By Chuck Hustmyre

(Continued)

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NOT MUCH HELP

It wasn't a profile that caught serial killer Shawn Vincent Gillis. It was hard detective work.

Ask any veteran homicide detective or sex crimes investigator and they will likely agree that FBI criminal profiles are often wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Sometimes tragically wrong.

A criminal profile is a speculative tool designed to reduce the number of potential suspects in a case by describing perpetrators based on their behavior. A profile is supposed to allow investigators to focus on people who match the profile and ignore those who don't. In some cases profiles have focused investigators on the wrong people. They have delayed investigations and gotten in the way of catching the real killers. In a few cases, that delay has likely cost lives.

Zachary, La. police detective Lt. David McDavid found out the hard way about the dangers of criminal profiling. In July 2002, he tried to tell the Baton Rouge Serial Killer Task Force that the man they were looking for in connection with the brutal slayings of several women was a local pervert named Derrick Todd Lee. The task force brass took one look at Lee's picture and told McDavid to go home. Lee was black. The FBI profile said the killer was white.

Nearly a year later, and after the deaths of two more women, cops got a DNA match on Lee and charged him with killing seven women. He has since been convicted and sentenced to die by lethal injection.

In a January 2003 article in Monitor on Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association, Mary Lindahl, an associate professor of forensic psychology at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., commented on the botched profiling in the Washington, D.C. sniper case. "Profiling is really an art, not a science," Lindahl said. "The public could profile as well as the experts on TV...but most (experts) were wrong."

Even when the criminal profiles are right, they rarely help working detectives solve crimes. What good does it do for a detective to know that the killer might be a white male who can't hold down a job and whose mommy was mean to him? That kind of speculation doesn't do a lot to help shorten the suspect list.

Asked how effective a criminal profile is in helping cops actually catch criminals, a veteran sex crimes detective told Crime Library, "It doesn't help at all as far as I can see."

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Sean Vincent Gillis Has Confessed To Killing, Mutilating Eight Women

See Feature Story on Derrick Todd Lee

See Feature Story on Baton Rouge Serial Killer

Contact Chuck Hustmyre at chuck3174@yahoo.com

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