CASKU, FBI profilers Ressler Dupue Clemente ransom note staging vs power of the daubert side of the Forensics

A top former FBI profiler says Patricia Ramsey fits the profile of the person who wrote the ransom note in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case.

Dr. Roger Depue, who headed the FBI unit in charge of profiling, was asked at one point to examine the kidnap note and the circumstances surrounding it by Dr. Bertram Brown, a psychiatrist called in by Alex Hunter, then the district attorney in Boulder, Colo.

While Depue would not take a position on who killed the 6-year-old girl, he said the way the note was written fits the profile of JonBenet's mother, Patricia Ramsey. He gave his opinion before charges were dropped against John Mark Karr.

Depue, who wrote "Between Good and Evil: A Master Profiler's Hunt for Society's Most Violent Predators" with Susan Schindehette, said that on its face, the kidnap note makes no sense.

"It demands a ransom for the return of JonBenet, but she was already dead," Depue said. "Since her body was in the house, a kidnapper would have had to realize that she would be found before any ransom was paid. The note appears to be an effort to obfuscate why she died."

Depue said the note was apparently written on a pad of yellow paper found in the house. It was written with a black felt tip pen also found in the house.

The fact that the note was two and a half pages long "suggests that the killer was not hurrying out of fear of being caught, as one might expect," Depue said. "To kill a child and then write a note of that length suggests that either the killer was so bold that he was mentally deranged or that he was a member of the family and had no reason to be concerned. The killer even had the time to start a previous draft and discard it."

On the other hand, there is the possibility that the writer was in the house before the Ramseys came home and if so, had time to write a kidnap ransom note and practice writing the note before the crime.

The note's demand that the Ramseys withdraw $118,000.00 from their account is significant, Depue said. That amount was John Ramsey's bonus that year.

"The use of the figure shows that the writer knew Ramsey and his finances," Depue said. "Moreover, the sum is ridiculously low. Given John Ramsey's wealth, a legitimate kidnapper would have demanded at least $1 million for the return of his daughter. Even more interesting, the demand that John withdraw the money from his account suggests that the writer knew that he had that much money in a single account. Perhaps the bonus had just been deposited and not yet disbursed to investment accounts."

The note demands $100,000 in $100 bills, with the remaining $18,000 in $20 bills.

"The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested," the note says. Depue called that an unusual instruction.

"The statement sounds caring, motherly," he said. "That fits in with the relatively small amount of money demanded. The writer only wants John Ramsey's bonus, something he can part with easily.

The note warns that if the instructions are not carried out precisely, "You will also be denied her remains for proper burial." Depue said. "In my opinion, proper burial is of more concern to a female than to a male," Depue said.

"The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you so I advise you not to provoke them," the note says. The idea of "gentlemen watching over" has a feminine tone, Depue said. "Watching over" is also a caring concept, he said.

"Follow our instructions and you stand a 100 percent chance of getting her back," the note said. "You and your family are under constant scrtiny [sic] as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain John."

The phrase "don't try to grow a brain John" is familiar usage that "makes it clear that the writer knows John Ramsey intimately enough to chide him," Depue said.

"Don't underestimate us, John," the note says. "Use that good Southern common sense of yours."

That phrase is complimentary and suggests the writer is from the south, Depue said. Patsy Ramsey was born in West Virginia.

So, Depue said, "The writer knows he is from the south and again refers to him as ‘John.' This person knows John pretty damn well."

In Depue's opinion, "The writer is a well-educated, middle-age female. The writer used the term ‘fat cat,' suggesting that the person is middle age. ‘Fat cat' is a term used in the 1960s and 1970s. The writer," Depue said, "is a close relative, friend, or business associate, in that order."

Depue said that conclusion and the circumstances surrounding the note fit the profile of Patricia Ramsey.

source http://www.newsmax.com/Pre-2008/Ransom-Note-Fits-Profile/2006/08/28/id/687388/

The Court defined "scientific methodology" as the process of formulating hypotheses and then conducting experiments to prove or falsify the hypothesis, and provided a set of illustrative factors (i.e., not a "test") in determining whether these criteria are met:

Whether the theory or technique employed by the expert is generally accepted in the scientific community;
Whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication;
Whether it can be and has been tested;
Whether the known or potential rate of error is acceptable; and
Whether the research was conducted independent of the particular litigation or dependent on an intention to provide the proposed testimony.[4]

Problems

Offender profiling is not without problems or those who say it is invalid. Incorrect information from profiling can lead to false positives or false negatives. Investigators may find a suspect who appears to fit an incorrect profile and ignore or stop investigating other leads. The opposite of the false positive is the false negative: the profile yields incorrect information which would cause investigators to ignore a suspect who is actually guilty.

Some profilers such as Brent Turvey, as quoted by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker[23] have questioned its scientific validity. Many profilers and FBI agents, such as Turvey, are not psychologists, and some researchers who looked at their work found methodological flaws.

Although criminal profiling is quite popular and is often used as a tool in criminal investigations, it lacks empirical evidence to support its use. In a review by Eastwood et al. (2006), existing research on the validity of criminal profiling was analyzed, to determine whether this technique can be counted on to aid in criminal investigations. One of the studies that was noted in the review was by Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990), and involved asking different groups of people, including actual profilers, university students, police detectives, and clinical psychologists, to create a profile based on details about a particular crime. The results showed that the trained criminal profilers did not do any better than the other groups in creating an accurate profile which could predict who the culprit was. Similar results were obtained in another study, which assessed police officers, psychologists, students, psychics, and profilers on their ability to create a predictive profile. Again, results showed that profilers were not significantly better at creating a profile than any of the other groups.[24] From these results, Eastwood et al. concluded that there is no compelling evidence that criminal profilers are more capable of predicting the characteristics and traits of a criminal than those who are not trained in the field. Thus, if criminal profiling cannot be shown to be a valid instrument for narrowing down the suspect pool and potentially targeting a guilty individual, it is questionable whether it should be used in investigations and courtrooms at all.

Besides its validity, other aspects of criminal profiling are problematic as well. Snook et al. (2008) outline several problems with the practice. First, the typologies that are used in criminal profiling have not been empirically shown to be accurate in matching the behavior of criminals. The practice of criminal profiling is based on the psychological theory that underlying dispositions are what make individuals engage in criminal behavior. It is now known that this theory is flawed, but it is still a central component of profiling.

Three psychologists from the Universities of Liverpool and Hull are questioning the basic presumption that one can draw conclusions about a person from a single instance of behaviour under such special circumstances. "The notion that particular configurations of demographic features can be predicted from an assessment of particular configurations of specific behaviors occurring in short-term, highly traumatic situations seems an overly ambitious and unlikely possibility. Thus, until such inferential processes can be reliably verified, such claims should be treated with great caution in investigations and should be entirely excluded from consideration in court."[25]

Critics of the practice of offender profiling have mainly contended that few studies have produced clear, quantifiable, evidence of a link between crime scene actions (A) and offender characteristics (C), a necessary supposition of the A to C paradigm proposed by Canter (1995).[26] However, recent research by Goodwill, Lehmann, Beauregard and Andrei (2014)[27] has revealed compelling evidence of links between clusters of crime scene behaviours and offender characteristics. Goodwill et al. suggest that the failure of some previous research to find such links was based on a failure in those studies to examine offender behaviour as part of a dynamic decision-making process, or action phases of the offence. Their study an "Action Phase Approach to Offender Profiling" sought to identify and model the decision-making (action) phases of an offender based on their choice of behaviour and relate these behaviours to known characteristics of the offender.

malcolm gladwell and brent turvey wrote:
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.”

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

Jim Clemente is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent/Profiler and former Prosecutor for the New York City Law Department. He is a dynamic Public speaker who delivers Keynote Speeches, lectures, and instruction on a variety of topics across the country and around the world. During his 22-year career with the FBI, he has investigated cases from Bank Robberies to Serial Killers. He has also investigated Sex Crimes, Public Corruption, White Collar and Violent Crime and has worked as an undercover agent posing as everything from a street beggar to a Broker on Wall Street. For over a decade he was an FBI Profiler investigating serial violent and sexual crimes. He is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of Child Sexual Victimization, Sexual Homicide, and Child Abduction. Today he teaches and gives presentations around the world. He also consults on Criminal and Civil cases and does Television Commentary for multiple news and entertainment shows. He is the Technical Adviser and Free-lance Writer for Criminal Minds, Secrets & Lies, and Those Who Kill, and he Produces and is On-Air Talent for several Television productions including Killer Profile and Crime Time.