- People often ask whether it's nature or nurture
that creates a serial killer.
Well it's actually both, and more.
I like to say that genetics loads the gun,
personality and psychology aim it,
and your experiences pull the trigger.
Your genetics give you the potentiality to be a killer,
but your personality and psychology are the filter
through which you experience, and they can shade
how you come away from any event in your life.
[upbeat music]
I'm Jim Clemente, I'm a retired FBI Supervisory
Special Agent and Profiler in the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
As a profiler, my job was to hunt down child abductors,
serial rapists, and serial killers.
We help out where forensics fail.
If we look at how the crime was committed,
that leads us to why the crime was committed,
and that leads us to who committed the crime.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit is part
of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime,
and as such, we study all violent and sexual crimes
across this country, and much of it around the world,
so that we can then train law enforcement
so that they can get the benefit
of our research in our training.
The original FBI profilers, Degall, John Douglas,
Roy Hazlewood, Robert Ressler, Pete Semerak,
they gained this body of knowledge
by actually going into prisons
and interviewing convicted serial killers.
They interview them in great detail about what they did,
and also how they grew up and how they felt
during the entire time that they were killing people,
developing this criminal expertise,
and that they were getting away with these crimes.
For example, from Ed Kemper, they learned that he had
a very difficult relationship with his mother,
so he started killing surrogates in place of her,
and then he killed his mother.
David Berkowitz showed how sexual frustration
can be taken out on innocent people
on the streets of New York.
From Ted Bundy, they learned that he was a sexual sadist,
that he got off on causing and witnessing the pain
and suffering of others.
But he did that many times by using his psychopathic charm
to lure in victims, and he feigned injury
so that it was the people who wanted to help him
that he ended up killing.
So now we have an amazing volume of institutional knowledge
about these offenders, and it tells us how they killed
and why they killed, and it helps us to hunt them down.
Criminal profiling is basically reverse engineering a crime.
We look at the victimology, the choice of the victims.
We look at the crime scene,
we look at the organization level,
and then pre-imposed events behavior, and together
all those things tell us the kind of person
who committed the crime.
Victimology is the study of the victim,
their life, their desires, their education,
their daily routine, because an offender picks
a particular victim, at a particular place,
at a particular time, an imparticular manner
for a particular purpose, and all those choices
leak out information about the offender,
about their skills and abilities, about their desires,
and they can lead us right back to the offender.
The crime location can tell us a lot.
Did the crime occur on a farm in the middle of Iowa
where the only potential witnesses
are a bunch of cows and pigs?
Or did it happen in New York City's Times Square,
where at any given moment there may be
50 to 100,000 potential eye witnesses.
Pulling off a crime in either of those locations
tells you a lot about the offender.
At the crime scene, we look at the offender's behavior,
how much time did they spend there?
What was their interaction with the victims?
And what was their criminal sophistication level?
The choice of weapons that an offender uses at a crime scene
reveals a tremendous amount of information about them.
Did the offender use a gun
and kill somebody from a distance?
Or did they get up close and personal and use a knife?
That's a different kind of person
who typically is engaged in different kinds
of profession than somebody who will not
get up close and personal.
Next we look at the offender's organization level.
The two types of offenders that we see
are on a spectrum between organized and disorganized.
The organized offender will plan it in events,
fantasize about committing the crime,
and then bring all the implements necessary
to commit the crime, and then take them away with him
after the crime.
Whereas the disorganized offender is impulsive,
they don't plan the crimes out in events.
They may have lowered inhibitions
because of drug or alcohol use, and they basically pick up
the implements along the way, and may leave them behind,
leaving a lot of forensic evidence
for law enforcement to find.
If an offender doesn't have a very high skill level
in terms of getting access to victims,
they'll pick victims who lead very high risk lives,
prostitutes and drug addicts,
whereas a very sophisticated offender
will be able to acquire victims in the privacy
and security of their own homes.
It takes a much different level of criminal sophistication
to be able to accomplish those two different crimes.
The next level of criminal behavioral analysis
is looking at pre and post-offense behavior.
If they're organized offenders,
they probably did pre-offense surveillance
to check out the location, maybe even surveil
potential victims and stalk them.
Also we find that offenders, after they commit
a serious criminal offense, they'll have behavioral changes
that people around them might see.
For example, if an offender has committed
an abduction and murder, they would likely leave the area,
making up an excuse, an emergency, to get out of town,
and they wouldn't return until everything calmed down
and they felt that it was safe to come back.
Building a profile is simply taking
all of those five factors and looking at
what information the offender leaks out
by behaving in those particular ways.
When I analyze a crime scene,
I look at various types of evidence, some of which
we have here, pictures inside the house
where the crime occurred, crime scene photographs,
autopsy pictures, as well as an affidavit
summarizing the facts of the case
and the crime scene description.
Typically I'd like to ask a lot more questions
and get much more data, but I think we have enough,
at least now, to start a preliminary profile.
So I'm looking at a case of a double homicide
of a male and female.
The male appears to be in his early 20s,
he was shot about five times.
He has an unknown relationship to the female victim,
who appears to have been pregnant, and she was shot
seven to eight times in her face and head and upper torso.
It also appears that the male
may have scrawled in grease several letters.
He's found on the floor of the backroom buy the backdoor.
She's found in a room next to it, half hanging off the bed
with her head on a couch that's pushed up
right next to the bed.
It appears that she was first shot
while she was laying on her back on the bed,
and that she either rolled over to try to get away,
or was flipped over by someone and shot again,
where she died in place.
My first impressions are that the male victim
was killed first, that he was a practical kill
to get him out of the way, whereas the female victim
was shot multiple times in the chest,
and at least once in the face, and another time in the head.
She appears to be the main target of this attack.
So if we start with victimology,
we know that the first victim, the male,
grew up in this town and had left town
for several years and came back.
He's got no known criminal history,
yet, in this house, $11,000 in cash was found,
three and a half pounds of marijuana was found,
and powdery substance that appeared to be drugs
was also found.
That tells me that they were engaged
in a high risk activity, drug trafficking.
But, the fact that the drugs and the money were left behind
tells me there's a high probability
that this was not a drug related hit.
I believe that if drug dealers were involved in this,
they would've taken the drugs
and they would've taken the cash.
This tells me there's a level of immaturity
in this offender, somebody who didn't
have the presence of mind to search for these things,
or didn't even think that they might be there.
I would put the intelligence level
of the offender at mid to low because they made
a flimsy attempt at cleaning up after themselves.
That could also mean that their inhibitions were diminished
by drugs or alcohol.
Something that's particularly unusual in this crime scene
is the letters that are scrawled on the floor,
apparently by the male victim with grease
that was squirted onto the floor.
They attempt, it appears to spell out a name, J-F-F,
and then under that, B-O-P-E,
sort of a last dying declaration.
This could indicate either a person or some kind of motive.
As a Criminal Behavioral Analyst, I wanna determine
whether this is an actual message
that was left by the dying male, or whether this is staging
in order to misdirect investigators.
So I'd like to know if he had grease
on one or more of his hands or fingers,
and whether or not he was left handed or right handed,
and whether or not that was the hand
that had the grease on it.
The organization level of this crime is fairly low,
even though the offender brought the gun he used
to commit the murders with him,
he left forensic evidence behind.
Now that tells me he doesn't have
a very high level of forensic or criminal sophistication.
When we look at pre-imposed offense behavior,
since it doesn't look like
he's very criminally sophisticated, this could be
one of the only times he committed a crime like this,
and I believe that he may have gone into a panic afterwards.
I would think that somewhere between
where he committed these crimes and where he went,
you would find the weapon in a dumpster, a body of water,
or a place he thought it would be hidden.
I would also expect somebody like that
to make an excuse to either leave the area
or leave town for a period of time
til everything calms down.
So in this case, I believe that how the victims were killed
tells us a story.
I believe he was a practical kill
and she was the target of this double homicide.
Also the fact that she was pregnant may indicate
that the why was jealousy and that there was another person,
sort of a love triangle here,
and that the person responsible was the third person
in this love triangle, or a family member.
In the D.C. Sniper Case, the entire Washington D.C. area
was terrorized for 23 days.
A number of random people were shot and killed or injured.
It turns out, this was a longer spree
that had started in the state of Washington
and spanned the entire country.
So I became involved in the case
because I was working in the Behavioral Analysis Unit
at the time and we consulted on the investigation.
Immediately this case presented
as if it were a spree killer, six murders
in the space of 27 hours.
So we didn't think he was targeting
a particular type of group,
the victimology was completely random.
Typically in spree cases, the offender is on the run
and commits murder after murder after murder,
but decompensates over that time, the rush of adrenaline
and the excitement and the fear of getting away,
all those things can cause an offender
to make more mistakes as time goes on,
but in this case that wasn't happening.
The shootings themselves indicated
that there was pre-attack surveillance.
This offender planned and executed six murders
within the space of 27 hours, and was a ghost.
No one even saw him.
That told us right away that he had
a certain level of calm, cool, and collectedness,
that he was probably in his mid to late 40s,
and had police or military training.
But more than that, he must've actually had experience,
on the streets as a police officer, or on the battlefield.
Because pulling the trigger on a paper target is one thing,
but taking the life of an unknown individual
is a whole nother matter.
So when we started the profile,
we based it only on statistics,
and statistically snipers are in their 40s or 50s,
white males, and they have a grudge against society
or somebody in particular
that they take out on their victims.
Another thing about snipers is that they have a God complex.
They wanna take life from afar and above
so they can feel omnipotent, like God.
And because of that, it's very important
to appease them and not challenge them.
Unfortunately, that's not what law enforcement
was doing at the time.
They called them a coward and they said the streets are safe
and the schools are safe, so the sniper shot a kid
walking into school the next day.
But they left a Tarot card, the death card,
and on that card there was indications of duality.
First of all it said, "Call me God,"
which reinforced our opinion
that the sniper had a God complex, and it went on to say,
"This is for you, Mr. Police," and that looks as though
the writer is looking up to the police,
calling them Mr. Police.
It also has it's origins in a number of reggae songs,
so that could mean that the offender
had a Caribbean influence.
But then it said, "Do not release to the press."
And press is an older word, something that older people use,
which is consistent with the level of sophistication
of planning and executing these crimes,
but not consistent with looking up to the police.
So for the first time, we had to consider
whether this offender was calm, cool, and collected
when he plans and executes his murders,
but he decompinsates when he's writing, or,
for the first time in US history, we have a sniper team.
One older, in his mid 40s, and one younger, in his teens.
But the fact is that we know that because snipers
have a God complex, they don't work well together.
So I theorized that the older one
was actually controlling the younger one,
and I went as far as saying that he may be controlling him
through sexual victimization because that would give him
complete control over the younger person.
In fact, 10 years after they were caught and convicted,
Malvo disclosed that Muhammad
had been sexually victimizing him the whole time.
So in the end, our profile was that of two snipers
working together, both African American,
one in his mid 40s having police or military training
and experience, one in his teens.
Once we released that profile and because of other work
that the FBI was doing parallel that reinforced our profile,
Muhammad and Malvo were arrested within 24 hours.
Developing the profile in the DC Sniper case
was groundbreaking because in the vast majority
of previous sniper cases in the United States of America,
they were committed by lone offenders
who were white, male, who were in their 40s or 50s,
with a particular grudge, and this case
blew that profile to pieces.
As Criminal Behavioral Analysts,
we look at how the offender committed the crime,
and determine why they committed the crime,
and that leads us to who committed the crime.
In many of these cases, local law enforcement
has absolutely no idea who committed the crime and no leads,
but Criminal Behavioral Analysis can generate leads
as to the type of person who committed the crime,
and in many cases across the country,
Criminal Behavioral Analysis has lead
to the identification, arrest,
and conviction of the offenders.
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