http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/profiling.htm
What I Do
By John Douglas
Profiling: Fact vs. Fiction
During my first years with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (later called the Investigative Support Unit) in the late 1970's, the word "profiling" hardly existed, not in the sense that it does now.
I think it's become a familiar concept to most people these days, thanks to my books those by my former associates, television shows, movies, and other media. But a lot of people have misconceptions about profiling—either an overblown sense that we close our eyes and magically "see" the crime we're investigating as it occurred, or a restricted notion that all we do is create profiles of subjects who are unknown and at large.
Proactive Techniques: Reaching out to the Public
This is just one function we perform. As I mentioned, to see that as all we do is a limited view. In fact, toward the end of my career in the FBI, I was doing fewer and fewer of those sorts of profiles. We were doing a lot more crime scene analyses, crime reconstructions, and spending more time developing and incorporating proactive techniques for ongoing investigations.
These proactive techniques are among the most exciting advances we've made. Sometimes we'll use the amazing power of the media to get potentially identifying information, like copies of handwritten notes and descriptions of probable post-offense behavior, about the criminals we're looking for out to the public.
Somebody out there knows something about our UNSUB or about a suspect, but they may not fully realize it. They may need us to connect the dots, to present some information that will help them understand what may to that point have been no more than a funny feeling or vague suspicion they've had about their brother, boyfriend, aunt, co-worker, and so on.
In one instance, at the suggestion of Jana Monroe, an extraordinary agent in my unit, we publicized an UNSUB's handwriting by mounting a billboard campaign in Tampa Bay, Florida, the location of the 1989 murders of Joan Rogers and her two daughters, who were vacationing in the area.
We posted an excerpt from directions we knew the UNSUB had written by hand on a brochure and given to the victims, and which was found in their car. Within three days, witnesses had come forward to identify the person whose handwriting they recognized from the publicized excerpt, and they all named the same man—Oba Chandler, who was convicted of the three murders in 1994 and is now sitting on Florida's death row
ullhair:
