Peter, I respectfully disagree.
That's fine and your good right
You subscribe to a theory that I don't. You believe that the crime scenes allow you to classify two different killers, one disorganized and the other organized. Your take on Manorville versus GB4 crime scenes leads you to the conclusion that the important burlap connection that I've identified is not important since you believe strongly that there are two killers.
That's not true. In fact, I profiled both of them, LISK and Manorville as medium to high organized. And I considered the burlap wrapping always as important in the cases, where it actually happened. I consider it not important for those cases which include no burlap wrapping and at the same time a significant different signature and a completely different timeline.
Your theory is based on underlying work done by F.B.I.'s Douglas and Ressler.
And Harbort, Hazelwood, Keppler, my own studies of lots of cases. So to say, my work would be exclusively based on Douglas and Ressler is just touching about 5% of the whole.
Note:
"There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didnt 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 isnt a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.
Which would be relevant if organization would be the only criteria. Which it isn't. And even if it would be relevant, you mix up here tool and interpretation. There is no question, that SKs have different levels of organization, it's the question how to categorize this and how to interpret this. Harbort for example uses four categories, I use in many cases just a percentage scale.
The misunderstanding is, that a bunch of psychologists doing studies are busy on a rather theoretical level, while the main interest of Ressler, Douglas, Hazelwood, Keppler, and so on and so on, are on catching SKs. So it's nice to develop methods, who can give you a very accurate picture about the connections between IQ, social organization and general organizational level of an SK after you have him and can make him fill out test forms. But it will only work AFTER you get him.
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 victims belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.
Which would be already the first mistake. Because one sign alone isn't relevant, it's the summary of symptoms used in profiling. If you have someone, who used a weapon on convenience but brought his burglary tools to enter the house, what did you get? The answer will depend on who you ask:
The theoretical shrink: "All you criteria are wrong, you can'T conclude anything"
The profiling critic: "Profiling is all bull****"
The profiler (provided, he is good enough in his job): "So he brought burglary tools, means, the entry was premeditated, but not a weapon, means the killing wasn't planned originally" and then he goes and need many more details to confirm or dismiss what he sees from the first little details"
Which is essentially the reason, why profilers are currently the only ones who ever caught SKs with investigative measures. All the critics relied on accidents in the one or other form (either catching an SK without plate or while speeding or parking too near to a hydrant or hoping, an SK gets caught in the act by accident and his DNA pops up in the database). So, from a pure mathematical and therefore scientific point of view, the opinion of critics with a zero percent success quota tends in general to be irrelevant.
If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should co-occurthat 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 couldnt find any support for the F.B.I.s distinction. Crimes dont fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that theyre 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 Psychologists Casebook, told me, The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.
Here's the source article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1
I agree with Laurence Allison in so far, that the matter is is far more complex than just a digital decision between organized and not-organized. But then, the idea that SKs are organized or not organized and nothing in between is an idea, that is most of the time only carried by the critics of profiling per se (and unfortunately lately also the FBI, which maybe also is one of the reasons their success quota has reached the basement and is still headed straight downwards).
As Allison correctly points out, there is always a mix. But it's a mix of three components:
- clear signs of higher organization
- signs without relevance for the organization
- sings for a lack of organization
The problem is, in the process of "formalizing" profiling, the FBI made without doubt mistakes. Lets take just one example. They placed "beating" as secondary symptom on the list of signs for lack of organization. I admittedly never got why. It makes no sense because it doesn't show anything about the degree of organization, it shows more about the killer's emotional setup. That is like one using a hammer to drive a nail in the wall, missing the nail and the other guy blaming the hammer.
So while the concept of "organization" is right, the wrong formalized procedures of the FBI have hampered the success. That's all. It happens if an organization like the FBI is more interested in formalizing to get an accord with scientific formalizing than in honing the tools correctly.
On a personal side note: I hope, one day, I can put all those files, I have here on paper, in a database. Some friends are already about to help me there, so there is hope. It would make it so much easier to show instead of explain.
