A Killer by Design by Ann Wolbert Burgess

A Killer by Design by Ann Wolbert Burgess

Author:Ann Wolbert Burgess [Burgess, Ann Wolbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00


A week or so later, Hazelwood led a group of agents in developing a formal profile of the Ski Mask Rapist, making sure I could attend. We stuck to our now-standard process of studying police reports, looking at crime scene photographs, and talking through the offender’s motives and patterns. Hazelwood made sure to include notes from the conversation we’d had earlier as well as analysis from my trip to Louisiana. He also asked that I provide context for the validity of certain victim statements, because even seasoned agents had their own biases to overcome. Afterward, however, instead of taking all the information and writing up the profile on his own, Hazelwood asked the group to write the profile as a team. And he specifically wanted us to split this assessment into two distinct parts.

The first part was informed by our traditional profiling approach, which characterized unsubs in terms of likely demographics, background, and personality. We were well practiced in this process by now, and it didn’t take long to write down our ideas. For the Ski Mask Rapist, based on how long he’d been active without getting caught, we classified him as a man in his late twenties or early thirties who’d never been married. His domineering behavior showed that he was confident and saw himself as an alpha male. He was also meticulous about the details—he made sure to discreetly cut telephone wires before breaking into a house—and he was a perfectionist, and this knowledge helped us characterize him as someone who kept in good physical shape, watched and/or played sports, kept a cleanly manicured appearance, and likely had a tendency to project this masculinity in the way he dressed and the flashiness of his car. His evasiveness and the frequency with which he moved to different states—a rover, as we called unsubs with this habit—showed that he was educated and had served in the military, most likely abroad.

For the second part of the report, we made a point of clarifying the Ski Mask Rapist’s psychological makeup. This part was much trickier. We struggled to fit the facts of the case to a known classification of offender, largely because of the evolving nature of his crimes. So we referenced previous cases, mostly from the serial killer study, to define the offender as someone who was undergoing a progression from a power-assertive type—the Ski Mask Rapist’s early crimes showed his need to project an image of potent masculinity—to the anger and escalated violence common to vindictive rapists. Violence was becoming an important part of the offender’s ritual. Not violence as a tool to overcome a victim’s resistance, but violence as pleasure. Ultimately, the Ski Mask Rapist was showing signs of increased aggression in his attacks. He was becoming more dangerous, more sadistic, and more confident. He was improving his MO (modus operandi—the way an offender carries out a crime), inching closer to some ideal he was trying to re-create. And he was clearly giving in to his murderous temptations.



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