Body Dump by Fred Rosen

Author:Fred Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497697201
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Ten

August 26, 1998

The task force’s existence was finally made public. The press and, in turn, the public, was let in on the secret. There were now five cops working full-time, representing three police agencies, to track the killer down.

Commenting in the local press, one former director of the FBI’s “elite behavioral sciences unit” maintained that the disappearance of the women was not coincidental. He stated the obvious when he said, “Prostitutes make easy targets.” Another former FBI profiler quoted in the same article said essentially the same thing. For the public reading such statements, it sounded like the Federal agents really knew what they were talking about.

They didn’t.

The FBI first decided to take a proactive stance against serial killers in 1978. Dr. Maurice Godwin in Hunting Serial Predators, his revolutionary text on the subject, writes, “The impetus for the project was to conduct personal interviews with serial murderers about their crimes in order to find out how they were successful at avoiding capture.”

According to Godwin, the idea was “to use interviews with convicted killers as the basis for constructing future classifications, which then could be used to aid police investigations.” What followed were a series of interviews with 36 convicted offenders, “of whom 25 were defined as serial murderers (i.e., the killing of three or more individuals over time).” Those interviews took place between 1979 and 1983.

The FBI serial murder project was given added attention in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980’s due to public outcry over the murder of a six-year-old boy in Florida by a serial murderer. According to Godwin, due to public pressure, the FBI serial murder project was brought to the forefront and given the necessary U.S. government funding, which eventually led to a unit being established in Quantico, Virginia, called the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU).

“The primary purpose of the serial murder project was to use interviews with convicted killers as a basis for constructing future classifications, which then could be used to aid police investigations,” wrote Godwin. But the project was founded on a house of cards.

Before questioning, information on each offender and their crimes was obtained through the usual police channels—physical evidence, court transcripts, crime-scene photos, autopsy reports, victim reports, psychiatric reports and prison records. Questions were then put together in an unstructured checklist.

What made all of this essentially a house of cards with little or no validity was that according to Godwin, “no detailed analysis of this material has ever been presented. Instead, a simple dichotomy was claimed to emerge from the project by which offenders were classified as either organized or disorganized. The assignment of the offenders to either the organized or disorganized category was based on the appearance of the victim’s attire or nudity, the exposure of the victim’s sexual parts, the insertion of foreign objects in body cavities, or evidence of sexual intercourse.”

The idea, according to the FBI, was to create a major subcategory of serial murderers—sex-related murders where motive was often lacking. Therefore, where the murderer was emotional and seemingly disorganized, interpreted from his actions at the crime scene, there was no motive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.