Lecture given by Dr Bill Tafoya on Offender Profiling at the The Henry Fielding Centre's
(University of Manchester, Manchester England) 1998 NCIS Conference.




It is a pleasure to be here with such a large collection of criminal intelligence analysts. I
want to share a couple of thoughts with you about the nature of our job and how what
you do now can be of help from a behavioural standpoint. The question is, just how can
you contribute to that, given all the complexities of the nature of what this mornings
speakers have talked about, the difficulties of disparate databases of different agencies
with different rules and regulations and different requirements for releasing information?
So the essence of my view is that, given your capabilities, given your understanding, given
your innate qualities there are a number of things that you can do to contribute.

First of all, Im indebted to the NCIS for a lovely evening last night discussing things and
formally talking about the context in which the data appears. Looked at in the abstract
there are many things that do not appear. For the conventionally-trained investigator who
looks at a crime scene and says, for example, why is this twig broken? why has the body
been positioned in this fashion? and then go on and say oh well and move on, much of
the context in which the serial offender commits a crime will be lost, so its critical to look
at the context in which the data you look at is collected, and secondly to integrate that
information, to integrate the disparate pieces of information which you find. Once youve
done these two things you are ready to step forward to collect your diploma as a
behavioural science analyst.

Let me talk a bit about the process in which behavioural scientists do their work,
behavioural science-trained investigators do their work at the FBI and in other places,
(some of them are here at this meeting. I was delighted to run into some colleagues,
people who Ive worked with over the years, Ron McKay whos retired from the RCMP,
whos now with a forensic behavioural analysis group). First of all it isnt an exact science.
My estimation that the nature of what this work has evolved to from the early
nineteen-seventies, when the original research was done by colleagues of mine, Bob
Russler, Roy Hazelwood, John Douglas, Ken Lanning and some others, that it has moved
from being mostly intuitive to being about eighty per cent science and somewhere in the
neighbourhood of twenty per cent art, with a smidgen of intuition. Theres still a need to
draw on ones instincts in integrating information and identifying context of information.
The proactive nature of the way in which this work can be utilised is evidenced by what
happened with the so-called Mardi Gras bomber here in the UK, its still causing
problems, but Ive noticed from the news accounts from a year ago in which the decision
was made not to publicise information about this persons activities, to todays situation of
letting that information go public to try to draw on knowledge in the community, I think is
a very important thing. That is probably the key that resulted in Theodore Kazynski (?),
now having just pleaded guilty to the crimes in the Unabomber case. The decision to go
public and to appeal to the publics support led directly to David Kayinski recognising the
writings in the manifesto.

Well, having said that theres a lot that can be gained from psychological profiling, its
important for investigators, its important for you as you get involved in the nature of this
facet of analysis, to remind people that this isnt the first tool that should be drawn upon.
Too often administrators want quick answers, quick solutions, and want to use profiling as
a means by which to do that. All other traditional investigative techniques ought to be
utilised before one goes to the toolbelt to pluck out psychological profiling.

The things that are required to do this are within your venue, that is they are the tools
which you have available and can make use of but require you to move totally from
keyboard to examining things like forensic evidence reports, looking at crime scene
photographs. I dont know how many of you are fans of American movies but theres a
recent American movie in which an analyst was able to accurately predict the movements
of a friendly force in enemy territory. Part of the ability to do that is not only to be able to
have the analytical skills to understand how to manipulate data in a computer environment
but also to be able to integrate information, to be able to look at the context in which that
information appears. So those of you who arent familiar with the movie Im talking
about, and want to look at it from an analysts perspective, you can check that out at the
movie theatres and the video stores, its GI Jane. The part of the movie that I thought was
very interesting was that traditional administrators looked at the integration she was
making of this data and were very chagrined about her using her intellect which turned out
to be right, they were about to call her wrong, so of course this is fiction but my
contention is we need to draw away from the typical ways in which we analyse
information, expand our views of what has been described in many circles as thinking
outside the box. I think as an analyst you need to think outside the box if youre going to
provide the best source of information and insight for administrators and decision-makers.

In terms of doing profiling from the standpoint of criminal investigation, its essential that
what you deal with is violent crime which has evidence of overkill rage. The process of
profiling has been successfully used for a number of years within the intelligence
community but the nature of this work has been described as personality assessment. Its
been used by all the three-letter agencies in America and by all the agencies in what was
referred to during World War Two as the Allied Services. In fact the very first effort to do
profiling was to try to predict the behaviour of Adolf Hitler.

Its important to look at the context of the data which youre looking for, and rather than
giving up try to assess what bit of information you have. Something as simple as a report
which indicates that a body is positioned in a certain way can be sufficient information to
start to identify whats called the signature of a serial killer. Theres a lot of confusion
about something called MO, modus operandi, that which the killer will, the pattern of
behaviour that often leads to the identification, but these people, serial killers, know that
law enforcement is looking for them and will alter their MO What they do not alter and
cannot alter is their signature; its that part of the MO which gives them satisfaction,
which gives them gratification for committing the crimes the way they do. And it could be
anything from clipping a lock of hair to positioning the body to taking a memento, any
number of things which are in the framework of MO are things which could be part of
signature and the signature is not going to change. And so it takes a very careful
observation to note what things are going on within an MO if you believe that the same
criminals responsible for a number of crimes - where some things have changed, what has
not changed? There is an important characteristic, Im a button pusher so I dont know
how I did this but I love the effect.

One of the first efforts since World War Two to use psychological profiling occurred in
New York City. A psychiatrist by the name of Brussell was endeavouring to identify a
fellow who later was called the Mad Bomber who later was identified as George
Mateski (?), who had a particular grudge against power companies in New York City. He
committed a number of bombings, and when I was asked about the comparisons between
the Mardi Gras bomber and Theodore Kazinski, in fact the papers have said that he may
be a copycat, it looks to me like the Mardi Gras bomber has a lot more in common with
George Mateski than he does with the Unabomber. First of all Theodore Kazinski knows
how to spell.

Fascinating what Dr. Rossell was able to do, to include the way he was dressed, the
manner and style of his dress, when he was arrested. That results in people looking at the
work of behavioural scientists as being some sort of voodoo or magic; it isnt, its very
carefully applied science in the context of the integration of information.

From the modern history of profiling, then, we move to the FBI Academy Quantico,
Virginia, where a man now long retired, Howard Teten, got the idea. He was teaching
criminology courses at the FBI Academy, it was his view that somebody ought to go out
and do intensive and extensive interviews of serial killers to try to identify patterns of their
behaviour. When this was first proposed to the leadership of the FBI they didnt think it
was a good idea so in the context of conducting training exercises that happened to be
adjacent to prisons around the country, my colleagues and I interviewed some of these
people in prison, after having developed a protocol, that we were able to find consistent
patterns of behaviour. The process now has, since the early eighties, has been very highly
endorsed by the FBI and has now been utilised in a number of different venues, including
here in the UK.

Lets talk about Ted. He was born in a suburb of Chicago, Evergreen, in 1942. His parents
were both immigrants who came to the United States with a particular mindset about the
role of education and emphasised that with their children, they had a very strong
commitment to education. David, seven years younger, is probably Theodore Kazinskis
equal intellectually. One of the things that we often have talked, well I say we, what
profilers often talk about where there are serial offences is that perhaps the most critical
parts of a series of investigations that need to be examined both by investigators and by
analysts is the first three or four incidents. You may know that it wasnt until the fourth
bombing by the Unabomber that the authorities recognised that who they had was a single
criminal offender. It wasnt possible to make that determination after the first, second or
third but by the fourth they were able to link forensically those four incidents together, and
thereafter look for the clues and the physical evidence that remained, that is, the forensic
analysis that remained, to link those together to the Unabomber.

But as I re-evaluate and examine the nature of what was done in those investigation, my
contention still is, and my colleagues at the FBI academy agree, that had the first three or
four investigations been reviewed from its context from a behavioural perspective, we
might have been able to get much closer to Theodore Kaczynski using the traditional
investigative means rather than relying on the brother to come forward.

So, whats my message to you as analysts? If youve got a series of investigations,
re-examine them, turn them over upside-down and backwards, look at the evidence which
you have in those early cases because those are the places where the criminal will have
made his most crucial mistakes, that will over the series of time perhaps be overlooked
because were so closely looking at the most recent incidents. Look at the first three or
four earliest incidents, thats where the mistakes will have been made.

At nine months, Theodore Kaczynski was hospitalised with what was then not
well-understood but believed to have been a communicable disease. And so at nine months
heres a child who is torn from everything that he knows and understands. He apparently
came out of that experience much differently than he went in. Would that have been used
by the prosecution? If they had had the means to do it I have no doubt that they would
have said its not his fault, its this early experience along with so many other things, but
theres so much evidence that the Unabomber task force, consisting of the FBI, the
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and the Post Inspection Service, were able to have such
evidence that would have been overwhelming had he gone to trial. And thats why he
pleaded guilty, because he knew that there was no chance that he was going to escape
conviction and that there was already a pre-determination made that the death penalty
would be sought.

Theodore Kaczynskis IQ is clearly into genius level. Most serial killers and serial rapists
have IQs well above average, in the range of about a hundred and twenty. Dont
underestimate the enemy. Dont underestimate the person that youre looking for. Theyre
very clever, they like to taunt, thats whats been alleged, at least in the newspapers, about
the Mardi Gras bomber. Theodore Kaczynski did that in a number of different ways before
the manifesto was published. Dont underestimate the person youre trying to target.

In terms of his formal education he was educated at Harvard, a university in
Massachusetts, and prepared his dissertation in such a unique area in mathematics that he
was assured right out of school one of the most prestigious offers that could have been
made to a brand new PhD from the mathematics department at the University of
California, Berkeley, where he promptly taught the most esoteric of graduate and
undergraduate courses that were available at the time, but became disenchanted because
perhaps of what he saw all around him in Massachusetts and then at Berkeley, the anti-war
protest and the realisation that the warped nature of the work that he was doing in
mathematics contributed to the war effort. Those are questions which the United States
Attorneys office and the FBI expect to get as part of the plea negotiations with Theodore
Kaczynski, having him fill in the blanks as to why he did what he did.

Perhaps this is the reason why traditional investigative means werent able to come up
with this man sooner, because investigations tend to be geared towards conducting
investigations in urban settings, not in remote rural mountain tops. The investigation itself
consisted of four different phases. The first phase was the period of time where the
bombings were first identified, through 1993 when he started again after a seven-year
hiatus. People asked why did he stop? if he gets a thrill out of what hes doing, why did
he stop? Its because he saw a composite sketch when he was seen at a computer sketch
in Sacramento, California, there was a composite drawn, and although it wasnt really
terribly close it was sufficiently close for him to believe that others would recognise him in
it, and I think thats why he went on the hiatus for seven years before he decided he had to
come back again, when he bombed in June of 1993.

The third phase that Im describing is from the point at which the last killing occurred until
Theodore Kazinski came forward, and then the period of time, I say to the present because
he fully satisfies the interview part of his negotiation for this plea, hes going to be
interviewed a number of times to get verification of the information that he is supplying,
that he will supply to the prosecution.

The first set of bombings occurred in Chicago, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and then
Chicago again. This is where the acronym comes, its not really an acronym, Unabomb
comes from the first four bombings, university airline bombing. It was the fact that
there were airlines, airline industry involved, airline executives involved, a flight from
Chicago OHare airport to Washington DC on which a device was placed, but fortunately
it didnt reach full conflagration. But these are the events that occurred and where they
occurred, and he was very clever in being able to identify victims by using them as return
address. In fact the very first bomb went to the person the package was addressed to. It
was left literally on the ground in the parking lot of the University of Chicago where I am
presently, people have said did I feel an irresistible impulse to go back there, I plead guilty,
but the device was found in a parking lot and then hand delivered back to the return
addressee, who was at North-Western University in Everson, Illinois, about an hour north
of Chicago.

This is a fabrication plant of Boeing Aircraft Corporation. One of the amusing parts of the
story is that the package sat there for months and months and it was so well prepared that
people were trying to figure out what it was. They started beating on it with a hammer,
now theres a clever technique that I urge you not to undertake.

The bombings in 1993 which resulted in the task force being re-invigorated occurred to a
physician, a geneticist, in a suburb of San Francisco, and then two days later, a
world-renowned computer scientist by the name of Didi Gardner (?) at his office in Yale
University. Thats what resulted in the task force being re-invigorated, and it was during
that time that all the records from all over the United States were brought together in one
place and re-evaluated, examined anew. That was done under the leadership of a fellow by
the name of George Clow whos now retired. But his administration, his determination to
bring these records together was very significant, because they had been in different places
around the country where the bombings had occurred previously.

My role in this investigation was not for purposes of being a profiler, although Im a
trained profiler. I was already in San Francisco when the bombings occurred. I had left the
FBI Academy in 1991 and was assigned to San Francisco, and when I was asked to be
part of this task force it was to conduct a victimology study. We interviewed, I
constructed a protocol of about fifteen hundred questions, sixteen pages in length, that
was intended to be automated, and run it against the databases that we had from different
systems dating back to the early 1960s. Imagine trying to do that; it was a Herculean task
that was able to be performed, but what we wanted to do was bump up this data about the
victims, what the victims had in common and find out what that might lead back to the
Unabomber. Well, it turned out that the only thing that they all had in common was that
they all made use of computers. So that didnt lead us very far.

But what I did, as a result of having never worked on the investigation during the time I
was at Quantico, was to collect the information which we needed to do a profile anyway,
and I wanted to find out how close my profile, completely independent of the one John
Douglas and others had done, what it would look like, and it was considerably different.
But it didnt come to surface at the time when it was done, which was August 1993,
because we had other things that we needed to do, and the administrators at the time,
following George Clows administration, felt that they had a profile already and didnt
need a new one.

Well, the warrants have been served, hes been arrested, hes been indicted, hes now pled
guilty and I said were in the dot right there, this is post-arrest interviews. The first one
was done in 1979, the first bombing occurred in 1978. In 1985 there was another one
done in Quantico and then mine done in San Francisco. There was subsequently another
one after I retired in 1985, two over, one at Quantico and one in San Francisco. How did
mine differ? I said he was ten years older than the earlier profiles. The earlier profile said
that he had a college degree, perhaps but probably in the behavioural sciences. I said, uh
huh, this guys got a degree, its probably a graduate degree, maybe a PhD, in
mathematics or electrical engineering. My reason for being so specific was that I had the
advantage of the most recent bombings of 1993 that the older ones didnt have. I had also
the advantage of being able to look at the increased sophistication of the devices. The
laboratory was able to provide such comprehensive information that enabled me to judge
the evolution of these devices which nobody could have picked out of the Anarchists
Cookbook of some other How To Bomb For Dummies book. These were techniques that
required a very sophisticated kind of knowledge, and thats who it turned out to be.

As it relates to a loner, Im working on a book now about the nature of the investigation
and what was done in that investigation, and one of the anecdotes that will be in the book
that Ill share with you now, you might find amusing. During the time of the task force I
had a difficult time persuading some of the members of the task force that being a loner
didnt mean that he was an isolationist. I said it was possible for a serial killer, and they
often are loners, but loners means that they conduct their business in secret. Its possible
for a serial offender to have a special room that nobodys allowed to go into. If hes
married, hes got it padlocked, if hes living with Mom or sister, hes got this room, its
off-limits to everybody else. So in that way what hes doing is like a loner. But one fellow
couldnt comprehend this so I went a step further, and, given my propensity for alliteration
I said Look, he doesnt have to be a monk on a mountain-top in Montana, and I was
simply alliterating, and after Theodore Kaczynski was arrested I got several phone calls
from some of the people on the task force who said how did I know? and I said I cant
take credit for that.

His motivation I think is interesting, comes from the UK, those of you that probably know
about nineteenth century, Ned Ludd and his efforts were not any more successful than
Theodore Kaczynskis were, to stop the drive of technology. He murdered three people,
he injured twenty-three others, it could have easily been twenty-three others killed if that
device had correctly exploded on that aircraft. The manifesto, the recognition of it, its
simultaneous publication in the Washington Post and the New York Times, led to
Theodore Kaczynskis arrest and recognition by his brother.

One of the tools that we made use of was the internet and the World Wide Web. The FBI
didnt have at that time the computer equipment available to make use of this, so I drew
on some friendships that I had at NASA, they made computers available to use to put up
the information that was then available to us, this has subsequently been moved to FBI
computers.

Let me say in closing that I really do believe that the nature of the work that you do as
analysts often goes unappreciated and unrecognised. Youve got some kudos from the
speakers whove been here before, I want to add mine to those, to say that the work that
you do is very important. Dont allow yourself to be closeted. Be willing to look at the
context of the information that youre reviewing, because in the abstract its of no use.
Ive talked to a number of investigators who have said in frustration at looking at what an
analyst does, taking days to provide data, is obvious on its face. I think that most
investigators want you to draw on your resources, on your understanding of the context of
the information and to render an opinion on what this means, not simply regurgitate what
comes out of the computer. So I think that there is an important role for you as analysts,
and being able to make use of behavioural assessment, not simply to be taking data and
dumping it from one place to another. And by doing that you can increase the value of the
role you play for your agency, as well as helping perhaps to stop further victimisations and
other people from being killed. Its been a pleasure to be here with you, to be a part of this
conference, to be a part of this organisation and the University of Manchesters vision to
be the host for this kind of gathering, because I think that the merger between
practitioners and scholars is whats going to lead us to identify a lot more criminals in the
near-term future. I thank you very much for your time and attention.