Individual Vs. Multiple Killers

Crime investigators such as the RCMP, FBI and even the CIA have powerful new knowledge at their disposal to potentially help solve murders, thanks to a ground-breaking study involving UBC Okanagan forensic psychology researchers. Their findings could help police generate predictions about the characteristics of a killer or killers based on the crime scene evidence and victim. The study, Partners in Crime: A Comparison of Individual and Multi-Perpetrator Homicides, looked at 124 cases of convicted Canadian male offenders a third of the cases involving multiple people during the crime to determine what the crime scene could reveal about the nature of the suspect, and the likelihood of multiple perpetrators being involved. “It was the first empirical study of this nature,” says Stephen Porter, professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan and a practicing forensic psychologist. “We really had no literature to draw upon to come up with predictions, so it was very exploratory in nature.”