Shallow Graves by Maureen Boyle

Author:Maureen Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

BRINGING IN “OUTSIDE” EXPERTS to the case was the next step for the district attorney’s office. Ron wasn’t shy about asking federal agencies or nationally known forensic experts, such as Douglas Ubelaker, for help in the past and if there was ever a case where extra help was needed, this was it. Others in the office suggested one of the FBI’s units could offer needed insights into the case.

Jose wasn’t sure what to expect as he and Maryann sat down with the three FBI criminal profilers on January 11, 1989. The agents had met with a few members of the district attorney’s staff earlier that day and now they wanted to talk with the investigators in the field. Jose had read about the work the Behavioral Science Unit at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, was doing and he was intrigued. In theory, the unit could develop a criminal profile of a suspect by evaluating the crime, the crime scene, the victim, and the range of autopsy and police reports. The profilers could also give them suggestions on how to interview potential suspects. Details about the highway killing case had already been sent to FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), a database created in 1985 to compare and contrast murder and other violent-crime cases. The VICAP computer system would generate a computer printout ranking the top ten matches in the database that would then be given to a crime analyst.7 In theory, if the killer from Bristol County moved on, analysts would be able to identify similarities in the slayings and hopefully identify him or her.

The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit had a long history in profiling work. It began profiling criminals informally in the early 1970s using crime-scene information and eventually expanded the work. The FBI profilers discovered they could see patterns in an offender’s personality by examining the crime-scene evidence, patterns that might help identify a suspect8 As part of a four-year study by the unit, thirty-six convicted killers in sex-related homicides were interviewed and provided insight into how investigators could talk with the suspects. The study found nearly 70 percent of the killers’ families had alcohol issues and a third had drug-abuse problems; half of the families had histories of psychiatric disorders and there was a history of physical abuse in 42 percent of the cases.

It was cutting-edge social science in law enforcement, but Jose at first wasn’t sure how effective it would be. Earlier, the FBI unit had provided a verbal profile of the possible killer of a twenty-seven-year-old New Bedford woman named Dawn Copeland who was found stabbed and clubbed to death on a beach off Rogers Street in Dartmouth on June 26, 1988, after leaving a city bar. They still didn’t have a suspect under arrest. Jose had hoped that profile would have been much more precise and would have pointed directly to the killer.

Jose personally found the profiles he had read in the Copeland and other cases he researched too general; just about any killer, once caught, could fit the descriptions.

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