KEY POINTS:
On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison electrical company building in Manhattan, New York, found a homemade bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: "Con Edison crooks, this is for you."
In September 1941, a second bomb was found just a few blocks from Con Edison's headquarters. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York Police received a letter promising to bring Con Edison to justice - "they will pay for their dastardly deeds".
Sixteen other letters followed between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase "dastardly deeds" and all signed with the initials F.P. In March 1950, a third bomb - larger and more powerful than the others - was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. In 1954, the Mad Bomber - as he became known - struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955 he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department's crime laboratory, and two plainclothes policemen paid a visit to psychiatrist James Brussel.
Early in his career, Brussel had done counter-espionage work for the FBI. Finney handed him photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photocopies of F.P's neatly lettered missives. "I didn't miss the look in the two policemen's eyes," Brussel writes in his memoir, Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist. "I'd seen that look before, most often in the army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense."
He began to leaf through the case materials. For 16 years, F.P had been fixated on the notion that Con Edison - the major electricity supplier in New York - had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. F.P had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P's notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as "the Con Edison". And who still used the expression "dastardly deeds"? F.P seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel flipped to the crime scene descriptions. When F.P planted his bombs in theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. It seemed like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man - or perhaps both.
F.P had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap - F.P was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P wouldn't have mailed the letters from his home town. A number of cities in Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And from Connecticut he would have to pass through Westchester to get to New York City.
He waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction. He writes: "I closed my eyes because I didn't want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly - much more clearly than the facts really warranted. 'One more thing,' I said, my eyes closed tight. 'When you catch him - and I have no doubt you will - he'll be wearing a double-breasted suit. And it will be buttoned.' I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other. 'A double-breasted suit,' said the inspector. 'Yes.' 'Buttoned.' 'Yes.' He nodded. Without another word, they left."
A month later, George Metesky was arrested. He lived in Connecticut with two older sisters. He was unmarried, unfailingly neat. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931 and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police, he said, "I know why you fellows are here. You think I'm the Mad Bomber". It was midnight, and he was in his pyjamas. The police asked him to get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed and his shoes newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit - buttoned.
In his book, Inside the Mind of BTK, eminent FBI criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the 1970s and 80s. (Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs and the protege of the pioneering FBI profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau's Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972.)
BTK stood for "Bind, Torture, Kill" - the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January 1974, when he killed 38-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, their son and their 11-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a 24-year-old woman. In March 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. In 1984, in desperation, two Wichita police detectives paid a visit to Quantico.
Three FBI men and the two detectives sat around a table. The objective of the session was to paint a picture of the killer - of what sort of man BTK was, what he did.
We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of criminal profilers that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the crime novel genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centres on the detectives' search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the shadowy European. That's a whodunnit.
In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn't initiate the search, it defines the killer. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows. Douglas writes that once a detective asked him if he were a psychic. You might think he would bridle at that comparison. He is an ace profiler, part of a team that restored the FBI's reputation for crime-fighting, inspired countless movies, television shows and bestselling thrillers and some cop is calling him a psychic. But Douglas doesn't object.
"What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I'm not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris [author of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal] who've consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there's a psychic component to this, I won't run from it."
In the late 1970s, Douglas and his colleague Robert Ressler set out to interview the most notorious serial killers in the United States. Over several months they interviewed 36 murderers in federal prisons.
Douglas and Ressler wanted to know whether there was a pattern that connected a killer's life and personality with the nature of his crimes. They were looking for what psychologists would call a "homology", an agreement between character and action, and, after comparing what they learned from the killers with what they already knew about the characteristics of their murders, they became convinced that they'd found one.
Serial killers, they concluded, fall into one of two categories. Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfil a specific fantasy. The perpetrator maintains control throughout. He takes his time with the victim, carefully enacting his fantasies. He almost never leaves a weapon behind. He meticulously conceals the body. Douglas and Ressler called that kind of crime organised.
In a disorganised crime, the victim is seemingly picked at random and blitz-attacked, not stalked and coerced. The killer might grab a knife from the kitchen and leave it behind. The crime is so sloppily executed that the victim often has a chance to fight back. Moreover, the killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims - he does not want to know who they are, and often knocks them unconscious or covers or otherwise disfigures their faces.
Each of these styles, the argument goes, corresponds to a personality type. The organised killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him. The disorganised killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability. The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer's behaviour and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner's character.
The FBI's system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in profiling literature. The body of a 26-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after leaving for work at 6.30am. She had been beaten beyond recognition, and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, and defecated next to the body.
How would an FBI profiler proceed? First question: race. The victim is white, so let's call the offender white. Let's say he's in his mid-20s to early 30s, which is when the 36 men in the FBI's sample started killing. Is the crime organised or disorganised? Disorganised, clearly. It's on a rooftop, in broad daylight - high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at 6.30am? He could be a serviceman, or he could live in the neighbourhood.
He appears to be familiar with the building. He's disorganised, though, so he's not stable. He probably has a prior offence, violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he's probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem.
How does that sound? As it turns out, it's spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age 30, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the 4th floor of the same building.
But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you're looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don't really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the 4th floor.
That's why the FBI's profilers have always tried to supplement the basic outlines of the organised/disorganised system with telling details - something that lets the police zero in on a suspect.
In the early 80s, Douglas gave a presentation to police officers and FBI agents about the Trailside Killer, who was murdering female hikers in the hills north of San Francisco. In Douglas' view, the killer was a classic disorganised offender - a blitz attacker, white, early to mid-30s, blue collar, probably with a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals.
Then he went back to how asocial the killer seemed. Why did all the killings take place in heavily wooded areas, miles from the road? Douglas reasoned that the killer required such seclusion because he had some condition that he was deeply self-conscious about. Was it something physical, like a missing limb? But then how could he hike miles into the woods and physically overpower his victims? Finally, it came to him: "Another thing ... the killer will have a speech impediment."
And so he did. Now, that's a useful detail. Or is it? Douglas says he pegged the offender's age as early 30s, and he turned out to be 50. Detectives use profiles to narrow down the range of suspects but it doesn't do any good to get a specific detail right if you get general details wrong.
A profile isn't a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It's a portrait, and all the details must cohere for it to be helpful.
In the mid-90s, the British Home Office analysed 184 crimes to see how many profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. They worked in five of those cases. That's just 2.7 per cent.
A group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the FBI's assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organisation: perhaps a 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 disorganisation: perhaps a victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victims belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.
If the FBI was right, they reasoned, the crime scene details on each list should co-occur. When they looked at a sample of 100 serial crimes, however, they couldn't find any support for the FBI's distinction. Crimes don't fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they're almost always a mixture of a few key organised traits and a random array of disorganised traits.
Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of The Forensic Psychologists Casebook, says: "The whole business is a lot more complicated than the FBI imagines."
Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected 100 rapes in Britain, classifying them according to 28 variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging or blindfolding, whether there was apologising or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals - like age, employment, ethnicity, education, marital status, prior convictions and drug use.
Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more alike than rapists who, say, compliment and apologise? The answer was no - not even slightly.
The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviours for completely different reasons, says Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the FBI's approach.
"You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? It could mean he doesn't want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms - all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behaviour in isolation."
Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building. He wanted to know why, if the FBI's approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable, contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.
Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, lists them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse - the statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite. ("I would say you can be rather a quiet, self-effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party." )
The Jacques Statement, named for the character in As You Like It who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late 30s or early 40s, for example, the psychic says, "If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger."
There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific. ("I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?") And that's only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess - all of which, when put together in skilful combination, can convince even the most sceptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.
After Alison had analysed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the FBI, and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was 37, an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job and had met the victim before. What's more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships and prior convictions for assault and burglary.
How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the FBI's profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender.
Brussel didn't really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and documents, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book Author Unknown, Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the NYPD's bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn't have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between 40 and 50, and Metesky was over 50. And despite what he wrote in his memoir, Brussel never said the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man born and educated in Germany.
The true hero of the case was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison's personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early 1930s: a generator wiper had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn't. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee, Kelly spotted a threat - to take justice in my own hands - that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber's letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.
Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood, however, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten and those that turn out to be true will make you famous. Not a triumph of forensic analysis, it's a party trick.
Kicking off the profiling session with which Inside the Mind of BTK begins, Douglas says: "Back when he started in 1974, [the BTK killer] was in his mid-to-late 20s. It's now 10 years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late 30s."
Next to him at the table, FBI agent Ron Walker adds: "BTK has never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggests someone with an inadequate, immature sexual history. He would have a lone-wolf type of personality. But he's not alone because he's shunned by others - it's because he chooses to be alone ... He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he'd feel very inadequate with a peer-group female."
The third agent, Roy Hazelwood, says BTK would be heavily into masturbation. "Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around."
What's more, the profilers say, BTK would drive a decent automobile, but it would be nondescript.
The insights pile up. Douglas says he'd been thinking that BTK was married. But now, he thinks he may be divorced. He speculates that BTK is lower-middle class, probably in rented accommodation. Walker feels BTK is in a low-paying, white-collar job. Hazelwood sees him as middle class and articulate. The consensus is that his IQ is somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wonders whether he is connected with the military. Hazelwood calls him a "now person", who needed instant gratification. Walker says those who knew him might remember him, but not know much about him.
Douglas then has a flash - a sense, almost a knowing - and says: "I wouldn't be surprised if, in the job he's in today, that he's wearing some sort of uniform. This guy isn't mental. But he is crazy like a fox."
They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the FBI had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His IQ will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He won't be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won't be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper-lower class, lower-middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental.
If you're keeping score, that's a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that could never be verified and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, president of his church and a married father of two.
"This thing is solvable," Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up. "Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance." You can imagine him taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. "You're gonna nail this guy."
Malcolm Gladwell, one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2005, is the author of two bestsellers, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
