Psychological profiling is to be used to investigate the recent violent assaults in Athlone, but don't expect miracles say experts, writes Kathy Sheridan
WHEN THE GARDA announced this week that a psychological profiler was to assist in the investigation into five violent assaults on young women in Athlone, it focused attention on a profession with an almost mystical aura.
Images were evoked of testy, flawed geniuses such as Robbie Coltrane's Fitz, the psychologist star of Cracker, Robson Green, the clinical psychologist of Wire in the Blood, and Benton Wesley, the Quantico-based FBI criminal profiler of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta thrillers. In the BBC's Waking the Dead, a woman gets a rare look-in (oddly rare, given that women are more commonly hailed for their intuition) in the form of Dr Grace Foley, a forensic psychological profiler in the cold case unit.
Probably the best-known of them all, however, is the sinister, muzzled psychiatrist and mass murderer, Hannibal Lecter, who helped the FBI to identify a serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs.
All are blessed, of course, with the knack of solving hideous crimes through a combination of psychological insight, deductive reasoning, wondrous flashes of inspiration and the odd feat of life-threatening daring.
Prof David Canter is credited with pioneering the art or science (the jury is out on which) of profiling, also known as investigative psychology, in Britain. It was his idea to pull together the myriad strands from the social sciences, psychology and geography to feed into the criminal investigative process and he has since built a lucrative career around it, from his base at the University of Liverpool.
"The work should be about understanding how the police work and providing them with useful tools to filter data in the course of an investigation; it's not about being an outside expert offering a Sherlock Holmes-like opinion that the police decide how best to use," he told the Guardian four years ago.
If his voice was laced with caution, there was good reason for it. Canter's skills had come into public focus in the late 1980s, during the so-called Railway Rapist investigation. His scientific analysis of the crimes and their locations led him to hypothesise where the culprit might live, as a result of which John Duffy was caught and convicted.
As an adjunct, Canter also happened to produce a plausible psychological narrative for the progression and escalation of the rapist's crimes. It was this that fired the public imagination rather than the more important data on the relation of geography and location to offending. And thus, a profiler star was born.
However, some very high-profile fiascos have taken the shine off the art. The Cracker stereotype (based on the work of forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Badcock, who later said it gave a misleading impression) brought forth all manner of opinionated experts on unsolved cases. They included Paul Britton, a forensic psychologist, whose advice led to the police entrapment exercise that culminated in the collapse of the Colin Stagg trial for the murder of Rachel Nickell.
Another notorious case where investigators found an early suspect to fit the profile was that of security guard Richard Jewell, who was relentlessly investigated and battered by media assaults, following the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. This not only caused enormous distress to Jewell, but seriously delayed the identification of the real culprit.
According to Prof Canter's 2004 Guardian interview, things took a complicated turn at some point. After some early advances in the study of offending patterns, his research had become increasingly complex and many of the conventional beliefs had been turned on their head.
"The idea that you can say something about the personality of an offender by the nature of the crime has proved to be unsubstantiated," he said. "And I've come to realise that the real power of investigative psychology is in the study of volume crimes, such as robbery, car theft and burglary, rather than the more bizarre crimes that make the papers.
"In fiction, it is quite easy to link crimes because someone comes in and says they're linked, but in reality it is far harder to make those jumps. So much of the work is about establishing consistency in offending behaviour." Canter's aim was to provide the police with tools, including software, to enable them to focus their investigations better.
This need was well illustrated by the failure of the Jill Dando inquiry, wrote Canter's interviewer John Crace.
"The police knew, almost from day one, that the killer had escaped on foot. Had Canter been consulted, he could have told them that over 80 per cent of killers who escape on foot live within 525 yards of the crime. It took the police over a year to question and arrest Barry George, a man with a record of stalking celebrities. He lived within the 525-yard radius".
Prof Canter demurred modestly. "The point is not that it was Barry George and that I turned out to be right," he told Crace. "The point is that with a focused investigation, the police could have got to him a great deal earlier than they did and eliminated him, if necessary."
Four years on, however, we know that no one was right. Last month, after two trials and eight years in prison, Barry George was acquitted of Jill Dando's murder. Students of the case concede that he was a weirdo, fantasist, braggart and sex pest with an IQ of 75, but insist that he was simply incapable of perpetrating such a technically sophisticated crime.
Meanwhile, the contribution of profilers has proved difficult to evaluate. How much of the information could have been deduced by detectives themselves working on the case? If profilers are called in only to the most difficult cases, is it reasonable to expect that they will have a high success rate? Is a high-flying senior detective likely to trumpet the usefulness of an "outsider's" input?
In any event, the limited research into offender profiling suggests that there are very few cases where the profiler produces the kind of blinding, Crackeresque insights which lead straight to the perpetrator. But, it also suggests that investigating officers like to have an intelligent outsider to share ideas with, and that a profile can reduce the suspect list and help with the arrest and interviewing strategy.
DEREK GREEN, DIRECTOR OF THE UK-based Ray Wyre Associates, spends his working hours with sex offenders and occasionally undertakes offender profiling with the police. He says: "Informally, we do that here but profiling doesn't exist as a profession in the UK. In the US, they do have profilers; they have a behavioural science unit which specialises in sex offenders and serial killers because it's such a vast country."
Here there are people who can offer informed opinions about the kind of person who can commit a certain kind of crime and it might trigger alarm bells. "In the UK, it is used for prioritising suspects so it could help if you already have suspects by pushing one closer to the top. But basically, it's no more than informed speculation. It's not a concrete science, it's a behavioural science and there is scientific methodology to it, but it's about examining the hypothetical." The handful of practitioners on this island were unwilling to discuss any aspect of their work this week.
Green says: "It starts out with general knowledge, with informed speculation. If you're looking for a serial rapist, a serial killer or a paedophile, for example, there will be characteristics more common in certain groups. A paedophile, for example, can be an 80 year old, but you're unlikely to find a serial rapist who is 80, so it's limited by certain factors.
"A serial rapist is likely to reasonably young, to be unemployed, low-skilled. On the other hand, you do have professionals who are serial killers. So in serial-rape cases, you can make generalisations. You start out with basic factors that are typical, then as more information comes in, you begin to refine that.
"The man in the Athlone case might indulge in a lot of violence - a blitz attack - but does not humiliate his victims (such as making her crawl on her knees or to say things to make him feel more powerful). There is probably a lot of anger and there is possibly an issue of revenge. Perhaps it's someone who has a grudge against a certain type of woman. There appears to be a specific type of target, it's not a 50 year old one day and a 17 year old the next, so there is quite possibly a particular reason why there is this specific target.
"But, it could also be simply because women aged 19 to 29 are the age group most likely to be walking home at 4am in the morning. You're not saying that that's what it means; it could mean this, it could mean that. What profiling does not produce is that kind of precision you see on TV, like 'he's a 21-year-old manual labourer who lives in a council flat with his sister. But maybe in this case, you could say he's 21 to 35 years old".
Not spectacular enough for Cracker fans maybe, but it's a start.
"Also he is a 'disorganised' rapist, that is he doesn't appear to be taking a rape kit such as a torch, ski mask, rope or binding, a weapon and doesn't show signs of planning where he is going to attack. This guy has perpetrated all five offences in the same square mile so he's not thinking, he's doing it on impulse.
"He's living in a fantasy world; he fantasises about what he would like to do, then his feelings overpower him. When he goes out, there is no plan so that makes him a different kind. He is not a cunning predatory type; he is much more disorganised and impulsive. He may be slightly odd.
"You sometimes hear people say about an offender 'I'd never have thought it was him'. In this case, there will be something about him that makes you think that there is something odd about him. It could be that he's got a lack of social skills, he's not an organised individual, not an intelligent individual, his attacks are very sudden, violent and anger-driven. So when you have people who you've picked up or you have a few suspects, he's the one you'll start with."
Basically, says Green, "there's no problem if you keep it in proportion. It's to help the police to prioritise. That's all."