Character assassination: how profilers got it wrong

AS HEADLINES go it was, well, a Cracker. Psychological profiling of fugitive serial killers is "worse than useless" the tabloids cried last week, reporting the opinions of psychologist Professor Craig Jackson.

Profiling of killers has no real-world value, wastes police time and risks bringing the profession of forensic psychology into disrepute. Most of the stories were accompanied by a photograph of Robbie Coltrane as the agonised and personally dysfunctional Fitz in the Cracker television series. Fitz was in turn based on real-life forensic psychologist Paul Britton, who had been involved in a number of serial or high-profile murder cases in the 1980s and 90s, including Fred and Rose West and the murders of James Bulger, and Rachel Nickell.

Psychological profiling in the United Kingdom was undoubtedly damaged by Britton's involvement in the unfounded pursuit of Colin Stagg for the Wimbledon Common murder of Rachel Nickell in 1992. Stagg was among a number of men interviewed by police because he walked his dog on the Common. And he sort of fitted into Britton's offender profile.

Britton devised a strategy, Operation Edzell, that led to Stagg being pursued over a period of five months by an undercover female police officer, Lizzie, who met him, telephoned and corresponded with him and shared sexual fantasies in an effort to draw out admissions from him. He repeatedly denied any knowledge of the murder, but denial fitted the profile too.

Stagg was charged and remanded in custody for a year before being acquitted at trial. The Lizzie "honey trap" was criticised by the trial judge. In 2002 a routine review of cold cases led to the discovery of DNA evidence that eventually led to Robert Napper.

He was serving a sentence for the murder of another woman, Samantha Bissett, and rape of her daughter, 16 months after Rachel Nickell was killed. Napper subsequently pled guilty in 2008 to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and is now held in Broadmoor. Napper did not fit Britton's original offender profile.

The British Psychological Society charged Britton with several disciplinary offences but the case fell through as it was felt he would not get a fair hearing.But despite offender profiling appearing to hit the buffers in the Rachel Nickell investigation, the fiction shelves in the bookshops, and television schedules, still groan with tales of the misfit whose special insight into the mind of the killer leads the police, initially sceptical, to the culprit.

It's the mixing of fiction and its close acquaintance, self-advertisement, that was targeted by Prof Jackson and his colleagues and which generated last week's headlines. Their particular target was the bestselling book, Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the Thirty-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer (2007), written by John Douglas, one of the originators of "offender profiling" in the United States.

The "true crime" work is largely concerned with his part in the apprehension of a notorious American serial killer called Dennis Rader, dubbed "BTK" by the media because he would sign off his communications with the police with "Bind, Torture, Kill". Prof Jackson says: "We used Douglas's own account against him on three grounds - it doesn't work, it's bad science and it's unethical. We weren't writing off all of forensic psychiatry, so our critique wasn't quite as reported, but we were definitely attacking the first wave of psychological profiling that was developed within the FBI and then spread from the United States. We are critical of the lack of science and lack of results. Despite the PR, it hasn't been very useful.

"Our focus was on what has been called 'embedded profiling' in which the profiler leads, or thinks he is leading, the direction of the police investigation by claiming to 'get inside the head' of the offender."

Prof Jackson thinks that even allowing for the desire to sell books and become wealthy, the proposition is close to ridiculous. "Throughout Inside the Mind of BTK, references are constantly made to the disturbing dreams Douglas has about acts of murder, and the litany of disturbed nights he endures, to the point that he becomes less like a rational investigator and more like a shaman guided by visions, imagination and hallucinations. He claims to have subjected himself to near-death experiences in trying to become the victim and the murderer at the moment of the crime," says Prof Jackson.

"My background is occupational therapy and from the simple perspective of health and safety you really can't have profilers willingly exposing themselves to near-death experiences, sleepless nights and visions through the eyes of the killer or rapist. Apart from the fact it doesn't work."

Jackson explores the doubtful methodology that led the FBI to enthuse about offender psychological profiling, much of it based on interviews with incarcerated serial killers who were asked about their motivations and the triggers for their actions.There was no clear basis on which to distinguish which parts of their account was delusion and which reality; what was mockery of the interviewers and what was self-serving in pursuit of prison favours, from better clothing to a reduction in sentence. The lack of methodology rendered much of their classifications and categorisations at best speculative.

At first reading, last week's headlines would not have appealed to Professor David Canter, director of the recently established International Research centre in Investigative Psychology, based in Huddersfield University, and author of several books of his own on offender profiling, as well as the current standard textbook. There was an exchange of e-mails with Prof Jackson.

However, their analyses turn out to be not too far apart. "I called it 'the Hollywood Effect' and sometimes 'the Sherlock Holmes effect' a long time ago," says Prof Canter. "With the movies and TV series that glorify the edgy outsider with special insight, it is hard for us over here to appreciate just how basic the investigative capacity is in most of the 15,000-18,000 law enforcement agencies in the USA. The FBI attempts to provide some specialist services but has to sell itself to ensure its funding and has been guilty of overstating its skills. The specialist units in most of our police forces are the envy of all but a few departments in the US."

Both professors acknowledge that serious and reputable attempts were made to examine the characteristics of serial offenders before the term "profiling" was invented.

Prof Jackson cites the work of Dr Robert Brittain, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Douglas Inch Clinic in Glasgow, who died in 1971, who was asked by Glasgow CID to offer an opinion about the type of person they were seeking in the "Bible John" murder case in the late 1960s. "His subsequent paper, The Sadistic Murderer, remains the classic."

And Prof Canter mentions the work of a police surgeon in the mayhem of the Jack the Ripper murders in the 1880s.

He does not feel inclined to take up Prof Jackson's challenge for the profilers to produce a single culprit that they have identified. He would rather reword the premise. "I devised the term 'investigative psychology' to get away from the baggage that now goes with 'profiling'. Over the last 25 years we have slowly and cautiously developed a science that is there to assist police, along with the other tools of investigation at their disposal. We never go in pretending that we can solve a crime where others are stumped. Police seem to think our work is useful but maybe not very sexy. But I think we can live without the headlines."