The perp may not be a SK
at this time, but hoping and assuming geographic profilers are already well into the case, imo. rbbm.
The Serial-Killer Detector
''By reading meaning into the geography of victims and their killers, Hargrove is unwittingly invoking a discipline called geographic profiling, which is exemplified in the work of Kim Rossmo, a former policeman who is now a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. In 1991, Rossmo was on a train in Japan when he came up with an equation that can be used to predict where a serial killer lives, based on factors such as where the crimes were committed and where the bodies were found. As a New York City homicide detective told me, “Serial killers tend to stick to a killing field.
They’re hunting for prey in a concentrated area, which can be defined and examined.” Usually, the hunting ground will be far enough from their homes to conceal where they live, but not so far that the landscape is unfamiliar. The farther criminals travel, the less likely they are to act, a phenomenon that criminologists call distance decay.
Rossmo has used geographic profiling to track terrorists—he studied where they lived, where they stored weapons, and the locations of the phone booths they used to make calls—and to identify places where epidemics began. He also worked with zoologists, to examine the hunting patterns of white sharks. Recently, Rossmo studied where the street artist Banksy left his early work, and found evidence to support the British
Daily Mail’s assertion, made in 2008 but never corroborated, that Banksy is a middle-aged man from Bristol, England, named Robin Gunningham.
“In a murder investigation, when you step away from the Hollywood mystique, it’s about information,” Rossmo told me. “In any serial-murder case, the police are going to have thousands and thousands, even tens of thousands, of suspects.” In the Green River case, the police had eighteen thousand names. “So where do you start? We know quite a lot about the journey to a crime.
By noting where killings took place or the bodies were discovered, you can actually create probability distributions.” In his book “Geographic Profiling,” Rossmo notes research that found, among other things, that
right-handed criminals tend to turn left when fleeing but throw away evidence to the right, and that most criminals, when hiding in buildings, stay near the outside walls.''
