FBI BSU Profiling Books
Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs was a work of fiction and a big, fat lie. FBI profiling does not stop serial killers. These two books show why.
Novels and television series idolize FBI profilers as semi-psychic scientists who can outwit serial killers. That's bunk. Profiling does not help catch serial killers.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a lot about police work and serial killers lately because I was going to write a novel about with a serial killer as a main character. However, I think that for my next novel, I’m going to write about much more pleasant topics, like drug smuggling and civil war.
When Thomas Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs, he depicted FBI criminal profiling as a solid science that is always right, 100% of the time. That’s baloney. And it’s fiction.
Profiling serial killers is an art, say some people, but it’s not an art, and it’s certainly not a science. Basically, a couple FBI guys interviewed 36 convicted killers on death row, out of which only 25 were actual serial killers, using an unstructured checklist of questions, but based their conclusions about serial killers on all 36 interviews. This method is statistically and demographically invalid. It’s dumb. And it didn’t work.
The Unknown Darkness by Gregg O. McCrary with Katherine Ramsland is one of several books by honest-to-God FBI Profilers from the Behavioral Sciences Unit or whatever they’re calling it these days. This book terrified me, not merely due to the many gruesomely detailed cases that McCrary has worked on, but because my conclusion at the end of reading this book is that “profiling” is neither as reputable nor as efficacious as witchcraft.
The Unknown Darkness is an excellent reference and fascinating reading about FBI and police procedure once they suspect a serial killer is in the area. (Most of the time, however, law enforcement fails to link crimes to each other and thus deny the existence of a serial killer.) One example of current procedure is that FBI and other profilers no longer write a report profiling the criminal or submit a report to the FBI because this “profile” might be used at a later time either in the defense of someone accused or as evidence that the profile was flawed to begin with.
Another example is that a “profile” almost invariably puts the age of a serial killer as 18-39, a large range and statistically almost always correct. If the killer turns out to be older than that range, the profiler insists that the “emotional age” of the killer is within that range. See Morrison’s Freudian theories about how serial killers are stuck in an “oral, infantile” stage in My Life among the Serial Killers in this Recommended Reading article about Morrison's book and Ann Rule's fascinating book, The Stranger Beside Me.
Tracker: Hunting Down Serial Killers, by Maurice Godwin with Fred Rosen, is a better book on a better type of profiling than the pseudo-psychic profiling now in use by the FBI and others. Godwin wrote a PhD dissertation on criminal psychology in England. His main focus was developing a logical computer program that could accurately assess whether murders were linked by a common serial killer and a likely geographic area where the murderer lived or had some base of operation, called psycho-geographic profiling. By using a variation on his program, he helped find Dru Sjodin’s body after she was murdered and predicted where the D.C. sniper(s) was likely to strike with astonishing accuracy. He also predicted that there would two or more men who were the “D.C. sniper,” which was accurate. Of course, like all true prophets, he is teaching at a university instead of applying his skills to save lives and capture serial killers because the police and FBI are still pursuing their idiotic, superstitious, crystal-ball gazing version of the pseudo-science of profiling.
