Файл: [D._Kim_Rossmo]_Geographic_Profiling(BookFi.org).pdf

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11.1.12 Bloodings

During a sexual murder or rape investigation, British police may conduct large-
scale DNA testing of all men from the area of the crime (“How the DNA
‘Database,’” 1995). The first such case was the Narborough Murder Enquiry,
when “all unalibied male residents in the villages between the ages of seventeen
and thirty-four years would be asked to submit blood and saliva samples
voluntarily in order to ‘eliminate them’ as suspects in the footpath murders”
(Wambaugh, 1989, pp. 220-221). Close to 4,000 men from the villages of
Narborough, Littlethorpe, and Enderby were tested during the investigation.

Because considerable police resources and laboratory costs are involved

in such “bloodings,” British police conduct intelligence-led DNA screens in
which individuals are prioritized based on proximity to scene, criminal
record, age, and other relevant criteria (National Crime Faculty, 1996). In
cases of serial crime, geographic profiling can further refine the selection
process through targeting by address, or postal or zip code, resulting in more
efficient and systematic testing procedures. Canadian police are also begin-
ning to use this strategy. A series of 11 sexual assaults including a rape
occurred within the space of just over a month in Mississauga, Ontario. The
investigation by the Peel Regional Police resulted in 312 suspects. Combining
the geographic and psychological profiles with description and interview
information, detectives prioritized the suspects into groups and obtained
DNA samples from the most probable individuals. The offender was identi-
fied in the first lot. He resided within the top 2.2% (0.03 mi

2

) of the area

under consideration.

11.1.13 Peak-of-Tension Polygraphy

In presumed homicides with known suspects but no bodies, polygraphists
have had success in narrowing down the search area for the victim’s remains
through peak-of-tension (POT) tests (Hagmaier, 1990; see also Cunliffe &
Piazza, 1980; Lyman, 1993; Raskin, 1989). Peak-of-tension polygraphy
involves monitoring a subject’s reaction to photographs, objects, or maps, as
opposed to answering verbal questions. A deceptive response to queries con-
cerning the type of location where the victim’s body was hidden (e.g., cave,
lake, marsh, field, forest, etc.) can help focus a search. Because POT tests
often involve maps or pictures, their usefulness is enhanced when results are
combined with a geographic profile.

11.1.14 Fugitive Location

In cases where the identity but not the whereabouts of a criminal fugitive is
known, geographic profiling may be able to assist in determining probable

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hiding places. Sightings, purchases, credit or bank card transactions, tele-
phone calls, cellular telephone switch sites, crimes, and other locational infor-
mation can be used as input for the profile. This process is also applicable
to extortion and kidnapping investigations.

11.1.15 Missing Bodies

In certain missing person cases that are suspected homicides, geographic
profiling can help determine probable body dump site areas. In November
1993, a teenage boy was found shot dead in his parked car, and his girlfriend
kidnapped, outside St. Antoine, New Brunswick. The murderer was identified
through rifle ballistics but he disappeared before arrest. After unsuccessfully
pursuing various leads and tips, the RCMP began to theorize that the missing
female victim had been killed and the offender had committed suicide. Two
searches by police and military teams of the rural Bouctouche region failed
to find evidence of either body. A geographic profile was then prepared and
it identified two prioritized search areas using techniques of path analysis,
journey-to-crime estimates, and time-distance-speed calculations. A third
search effort located effects of the offender in a river under a railway trestle,
and the body of the female victim in a field; the former was found in the
highest prioritized area of the geoprofile, and the latter in the second highest.

11.1.16 Trial Court Expert Evidence

While geographic profiling is primarily an investigative tool, it also has a role
in the courtroom. In addition to analyzing the geographic patterns of
unsolved crimes for investigative insights, the spatial relationship between
the locations of a crime series and an accused offender’s activity sites can be
assessed in terms of the probability of their congruence (Rossmo, 1994a).
When combined with other forensic identification findings (e.g., a DNA
profile), such information increases evidential strength and likelihood of
guilt. The question of how to most appropriately quantify the weight of
forensic identification evidence and rare trait possession is called the gener-
alized island problem (see Balding & Donnelly, 1994). Geographic profiles
can also be used as supporting grounds for search warrant affidavits.

On the cold winter morning of January 31, 1969, nursing assistant Gail

Miller left home and walked to the bus stop to go to work (Karp & Rosner,
1991). She never made it. She was pulled into an alley, raped, and stabbed.
David Milgaard, a 16-year-old youth from Regina, was later arrested, tried,
and convicted of her murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but
maintained his innocence throughout 23 years of incarceration.

In 1990, an alternative suspect surfaced. Larry Fisher was a serial rapist

who lived in Riversdale, a block away from Miller’s bus stop, at the time of

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the murder. After lobbying efforts by Milgaard’s family, the Minister of Justice
ordered a review of the case by the Supreme Court of Canada. As part of the
review, a geographic assessment of the crimes, Milgaard, and Fisher was
undertaken (Boyd & Rossmo, 1992).

“True to his controlling, orderly nature, Fisher committed his rapes in a

comfort zone, which in the winter of 1969 was alleys in the working-class
Saskatoon neighbourhood where he lived and Gail Miller died” (Milgaard &
Edwards, 1999, p. 211). There were strong parallels in M.O. and crime site
microenvironment between Fisher’s rapes and the Miller murder — same
immediate area, identical location type (alleys protected from observation
by garages, fences, and vegetation), similar hunting style, same attack
method, clothing manipulation, use of a knife, and brutality of sexual assault
(Boyd & Rossmo, 1992). The similarity is even more striking given the rarity
of stranger sexual assault in Saskatoon in 1969.

Conversely, the circumstances of Milgaard on the morning of the murder

did not support an opportunity to commit the crime. The geographic profile
suggested that Fisher was the more probable suspect, but profiling is insuf-
ficient for the establishment of either guilt or innocence. More compelling,
a time-distance-speed analysis cast doubt on the accuracy of statements made
by certain witnesses for the prosecution. In 1997, advanced DNA testing
methods in Britain resulted in Milgaard’s exoneration and the arrest and
charge of Fisher for Miller’s murder (see Connors, Lundregan, Miller, &
McEwen, 1996).

11.2 Jack the Ripper

No one knows who Jack the Ripper was. And no one knows for certain what
motivated him (Abrahamsen, 1992). But he was, in a macabre way, a man
for his times. The turmoil of the Industrial Revolution in Britain upset the
standard social order, generating new ambitions, conflicts, and frustrations.
Urbanization, crowding, and change led to anomie and the creation of the
alienated loner. Harsh and inhumane conditions, an indifference towards
children, and a savage lifestyle all conspired to create an environment con-
ducive to violence and sexual deviance. It is not surprising the psychological
and social infrastructures of the 19

th

 century produced the first modern serial

killer (Leyton, 1986).

Many of the rookeries in Victorian London were demolished during a

series of social reforms, but the slums of Whitechapel and Spitalfields sur-
vived and predictably endured an influx of criminals displaced by the city’s
urban renewal (see Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984). The late 1800s saw
almost a million people dwelling in the slums east of Aldgate Pump; 4000

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houses in Whitechapel alone one year were condemned as uninhabitable,
though little was done about it for years (Rumbelow, 1988). Liquid sewage
filled the cellars of houses and people kept their windows — those not yet
broken — shut because of the stench from without. The majority of families,
often up to nine people, lived in one room. Incest was common in these
crowded conditions, even amongst children as young as 10.

Many East End youth died before they were five. It would not be unusual

for a mother to send her young children into the streets until after midnight,
while she engaged in the business of prostitution to make sufficient money
to feed them. Often children fell off their seats at school from exhaustion or
cried from the pain of chronic starvation. Yet these unfortunates at least had
a home. Many others slept on the streets or in dustbins, under stairways or
bridges. Those who managed to scrape together enough money could rent
a room in a lodging house, and such buildings held 8500 nightly in
Whitechapel. Within these doss houses, flea-infested wallpaper hung in strips
and stairway handrails were missing, long ago burnt for firewood. If you
could not afford a straw mattress, two pence bought you the privilege of a
place along a rope to lean against and sleep (Rumbelow, 1977).

Women’s work included scrubbing, sweatshop tailoring, hop picking,

and sack or matchbox making, all with a complete lack of safety standards.
Seventeen hours of backbreaking labour paid 10 pence, less the cost of mate-
rials. Prostitution was a viable alternative, paying anywhere from a loaf of
stale bread to three pence. It was estimated that one woman in 16 engaged
in this trade, for a total of 1200 prostitutes in Whitechapel and 80,000 in
London (Rumbelow, 1988). The environment in the slums of London was
such that Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw commented, after the second
of the Ripper killings, that perhaps “the murderer was a social reformer who
wanted to draw attention to social conditions in the East End” (C. Wilson,
1960, p. 60).

Little is known about Jack the Ripper beyond his handiwork. The first

canonical murder took place on Bank Holiday, Friday, August 31, 1888, in
Buck’s Row. The victim was Polly Nichols, a 42-year-old alcoholic with grey
hair and five missing front teeth. She had five children from a broken mar-
riage. The Ripper cut her throat from ear to ear, back to the vertebrae, and
sliced open her abdomen from pelvis to stomach. The autopsy found she
sustained stab wounds to the vagina (Howells & Skinner, 1987).

The next killing took place in a yard at No. 29 Hanbury Street, on

Saturday, September 8, 1888. Annie Chapman was 45 years of age, stout,
pugnacious, and missing two of her front teeth. An alcoholic, she was sepa-
rated from her husband and two children, one of them a cripple. She was
found with her neck cut so deeply it appeared as if an attempt had been made

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to take off her head. Her abdomen was laid open and her intestines placed
on her shoulder. Parts of her vagina and bladder had been removed.

On Sunday, September 30, 1988, a double murder occurred. The Ripper

first attacked Elizabeth Stride in a courtyard next to the International Work-
ing Men’s Educational Club on Berner Street. Stride was a 45-year-old alco-
holic missing her front teeth and the roof of her mouth. She bore nine
children, but claimed her husband and two offspring had perished in a
steamboat disaster. The Ripper had cut her throat, severing the windpipe.
The mutilation was minimal as he was interrupted by a carriage entering the
courtyard.

Within the hour a second body was discovered in Mitre Square, in the

City of London. Catherine Eddowes, 43 years, was, like her fellow victims,
an alcoholic with a broken marriage. She carried all her worldly possessions
in her pockets. Her throat was deeply cut, and her abdomen laid open from
breast downwards, the entrails “flung in a heap about her neck.” Her ear was
almost cut off and a kidney taken, the latter apparently later mailed to the
authorities.

The final and most horrific murder occurred in 13 Miller’s Court, on

Friday, November 9, 1888. Mary Kelly, only 20 years of age and 3 months
pregnant, was already a widow with alcohol problems. A bizarre sight greeted
those who discovered her body. Her head and left arm were almost severed,
her breasts and nose cut off, thighs and forehead skinned, entrails wrenched
away, and her body parts piled on the bedside table. Jack the Ripper had all
the time he needed to satiate his bizarre desires in Miller’s Court, and while
debate continues on whether he was responsible for other prostitute murders
that occurred around this time, most investigators believe he stopped, for
whatever reason, after the mutilation of Mary Kelly (Wilson & Odell, 1987).

In 1988 the FBI prepared a criminal personality profile for the Jack the

Ripper murders (Begg, Fido, & Skinner, 1991; Douglas & Olshaker, 1995;
The secret identity of Jack the Ripper, 1988). After an analysis of the crime
scenes, police and autopsy reports, photographs, victimology, and area demo-
graphics, the following key crime scene elements were identified:

• Blitz attacks and lust murders;
• High degree of psychopathology exhibited at the crime scenes;
• No evidence of sexual assault;
• Possible manual strangulation;
• Postmortem mutilation and organ removal, but no torture;
• Elaboration of ritual;
• Victims selected on the basis of accessibility;
• All the crimes took place on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, in the early

morning hours; and