I agree with what you say. You and I are on the same boat.
The issue is that when analising the behaviour of the perpetrator, LE has to start from somewhere in order to undersrand what they deal with.
Profiling, being based in statistical data of various crimes, comes handy precisely because points to the highest probability, and also narrows, where and what to search for. I worked with data all my proffessional life, large databases, sql.
Profiling is not math where 2 + 2 is always 4. You have certainly noticed that each profiler points to some nuances of perpetrators' behaviour they believe are significant and differ from the other similar crimes, based on the personal knowledge abd experience of the profiler, trying to find a logucal way when explaining unimaginable to ordinary person crime. And this is the beauty of the profiling that atrracts me.
So, to wrap the long story short: you srart with what is common between different crimes based on the information available and then you start fitting where you see the discrepances, deviations in realising to the perpetrators behaviour in relation to the crime they committed
So, your input about the old grandma from next door as long as it is based on logic and high probability is as useful as input from a profiler, they complement each other.
At the beginning of my posting about this case here, I wrote, and I still think it may be the case, that the perpetrator holds some sort of maintenance, manual or delivery (Amazon, regular food or groceries) job, a job which gave him opportunity to meet the victims and even to enter the house without being a close friend
My idea was based purely on analysing who may have access to the house legally but would be difficult to identify. I also suggested to check if there were deliveries or maintenance works in the neighbouring houses, as some of the neighbours may innocently attracted the perpetrators attention to 1122 Kings Road by complaining that there are regular parties and people go in and out of house all the time.
Yesterday, I was reading about different types of serial.killers and specialists also point out that statistically is more likely that a serial killer may hold a manual job.
What i am trying to say that when experience, logic, common sense and statistics join the forces together, profiling could be a very powerful tool helping to find and arrest the perpetrators.
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