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Profiling | Analysis

Criminal Profiling from Crime Scene Analysis

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INTRODUCTION: HISTORY OF CRIMINAL PROFILING

Criminal profiling has been used successfully by law enforcement in several areas and is a valued means by which to narrow the field of investigation. Profiling does not provide the specific identity of the offender. Rather, it indicates the kind of person most likely to have committed a crime by focusing on certain behavioral and personality characteristics. Profiling techniques have been used in various settings such as hostage taking (Reiser. 1982). Law enforcement officers need to learn as much as possible about the hostage taker in order to protect the lives of the hostages. In such cases, police are aided by verbal contact (although often limited) with the offender and possibly by access to his family and friends. They must be able to assess the subject in terms of what course of action he is likely to take and what his reactions to various stimuli might be. Profiling has been used also in identifying anonymous letter writers (Casey-Owens 1983) and

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Crime Scene Profiling

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Descriptions of crime scenes are sobering and often agonizing, but the crime scene like the one described above is atypical. Sexual murders are very rare, constituting from 1 to 3% of all homicides (Alison, West, & Goodwill, 2004), and homicides themselves are rare compared with other crimes. Nevertheless, we open with the above description from an actual case because it relates to concepts that will be discussed throughout the chapter. Steven Fortin was charged with the 1994 murder of Melissa Padilla. At the time of the charges, Fortin was serving a 20-year sentence for the aggravated sexual assault of a Maine state trooper, which occurred 8 months after the Padilla murder in New Jersey. Some of the details of the two crimes were similar. The Maine trooper who survived the crime was sexually assaulted and bitten, and her uniform pants were found with her underwear still inside them. Prosecutors in the New Jersey case wanted to introduce the expert testimony of a former special agent

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