FBI profilers claims on intruder theory - debunking CASKU offender profiling

FBI Knocks Down Intruder Theory

As part of the Boulder police's investigation, they accepted an invitation from the FBI to put on a full presentation of the case to the FBI's Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit based at Quantico, Va. As Thomas recounts in his book, over 20 CASKU team members, including hair and fiber experts, attended the August 1997 briefing. Police investigators reviewed the autopsy results, and crime scene photos. In turn, CASKU agents reported that of the more than 1,700 murdered children they had studied since the 1960s, there was only one case in which the victim was a female under the age of 12, who had been murdered in her home by strangulation, with sexual assault and a ransom note present: JonBenet Ramsey. The agents told the Boulder investigators that while it might be possible that someone broke into the house that day, it was not very probable. The staging of the crime, the evidence presented to them by the Boulder police, and the totality of the case pointed in one direction: This was not the act of an intruder.

Thomas wrote that the FBI team said the crime "did not fit an act of sex or revenge or one in which money was the motivation. Taken alone, they said, each piece of evidence might be argued, but together, enough pebbles become a block of evidentiary granite."

Thomas reported that "CASKU observed that they had never seen anything like the Ramsey ransom note. Kidnapping demands are usually terse, such as 'We have your kid. A million dollars. Will call you.' From a kidnapper's point of view, the fewer words, the less police have to go on."

http://www.crimemagazine.com/murder-jonben%C3%A9t-ramsey

Now comes a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool who conclude that FBI profiling of criminals is little more than cold reading and subjective validation at work. This was apparent to many people about ten years ago when Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, was caught and the profile was matched to the man. The FBI said the Unabomber would be in his late 30's or early 40's. Kaczynski was 53 when caught. The profile was correct in predicting a white male, though this doesn't seem like a tough trait to guess. The FBI said he'd be 5'10" to 6' tall, 165 pounds, with reddish-blond hair, a thin mustache, and a ruddy complexion. Kaczynski was 5'8", weighed 143 pounds, had brown hair, pale skin, and was bearded. The profile predicted he would be a blue collar worker with a high school degree. Kaczynski hadn't had a job in 25 years and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in addition to being a graduate of Harvard University. The FBI profile predicted the Unabomber would be a meticulously organized person, reclusive and having problems dealing with women. Kaczynski was a recluse (again, not a tough call) who apparently did not deal with women at all, but he was slovenly and unkempt. The FBI profile was wrong about almost everything regarding a man they'd been tracking for years.

The Liverpool psychologists argue that profiling won't work the way the FBI does it. (FBI profiling assumes a stable relationship between configurations of offense behaviors and background characteristics, which is not supported by the research evidence.) Second, they note that the FBI claims a high degree of accuracy for the method that supposedly shouldn't work. Then, they explain the illusion of accuracy as due to subjective validation. The whole sordid story is detailed in Malcom Gladwell's recent article in the New Yorker, "Dangerous Minds - criminal profiling made easy."

According to Gladwell, the psychologists tested the FBI's profile of serial sex-offender killers, who the profilers divide into two types based on their level of organization.

First, they [the psychologists] 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 FBI 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 FBI’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.*

It also turns out that it shouldn't be surprising that the profile is bogus. It wasn't based on a representative sample. According to Gladwell, the FBI profilers who came up with the serial killer profile, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, chatted only with convicts who were in prison in California. Furthermore, they had no standardized protocol for interviewing their subjects. There are other reasons FBI profiles are bound to be inaccurate. I noted some of these in a newsletter five years ago. Even if the profilers got a representative sample of, say, serial rapists, they can never interview the ones they don't catch nor the ones they catch but don't convict. Also, it would be naive to believe that serial rapists or killers are going to be forthright and totally truthful in any interview.

FBI profiles are based on the assumption that there is a pattern where in fact there is none. The assumption is that facts about the crime will match up with facts about the criminal. The Liverpool psychologists tested this hypothesis:

http://skepdic.com/profiling.html

The Killer Didn’t Act Like An Intruder

Every item involved in killing JonBenét was found inside the house, including the pad and pen used to write the “ransom note,” the broken paintbrush, duct tape, rope and ligature used to pose the girl (police had evidence that Patsy probably purchased the latter two items from a hardware store earlier that month) and the flashlight (the likely murder weapon).

This was a pivotal fact. The question investigators kept asking was: What kind of sophisticated, highly motivated sexual predator and would-be kidnapper breaks into a house planning an abduction and rape of a young girl without bringing a single tool of the trade with him?

Then again, what kind of highly motivated sexual predator and would-be kidnapper would feel comfortable hanging around a house long enough to write a three-page ransom note after he’d just murdered a screaming child (neighbors told police they heard a scream, but no one in the house did, allegedly)? If the perpetrator had enough time to write a note at the home, he had enough time to move JonBenét’s body somewhere else.

Even more importantly, why would he stick around to write a ransom note when the prospect of deriving any money from the crime had already been lost? The only reasonable conclusion, according to an FBI report—and almost everyone agreed the ransom note was written after the murder; the perpetrator could have brought one along if he had planned a kidnapping—was that the note had been left behind in an attempt to hide the killer’s identity and motive.

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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds