Former FBI Agent Explains Criminal Profiling | Tradecraft | WIRED

people often ask whether its nature or nurture that creates a serial killer well it's actually both and more I like to say that genetics loads the gun personality and psychology image and your experiences pull the trigger your genetics give you the potentiality to be killer but your personality and psychology are the filter through which you experience and they can change how you come away from any event in your life I'm Jim Clemente I'm a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and profiler in the Behavioral Analysis Unit as a profiler my job was to hunt down child

abductors serial rapists and serial killers we help out where forensics fail if we look at how the crime was committed that leads us to why the crime was committed and that leads us to who committed the crime the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit is part of the National Center for the analysis of violent crime and as such we study all violent and sexual crimes across this country and much of it around the world so that we can then train law enforcement so that they can get the benefit of our research in our training the original FBI

profilers dick all John Douglas Roy Hazelwood Robert Ressler Pete's Merrick they gain this body of knowledge by actually going into prisons and interviewing convicted serial killers they interview them in great detail about what they did and also how they grew up and how they felt during the entire time that they were killing people developing this criminal expertise and that they were getting away with these crimes for example form ed Kemper they learned that he had a very difficult relationship with his mother so he started killing surrogates in place of her and then he killed his

mother David Berkowitz showed how sexual frustration can be taken out on innocent people on the streets of New York from Ted Bundy they learned that he was a sexual sadist that he got off on causing and witnessing the pain and suffering of others but he did that many times by using his psychopathic charm to lure in victims and he feigned injury so that it was the people who wanted to help him that he ended up killing so now we have an amazing volume of institutional knowledge about these offenders and it tells us how they killed

and why they killed and it helps us to hunt them down criminal profiling is basically reverse engineering a crime we look at the victimology the choice of the victims we look at the crime scene we look at the organization level and then pre and post offense behavior and together all those things tell us the kind of person who committed the crime victimology is the study of the victim their life their desires their education their daily routine because an offender picks a particular victim at a particular place at a particular time in a particular manner for

a particular purpose and all those choices leak out information about the offender about their skills and abilities about their desires and they can lead us right back to the offender the crime location can tell us a lot did the crime occur on a farm in the middle of Iowa where the only potential witnesses are a bunch of cows and pigs or did it happen in New York City's Times Square where at any given moment there may be fifty to a hundred thousand potential eyewitnesses pulling off a crime in either of those locations tells you a

lot about the offender at the crime scene we look at the offender's behavior how much time did they spend there what was their interaction with the victims and what was their criminal sophistication level the choice of weapons that an offender uses at a crime scene reveals a tremendous amount of information about them did the offender use a gun and kill somebody from a distance or did they get up close and personal and use a knife that's different kind of person who typically is engaged in different kinds of profession than somebody who will not get up

close and personal next we look at the offenders organization level the two types of offenders that we see are on a spectrum between organized and disorganized the organized offender will plan it in advance fantasize about committing the crime and then bring all the implements necessary to commit the crime and then take them away with him after the crime whereas the disorganized offender is impulsive it don't plan the crimes out in advance they may have lowered inhibitions because of drug or alcohol use and they basically pick up the implements along the way and may leave them

behind leaving a lot of forensic evidence for law enforcement to find if an offender doesn't have a very high skill level in terms of getting access to victims they'll pick victims who lead very high-risk lives prostitutes and drug addicts whereas a very sophisticated offender will be able to acquire victims in the privacy and security of their own homes it takes a much different level of criminal sophistication to be able to accomplish those two different crimes the next level of criminal behavioral analysis is looking at pre and post offense behavior if they're organized offenders they probably

did pre offense surveillance to check out the location maybe even surveil potential victims and stalk them also we find that offenders after they commit a serious criminal offense will have behavioral changes that people around them might see for example if an offender has committed an abduction and murder they would likely leave the area making up an excuse in emergency to get out of town and they wouldn't return until everything calmed down and they felt it was safe to come back building a profile is simply taking all of those five factors and looking at what information

the offender leaks out by behaving in those particular waves [Music] when I analyze a crime scene I look at various types of evidence some of which we have here pictures inside the house where the crime occurred crime-scene photographs autopsy pictures as well as an affidavit summarizing the facts of the case and the crime scene description typically I'd like to ask a lot more questions and get much more data but I think we have enough at least now to start a preliminary profile so I'm looking at a case of a double homicide of a male and

female the male appears to be in his early 20s he was shot about five times he has an unknown relationship to the female victim who appears to have been pregnant and she was shot seven to eight times in her face and head and upper torso it also appears that the male may have scrawled in grease several letters he's found on the floor of the back room by the back door she's found in a room next to it half hanging off the bed with her head on a couch that's pushed up right next to the bed

it appears that she was first shot while she was laying on her back on the bed and that she either rolled over to try to get away or was flipped over by someone and shot again where she died in place my first impressions are that the male victim was killed first that he was a practical kill to get him out of the way whereas the female victim was shot multiple times in the chest and at least once in the face and another time in the head she appears to be the main target of this attack

so if we start with victimology we know that the first victim the male grew up in this town and had left town for several years and came back he's got no known criminal history yet in this house $11,000 in cash was found three and a half pounds marijuana was found and powdery substance that appeared to be drugs was also found that tells me that they were engaged in a high-risk activity drug trafficking but the fact that the drugs and the money were left behind tells me there's a high probability that this was not a drug-related

hit I believe that if drug dealers were involved in this they would have taken the drugs and they would have taken the cash this tells me there's a level of immaturity in this offender somebody who didn't have the presence of mind to search for these things or didn't even think that they might be there I would put the intelligence level of the offender at mid to low because they made a flimsy attempt at cleaning up after themselves and that could also mean that their inhibitions were diminished by drugs or alcohol something that's particularly unusual in

this crime scene is the letters that are scrawled on the floor apparently by the male victim with grease that was squirted onto the floor they attempt it appears to spell out a name jmf and then under that the ope sort of a last dying declaration this could indicate either a person or some kind of motive as a criminal behavioral analyst I want to determine whether this is an actual message that was left by the dying male or whether this is staging in order to misdirect investigators so I'd like to know if he had grease on

one or more of his hands or fingers and whether or not he was left-handed or right-handed and whether or not that was the hand that had the grease on it the organization leveled this crime is fairly low even though the offender brought the gun he used to commit the murders with him he left forensic evidence behind and that tells me he doesn't have a high level of forensic or criminal sophistication we look at pre and post defense behavior since it doesn't look like he's very criminally sophisticated this could be one of the only times he

committed a crime like this and I believe that he may have gone into a panic afterwards I would think that somewhere between where he committed these crimes and where he went you would find the weapon in a dumpster a body of water or a place he thought it would be hidden I would also expect somebody like that to make an excuse to either leave the area or leave town for a period of time until everything calms down so in this case I believe that how the victims were killed tells us a story I believe he

was a practical kill and she was the target of this double homicide also the fact that she was pregnant may indicate that the why was jealousy and that there was another person sort of a love triangle here and that the person responsible was the third person in this love triangle or a family member in the DC sniper case the entire Washington DC area was terrorized for 23 days a number of random people were shot and killed or injured it turns out this was a longer spree that had started in the state of Washington and spanned

the entire country so I became involved in the case because I was working the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the time and we consulted on the investigation immediately this case presented as if it were a spree killing six murders in the space of 27 hours so we didn't think he was targeting a particular type of group the victimology was completely random typically in Spri cases the offender is on the run and commits murder after murder after murder but he compensates over that time the rush of adrenaline and the excitement and the fear of getting away all

those things can cause an offender to make more mistakes as time goes on but in this case that wasn't happening the shootings themselves indicated that there was pre attack surveillance this offender planned and executed six murders within the space of 27 hours it was a ghost no one even saw him that told us right away that he had a certain level of calm cool and collected news that he was probably in his mid to late 40s and had police or military training but more than that he must have actually had experience on the streets as

a police officer or on the battlefield because pulling the trigger on a paper target is one thing but taking the life of an unknown individual is a whole nother matter so when we started the profile we based it only on statistics and statistically snipers are in their 40s or 50s white males and they have a grudge against society or somebody in particular that they take out on their victims another thing about snipers is that they have a god complex they want to take life from afar and above so they can feel omnipotent like God and

because of that it's very important to appease them not challenge them unfortunately that's not what law enforcement was doing at the time they called them in coward and they said the streets are safe and the schools are safe so the sniper shot a kid walking into school the next day but they left a tarot card the death card and on that car there was indications of duality first of all it said call me God which reinforced our opinion that the sniper had a god complex and it went on to say this is for you mister

police and that looks as though the writer is looking up to the police calling them mister police it also has its origins in a number of reggae songs so that could mean that the offender had a Caribbean influence but then it said do not release to the press and press is an older word something that older people use which is consistent with the level of sophistication of planning and executing these crimes but not consistent with looking up to the police so for the first time we had to consider whether this offender was calm cool and

collected when he plans and executes his murders but he decompensates when he's writing or for the first time in US history we have a sniper team one older in his mid 40s and one younger in his teens but the fact is that we know that because snipers have a god complex they don't work well together so i theorize that the older one was actually controlling the younger one and I went as far as saying that he may be controlling him through sexual victimization because that would give him complete control over the younger person in fact

10 years after they were caught and convicted Malvo disclosed that Mohammad had been sexually victimizing it the whole time so in the end our profile was that of two snipers working together both African American one in his mid 40s having police or military training and experienced one in his teens once we released that profile and because of other work that the FBI was doing that reinforced our profile Muhammad and Malvo were arrested within 24 hours developing the profile in the DC sniper case was groundbreaking because in the vast majority of previous sniper cases in the

United States of America they were committed by lone offenders who were white male who were in their 40s or 50s with a particular grudge and this case blew that profile to pieces as criminal behavioral analysts we look at how the offender committed the crime and determine why they committed the crime and that leads us to who committed the crime in many of these cases local law enforcement has absolutely no idea who committed the crime and no leads but criminal behavioral analysis can generate leads as to the type of person who committed the crime and in

many cases across the country criminal behavioral analysis has led to the identification arrest and conviction of the offenders [Music]