Authors: Paul Britton
The senior officer returned to London and a few days later he telephoned to say that senior counsel had agreed with me. I was relieved because I didn’t want to publicize my involvement. Until then, my work for the police had been entirely confidential. Not even my superiors at the Leicestershire Health Authority knew of my extra-curricular activities, although the time was coming when this had to change.
After a three month trial at the Old Bailey in London, Rodney Whitchelo was found guilty of six counts of blackmail, making a threat to kill Heinz customers and two charges of contaminating tins of Pedigree Chum. He was sentenced to seventeen years imprisonment.
Yet the impact of his crimes will endure for much longer than his incarceration and touch all of us each time we shop in a supermarket. Thousands of foodstuffs are now packaged in special tamper-resistant shrink-wrapping. We now pay two or three pence more for every jar of baby food, jam, soup and sauce
etc.
that we buy.
It also led to changes in how people open bank and building society accounts. Police called for tougher restrictions on the opening of accounts, still shocked by how easily Whitchelo had set up his plot using bogus names and never having to set foot into a branch office.
Equally, having become instant experts in how computer transactions worked in the banking system, detectives were horrified by the potential for fraud and extortion. High-level meetings were held with financial regulators to discuss the implications.
Back at home the Pedigree Chum went back into the cupboard and Jess showed no sign of having been deprived.
Throughout history there have been theories and studies that have tried to identify and understand the criminal mind. In hindsight, some of these seem quite bizarre. The French prison surgeon Lauvergne made plaster casts of his patients’ heads to demonstrate ‘degenerate’ features of the skull; and Professor Cesare Lombroso, an Italian doctor, devised a whole range of strange measuring instruments to support his theories that various classes of criminals had very particular ‘faces’. For example, assassins had prominent jaws, widely separated cheekbones, thick dark hair, scanty beards and pallid faces.
Modern research into ‘criminal man’ is rooted on more precise scientific principles. Forensic psychology is an area of expertise that emerged from two separate strands - from the prison system, where psychologists have worked for many years both with individual prisoners and also to find the most effective regimes for running the prisons themselves, and also from the special hospitals and regional secure-units where people who offend as a consequence of mental abnormality are detained, assessed and treated.
This task of clinically interviewing, assessing and treating people has always been at the heart of my work, but it soon became important to me to understand the broader psychological aspects of offending and offenders. What could make a person abduct, rape, kill, torture or abuse another human being? What were the developmental processes that moulded them and sent them along this particular path?
When I first described to David Baker the psychological characteristics that later proved to match Paul Bostock and Colin Pitchfork, my analysis arose from an understanding of both sexual dysfunction and sexually deviant personalities. This understanding came from the psychological literature and my own direct clinical experience. Although sexual psychopaths are relatively rare in the general population, there are quite a number of men like this within our prisons, special hospitals and regional secure-units. Some prey on children, others stalk and rape women, a few target men. Some are responsible for murder. Mercifully, many are identified early in their ‘careers’ before they have caused maximum damage. As each of these people is caught, more is learned about their backgrounds, psychopathology and especially their motivation.
In painstaking clinical interviews their life-stories are dissected - their childhood, schooling, employment, accommodation, hobbies, sexuality, relationships and offending sequences are probed over and over again. Of course they lie, not only to the clinician, but also to themselves. Nothing can be taken at face value, the facts have to be winnowed from the rationalization. Their accounts are checked and rechecked with other sources such as family, social workers, teachers, friends and court and medical records. It is a continual contest that we can’t afford to lose.
Eventually in this process, a series of pictures emerges of a person at various points throughout his or her life. These personality structures and motivations are then compared with those of others who may not yet have killed but who share many of the same characteristics. Comparisons are also made with ordinary men and women, who have developed in a normal way, so that we can determine what factors may separate them from each other. By exploring these things in minute detail, we have an even bigger database to work on.
When I first sat down to draw up a psychological profile, this was the knowledge that underpinned my conclusions. There are thousands of deviant personality structures, all of them individual, but many of the core elements are the same. It’s like looking at different houses yet knowing that each one is going to have a bathroom, a kitchen and a lounge.
When profiling an offender, the details of their crime are set against this bedrock of knowledge. Everything about it, the location, timing, weapon, victim, ferocity of the attack and degree of planning, says something about the person responsible. It’s all in the detail. If you miss it, you are lost and if you don’t understand what you’re looking at, you won’t see it anyway. It is like going into an Egyptian tomb and seeing the walls are covered by hieroglyphics. Knowing the language, syntax and the grammar you can read the messages and understand more about the people who built the tomb. But if you don’t know how to read the writing, the carvings are just pretty pictures on the wall, with no relevance whatsoever, or worse, are misinterpreted and lead to completely the wrong conclusions.
Perhaps a better analogy is that of a jigsaw puzzle. Take, for example, the four questions I ask myself at the start of every investigation - what happened, how did it happen, who is the victim and why did it happen? Only when I have these answers can I tackle the most important question -who was responsible?
To find the answers, I have to sift through an enormous amount of information and decide which pieces I can rely upon and which are less certain, or can be totally ignored. It’s like working on several jigsaw puzzles at the one time. One puzzle will tell me what happened, another will reveal how it happened, a third will tell me about the victim and a fourth will show me the likely motivation of the offender. When completed, each of these puzzles then becomes a vital piece in a much larger jigsaw that will help me identify the psychological characteristics of the offender.
Despite having advised in numerous cases by 1990, I had very little interest in the history of psychological profiling or, as it was better known, offender profiling. Wrapped up in my clinical and consultancy work, I had little time or inclination to look at what was happening elsewhere. My police work had been done in my spare time, entirely unpaid. My only stipulation had been that I remain anonymous.
This changed in the middle 1980s, when out of the blue I received an invitation to attend a meeting at the Home Office hosted by John Stevens, a law graduate and chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Crime Sub-Committee on Offender Profiling.
John had first hand experience of investigating major violent crime having reached his ACPO rank by way of the CID, serving for some years as a Detective Chief Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police.
ACPO is one of the most powerful bodies in British policing as it brings together the most senior police officers from the forty or so forces in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Accepting the invitation, I found myself sitting around a table with various senior police officers, civil servants, psychologists and mental health professionals. The meeting had been called to discuss ‘offender profiling’ and to explore its future development. Independently, others had been working in this area and it had been recognized that the early results looked promising and it was time to clarify exactly what should happen next.
Everyone around the table introduced themselves and had their say - some more assertively than others - and when the meeting broke up it had been agreed that a strategy should be developed for the future that would expand the understanding and use of offender profiling.
I heard nothing more about this for several years when I received a telephone call from Detective Superintendent Ian Johnston of the Police Requirements Support Unit (PRSU). Set up originally as a link between the Home Office and the police service to ensure that the police had what they needed, the PRSU had also taken on a research and development role, looking at advances in law enforcement around the world in training, equipment and technology. One of the areas that had come under scrutiny was offender profiling.
Johnston wanted to come and talk to me and we eventually met in an old professorial office at Leicester University after I’d given one of my regular lectures on forensic clinical psychology to third-year students. A vastly practical and entertaining man, Johnston was the archetypal battle-hardened, rugby-playing Welsh policeman. He had a college-boy haircut, a stocky build and plastic-framed glasses that almost looked like a Clark Kent disguise.
He tiptoed cautiously around the subject of his visit until revealing that the PRSU wanted to research and evaluate offender profiling and he wanted to discuss how he might do this. In particular, he wanted to follow up all the work that had been done over recent years to see if it was proving useful to police.
We chatted generally about the issue and then he revealed that several years earlier the Home Office had committed a significant amount of research money to the construction of a database to contain information about sexual murders and rapes and the sort of people who commit them. This was to deliver an operational service, whereby police from around the country could contact the project and obtain offender profiles based upon the database.
The money had led to the creation of the Offender Profiling Research Unit in the psychology department of Surrey University under the directorship of Dr David Canter. I had met Dr Canter at the Home Office and learned of his profiling work with Surrey CID - in particular the case of John Francis Duffy, ‘the Railway Rapist’, who murdered three women and raped at least twenty others before being captured in 1987.
Since being established, the Offender Profiling Research Unit had reportedly been involved in more than fifty rape and murder investigations and helped jail a dozen dangerous criminals. However, according to Johnston, this success hadn’t been verified and, having funded the project, the Home Office wanted to make sure it was getting value for money.
Obviously, the simplest way of gauging the success of an offender profile is to match it against the outcome of the case. How accurate is it? Did it lead to the offender being arrested and charged? Did it positively influence the direction of the inquiry?
Johnston agreed, but unfortunately he was having trouble getting hold of the profiles from the Surrey project. So instead, he wanted to tackle it from the other direction by sending out a questionnaire to the various police forces, asking about their experiences with profilers.
‘If I draft a questionnaire and send it to you, would you look it over?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I said, assuming this would take him some time. Surprisingly, it arrived within two days.
After giving my opinions, I heard from Johnston regularly over the next year on a whole range of issues. His analysis of offender profiling seemed to stall and he asked me to evaluate various research proposals and independent reports prepared for the PRSU, including studies into stress and sickness rates in the police force and the impact on emergency personnel of disasters such as the Lockerbie terrorist bombing and the Piper Alpha oil-rig fire.
At about this time an organizational review within the Home Office led to the formation of the Police Research Group, which would eventually take over many of the key areas of investigation and development formerly handled by the PRSU. During this changeover I had a call from a middle-ranking mandarin in the Home Office saying that the department wished to formally review offender profiling.
In a wonderful blend of diplomatic-speak that was couched with sub-clauses and provisos he told me that the whole area had to be independently reviewed because the Government had been asked to put another significant amount of money into offender profiling, but had been unable to find out if the investment already made had been worthwhile.
He came to see me in Leicester and asked me how I thought such a review should be undertaken. We spent a long time talking and I told him what quality checks were needed. In due course, he came back and said, ‘Would you carry out the review?’ I didn’t anticipate this. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘I think the idea is very worthwhile.’ ‘Well, come to London and we’ll talk about it.’ I think they chose me for several reasons. Importantly, I wasn’t part of any previously funded initiatives and had never been paid for my profiling work, so there was no question of me having a financial stake in its future. At the same time, my own work in this area had been effective.
In London I met with the head of the Police Research Group, Dr Gloria Laycock, previously a psychologist who had worked in the prison service for many years. There were to be several elements in the review. On the one hand, it was a user survey - what did the police want from offender profiling? This would mean interviewing senior policy-making police officers such as John Stevens and also senior practising detectives from around the country.
It also had to look at the product and see what had happened so far. How accurate and valuable had existing offender profiles been when compared to the outcomes of cases? At the same time, it was important to see what work was being done elsewhere, by the FBI in America and European police forces.