The Single-Scene Profile

JonBenét Ramsey

Many people believe that in order to be accurate or helpful, behavioral profiling of criminal incidents requires more than a single crime scene, but that's not necessarily true. Obviously, the more behavior one has to work with, the more material there is for deriving an interpretation and for having one's interpretations confirmed, but a single crime scene can yield just as much information about an offender as a series. Thus, the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, apparently a one-time incident, can be profiled in a way similar to how we view multiple crimes linked to a single offender. In any crime, we have just as much behavioral evidence to work with as the offender leaves behind, and in this case, there was quite a lot.

With such incidents, we consider the time of day the crime occurred, the type of crime it was, the type of weapon used, whether it was high risk for the victim or high risk for the perpetrator, how it was accomplished, and whether there was evidence of mental illness or fantasy rituals. In addition, the offender might have left trace evidence behind or taken items away, any of which can help us to judge his or her comfort level with that type of crime, and his or her degree of criminal sophistication. In addition, we can take an educated guess about the offender's motivation, his or her experience with other types of crimes, and his or her possible level of education and type of work, was well as age and race. Some of these items are trickier than others, so we're always careful to alert the local law enforcement who use a profile not to exclude suspects based on criteria about which we're less certain.

While we're at a disadvantage with a single-scene incident, because it's difficult to examine such aspects as escalation, the amount of time that has passed between crimes, and whether there's a clear preference or signature that transfers from one incident to the next, we can nevertheless make a useful list from items that we discover at the scene. The story on Crime Library has laid out the facts and subsequent events, so we'll describe only those items about the crime and the victim that we need for a profile.