A young woman is busy teaching hardened police about the importance of early-age fixations in serial killers. Jan Taljaard reports
WHEN in 1982 John Duffy embarked on a raping and killing spree that would eventually earn him the name of Britain’s Railway Ripper, initial investigations threw up a possible 5000 suspects.
Two years, 18 rapes and three deaths later, detectives had accumulated enough forensic evidence to narrow the number of suspects down, on the strength of blood tests, to 1999. Then a psychological profile of the killer was run against existing profiles of the remaining suspects. The computer came up just the one name: John Duffy.
While the matching of crimes to psychological profiles may not be infallible, the technocratic FBI swears by the method, claiming that psychological profiles play an integral part in identifying up to 77 percent of such criminals.
And the South African Police Service — emerging from an era where the investigation of crime was often left to less-than-sophisticated devices — is currently in the process of establishing its own branch of what is provisionally known as “forensic psychology”. Two recent examples of local serial killings, the Cleveland and Station Strangler cases, perhaps emphasise the need for such a branch.
The woman picked to preach the new gospel to what may seem to be a cynical breed of murder and robbery detectives is 33-year-old psychologist Micki Pistorius. Appointed last year to help establish the Forensic Psychology branch, she returned this week from running a course for 28 detectives from various murder and robbery units on the investigation of serial rapes and killings.
Explains Pistorius: “The major difference between solving a serial killing with sexual undertones and investigating most other killings is the number of suspects. In most ordinary murder cases, one looks to the immediate family or acquaintances, but in serial killings the perpetrator is on average one of 2000 initial suspects.
“The victims are rarely known to the killer, but usually answer only to some deep-rooted fixation that found its way into the killer’s psyche long before the killing started.”
Very Freudian in her views on the source of these fixations, Pistorius acknowledges detractors of the good doctor’s theories, but points out that the correlation between the psychological make-up of known serial killers and their early environment is simply too solid to be purely incidental. So strongly does she hold to her beliefs that she is pursuing a doctorate on the early-age fixations of serial killers.
Without getting too involved in the possibility that a cigar may sometimes be something else, Pistorius believes that clues picked up at the scene of a crime may point to the nature and degree of the fixation — which may in turn serve as a pointer to the killer’s psychological make-up and the kind of environment the killer comes from. This leads to the psychological profile and the provisional elimination of suspects not answering to the profile.
There is generally a lack of physical evidence left behind by serial killers at the scene of a crime, she says, so detectives have to be taught not to overlook the psychological clues. These may be subtle, such as the positioning of the victim’s shoes; or more blatantly brutal, such as breasts hacked from a victim.
Pistorius believes each clue may point to a different personality with a different childhood trauma. Together with many other factors, these psychological clues may eventually help to crack the case. She reiterates that a psychological profile is merely one tool among many used by the detectives.
Pistorius’ course focuses on many other factors that come into play during the investigation of serial killings. These include pressure from the media, the community and even politicians, and a virtual mountain of sometimes unrelated information provided by such parties to the police. While any bit of this information may eventually lead to a breakthrough, she says, it also necessitates a laborious process of eliminating leads and often throws up evidence of other, if unrelated, sex crimes, such as the existence of child abuse rings.
While the 28 detectives have yet to try out their newly learnt skills, Pistorius has already been involved in the psychological profiling of the alleged killers in both the Cleveland and Station Strangler cases. The fledging science may be put to its first proper test this week when the suspect in the latter case goes to trial. — DigiNews