal Profiling

On the surface, the F.B.I.’s system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in the profiling literature. The body of a twenty-six-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her Bronx apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after she left her house for work, at six-thirty in the morning. She had been beaten beyond recognition, and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, chopped off her nipples, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, masturbated, and then defecated next to the body.

Let’s pretend that we’re an F.B.I. profiler. First question: race. The victim is white, so let’s call the offender white. Let’s say he’s in his mid-twenties to early thirties, which is when the thirty-six men in the F.B.I.’s sample started killing. Is the crime organized or disorganized? Disorganized, clearly. It’s on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight—high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning? He could be some kind of serviceman, or he could live in the neighborhood. Either way, he appears to be familiar with the building. He’s disorganized, though, so he’s not stable. If he is employed, it’s blue-collar work, at best. He probably has a prior offense, having to do with violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he’s probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem. How does that sound? As it turns out, it’s spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age thirty, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when he was not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the fourth floor of the building where the murder took place.

But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you’re looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don’t really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor.

That’s why the F.B.I.’s profilers have always tried to supplement the basic outlines of the organized/disorganized system with telling details—something that lets the police zero in on a suspect. In the early eighties, Douglas gave a presentation to a roomful of police officers and F.B.I. agents in Marin County about the Trailside Killer, who was murdering female hikers in the hills north of San Francisco. In Douglas’s view, the killer was a classic “disorganized” offender—a blitz attacker, white, early to mid-thirties, blue collar, probably with “a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals.” Then he went back to how asocial the killer seemed. Why did all the killings take place in heavily wooded areas, miles from the road? Douglas reasoned that the killer required such seclusion because he had some condition that he was deeply self-conscious about. Was it something physical, like a missing limb? But then how could he hike miles into the woods and physically overpower his victims? Finally, it came to him: “ ‘Another thing,’ I added after a pregnant pause, ‘the killer will have a speech impediment.’ ”

And so he did. Now, that’s a useful detail. Or is it? Douglas then tells us that he pegged the offender’s age as early thirties, and he turned out to be fifty. Detectives use profiles to narrow down the range of suspects. It doesn’t do any good to get a specific detail right if you get general details wrong.

In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the F.B.I. profile described the offender as a white male blue-collar worker, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, who “wants to be seen as someone who is attractive and appealing to women.” The profile went on, “However, his level of sophistication in interacting with women, especially women who are above him in the social strata, is low. Any contact he has had with women he has found attractive would be described by these women as ‘awkward.’ ” The F.B.I. was right about the killer being a blue-collar male between twenty-five and thirty-five. But Lee turned out to be charming and outgoing, the sort to put on a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots and head for the bars. He was an extrovert with a number of girlfriends and a reputation as a ladies’ man. And he wasn’t white. He was black.

A profile isn’t a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It’s a portrait, and all the details have to cohere in some way if the image is to be helpful. In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent, which makes sense if you consider the position of the detective on the receiving end of a profiler’s list of conjectures. Do you believe the stuttering part? Or do you believe the thirty-year-old part? Or do you throw up your hands in frustration?

There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.”

Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly.

“The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach, says. “You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.”

 

[Professor Emeritus]

A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

“Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the “Vanishing Negative.”

No, I don’t.

“No, I thought not. That’s not really your role.”

Of course, if the subject answers differently, there’s another way to play the question: “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?”

I do, actually, part time.

“Yes, I thought so.”

After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board, and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What’s more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the F.B.I.’s profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender.

James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.”

The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.

“Here’s where I’m at with this guy,” Douglas said, kicking off the profiling session with which “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. It was 1984. The killer was still at large. Douglas, Hazelwood, and Walker and the two detectives from Wichita were all seated around the oak table. Douglas took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid-to-late twenties,” Douglas began. “It’s now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late thirties.”

It was Walker’s turn: BTK had never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggested to him someone with an “inadequate, immature sexual history.” He would have a “lone-wolf type of personality. But he’s not alone because he’s shunned by others—it’s because he chooses to be alone. . . . He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he’d feel very inadequate with a peer-group female.” Hazelwood was next. BTK would be “heavily into masturbation.” He went on, “Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.”

Douglas followed his lead. “The women he’s been with are either many years younger, very naïve, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” he ventured. What’s more, the profilers determined, BTK would drive a “decent” automobile, but it would be “nondescript.”

At this point, the insights began piling on. Douglas said he’d been thinking that BTK was married. But now maybe he was thinking he was divorced. He speculated that BTK was lower middle class, probably living in a rental. Walker felt BTK was in a “lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar.” Hazelwood saw him as “middle class” and “articulate.” The consensus was that his I.Q. was somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wondered whether he was connected with the military. Hazelwood called him a “now” person, who needed “instant gratification.”

Walker said that those who knew him “might say they remember him, but didn’t really know much about him.” Douglas then had a flash—“It was a sense, almost a knowing”—and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing some sort of uniform. . . . This guy isn’t mental. But he is crazy like a fox.”

They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.

“This thing is solvable,” Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up and put on his jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance.” You can imagine him taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. “You’re gonna nail this guy.”

 

[re'up]

I've read John Douglas' books since I was 14, I think in a 40 year career spanning hundreds of cases, he's going to be off, wrong, maybe even excessively, or embarrassingly so. His work has helped solve dozens, if not hundreds of killings. He's legit, that New Yorker article is too, but it doesn't cancel out his skill, or career. I can see a killing in the news, follow the story, get the details, and profile the killer to degree of accuracy, that even surprises me sometimes. I learned it all from the books he's written.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I've read John Douglas' books since I was 14, I think in a 40 year career spanning hundreds of cases, he's going to be off, wrong, maybe even excessively, or embarrassingly so. His work has helped solve dozens, if not hundreds of killings. He's legit, that New Yorker article is too, but it doesn't cancel out his skill, or career. I can see a killing in the news, follow the story, get the details, and profile the killer to degree of accuracy, that even surprises me sometimes. I learned it all from the books he's written.

They sell themselves really well. And the community of fans, the ones who want profiling to be true (even within the LE community) are going to be far larger than the community of skeptics, because it's more natural to stan a brilliant charismatic crime-fighting tool than to poke holes in it.

But it's a sales act. It's no different than the sales acts that psychics and horoscope readers and magicians and the others do to sell themselves.

There's no way to know how many killings Douglas's work helped solve. How often does he take credit for pointing the cops towards someone who was already a suspect anyway? How often would they have found the suspect anyway? On the other hand, how often did he distract them from the actual suspect? What if Douglas's advice helped solve two cases, but kept two other cases from being solved because the cops believed him and it pointed them in the WRONG direction?

You have no clue, and Douglas's books definitely won't give you the answers. Even when you guess yourself, you're gonna remember the ones you got right, and quickly forget the ones you missed on. It's human nature - and THAT is a true psychological fact proved in study after study.

The only way to really know if they helped is to do a careful study. And like the Gladwell article points out, in the British study the profiler's advice only helped in 5 cases out of nearly 200. And that doesn't even factor in how many other cases the advice might have hurt in.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Take the Brussel story. I just randomly looked up a version of the story and got something from the American Psychological Association:

For 16 years, "mad bomber" George Metesky eluded New York City police. Metesky planted more than 30 small bombs around the city between 1940 and 1956, hitting movie theaters, phone booths and other public areas.

In 1956, the frustrated investigators asked psychiatrist James Brussel, New York State's assistant commissioner of mental hygiene, to study crime scene photos and notes from the bomber. Brussel came up with a detailed description of the suspect: He would be unmarried, foreign, self-educated, in his 50s, living in Connecticut, paranoid and with a vendetta against Con Edison--the first bomb had targeted the power company's 67th street headquarters.

While some of Brussel's predictions were simply common sense, others were based on psychological ideas. For instance, he said that because paranoia tends to peak around age 35, the bomber, 16 years after his first bomb, would now be in his 50s. The profile proved dead on: It led police right to Metesky, who was arrested in January 1957 and confessed immediately.

Sounds great, right? But that version of the story is bullshyt.

* Metesky wasn't "foreign", he was born in Connecticut.

* Brussel didn't say Metesky would be "foreign", he said he was "born and educated in Germany" - which was wrong. He was Slavic, born and educated in America. So after the fact it gets switched up to "foreign" to make it sound like he had nailed something he hadn't nailed.

* Brussel didn't say that Metesky would be "in Connecticut", he specifically said White Plains, so they searched all over Westchester County, where he had never lived. Again, after the fact it gets broadened to make it sound like it was a hit when it was a miss.

* Brussel didn't say that Metesky would be "in his 50s", he said 40-50...and turned out to be wrong. More post-incident fact massaging.

* No mention of the wrong prediction that the bomber had a facial scar

* No mention of the wrong prediction that the bomber had a night job

* Saying that the bomber had a vendetta against Con Edison had NOTHING to do with psychology - the bomber had left a note saying: "I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE – THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS..." That was one of at least four anti-Con Edison notes he left, along with multiple bombs sent to their headquarters. A 1st-grader can figure that one out.

* Unmarried and paranoid he got right...but that's common sense. The bomber was writing crazy paranoid notes, and it's pretty unlikely that a crazy person making bombs in their house for fifteen years is going to be married.

* "The profile proved dead on: It led police right to Metesky." That's the biggest lie of the whole thing.

The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.

Alice Kelly was going through Con Edison's personnel files because the bomber had bombed Con Edison and the bomber specifically said that he was out to seek vengeance against Con Edison. Alice Kelly narrowed it down to George Metesky because he had a complaint, the company hadn't addressed the complaint, there had been a long ugly fight with lots of angry letters, and she found a threat in George Metesky's letters that was exactly the same as a Mad Bomber threat.

Nothing to do with the profiler, and yet this is remembered as the classic, "Look what the profiler solved!" case.

Like Gladwell says, it's not that these profilers understand criminals so amazingly well that they can solve crimes. It's that they understand their target (their fans in LE) so amazingly well that they can manipulate them to all ends.

 

[re'up]

They sell themselves really well. And the community of fans, the ones who want profiling to be true (even within the LE community) are going to be far larger than the community of skeptics, because it's more natural to stan a brilliant charismatic crime-fighting tool than to poke holes in it.

But it's a sales act. It's no different than the sales acts that psychics and horoscope readers and magicians and the others do to sell themselves.

There's no way to know how many killings Douglas's work helped solve. How often does he take credit for pointing the cops towards someone who was already a suspect anyway? How often would they have found the suspect anyway? On the other hand, how often did he distract them from the actual suspect? What if Douglas's advice helped solve two cases, but kept two other cases from being solved because the cops believed him and it pointed them in the WRONG direction?

You have no clue, and Douglas's books definitely won't give you the answers. Even when you guess yourself, you're gonna remember the ones you got right, and quickly forget the ones you missed on. It's human nature - and THAT is a true psychological fact proved in study after study.

The only way to really know if they helped is to do a careful study. And like the Gladwell article points out, in the British study the profiler's advice only helped in 5 cases out of nearly 200. And that doesn't even factor in how many other cases the advice might have hurt in.

The little bit about me is more for just a novelty, but I really think it's absurd to dismiss the entire "science" without reading the books, or even more then a basic understanding of what profiling is, from articles that have their own slant, which isn't to be totally discounted. I mean, he's not a guy living in his van calling himself an expert, he's retired now, I believe, but he was an FBI agent for most of his life, he worked the biggest and more high profile, complex cases for decades. I think for sure he has a bit of an ego, but having read like 5 of his books, and following profiling, it's definitely not bullshyt.

These articles are taking examples where mistakes are made, and framing their entire argument around it, which is another inaccurate way to understand and view issues. He basically developed the groundwork and frame for tracking and solving "lust murders", sexually violent killings and rapes. That "Mad Bomber" case also took place in the 1950's. It's not as if these suspects are convicted and sentenced solely based on the profilers word, or work. It's basically reading a crime scene, and creating an idea of what the killer is like. It's not meant to be perfect or magic, it's simply another tool used to pursue the suspect.

It's not sales, that's a baseless accusation, it's based all on evidence, and interpreting that evidence.