How to catch a killer; FBI protocol for investigating serial murders PART 1, a post by LostCatWantedDeadAndAlive

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer

Firstly, I don't think I need to include my normal warning about provocative content and pictures; this post will have a lot of interesting content, but nothing in the way of gory crime scene photos or murder weapons. But, I do want to include the second half of my normal opening, which would be that if you see something that is incorrect, please let me know in a comment or a PM and I will fix it and tag you in an edit.

So I mentioned at the end of my last post, the one about Jared Fogle, that I was planning on doing an overview of the FBI protocol for catching serial killers. The very first thing I want to say is that this information is not a secret; all of my interpretations and explanations that will follow come from this website:

https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder

That's the source straight away, and it's quite a long read, but very interesting. What I want to do is not to talk about the actual investigations themselves (as in, how to do a stake-out or interview a witness), but about the general procedures to insure the best chance of capturing the killer. This document comes from the Behavioral Analysis Unit-2, but for short I will be referring to it as the "BAU-2", or the "BAU-2 article"

The general "outline" if you will looks like this:

• Identification of a Serial Murder Series
• Leadership
• Task Force Organization
• Resource Augmentation
• Communication
• Data Management
• Analytical Tools
• Medical Examiners/Coroners
• Administrative Issues
• Training
• Officer Assistance Programs

I'm going to combine a few of them so that they don't all have their own section, but I do plan on talking about all of these subjects, and wherever possible, I'm going to include some famous examples of how these worked or didn't work.

So we're going to start with one of the most important ones; Identification

Zodiac's first letter

Zodiac. Just a heads up, you'll be seeing a lot of him in this post. As some of you may be aware, Zodiac is one of the killers I find most fascinating (here is a link to my full-length post on Zodiac http://imgur.com/gallery/9bwEe), partly because he was never captured, but mostly because of how he worked virtually all of the angles he could regarding the investigation of a serial murderer.

This is an excerpt from his first letter to the press in San Francisco. You'll note that he immediately takes credit for his crimes as well as verifies them. The rest of the letter goes on to list the details he claims "only I and the police know", which, of course, check out to be true. Now, when we talk about Gary Ridgway, you'll notice he kept a VERY low profile, and didn't engage the press/public/police the way that Zodiac did. Ridgway's method was to rely on the difficulty for police to link the crimes together. What Zodiac did, on the other hand, was to claim responsibility for crimes that were not his. There were some that were easy to disprove, like his claim that he shot Sgt. Richard Radetich in a parked car when police already had a suspect in custody; but there were many others that it could've gone either way.

Let's say there's a case that Zodiac took credit for in which a fingerprint is discovered, a potentially huge piece of evidence for the investigators, BUT they haven't definitively proved that the Zodiac is responsible. You're getting hundreds of tips every week with just as many suspects. Do you use that print? What if it was him, and you didn't use it? What if it wasn't him, but you did?

You can see why I said this was one of the most important factors in investigating serial murders.

Leadership and Task Force Organization

This is a photo of Dave Toschi, the lead investigator on the Zodiac case. Yes, he did indeed wear kickass bow-ties.

I'm combining these two because they sort of go together well when it comes to putting a team together. The "leadership" aspect is more important than you might think, because it's not about picking who would be "team captain" so-to-speak, it's more about dividing the responsibilities up in a manner that would make for the best team all around. The two main categories are "investigation" and "supervision/administration". Separating these two is a very significant, intelligent, and effective thing to do, because it allows the investigators to focus on the leads, and the supervisors to focus on everything else. From the BAU-2:

"There should be a bifurcation of responsibility between the administration of the case and the investigation of the case. The task of running the investigation is the responsibility of the lead investigator. The administration provides all of the necessary support, including procurement of equipment, funding, and manpower. As an example, task force administrators must obtain authority for priority requests for services, from the forensic laboratory and other service providers. The lead investigator(s) and the administrators of the task force must have a close, cooperative working relationship, while maintaining their own areas of responsibility."
But what is a "task force"?

I look at it like this: a task force is a list of responsibilities, and every one of those responsibilities is a link in a chain. The responsibilities really don't change in number or importance, from case to case, just in the amount of man-power required to carry them out.

Leadership and Task Force Organization

So let's look at that list I posted at the beginning of this post.

• Identification of a Serial Murder Series
• Leadership
• Task Force Organization
• Resource Augmentation
• Communication
• Data Management
• Analytical Tools
• Medical Examiners/Coroners
• Administrative Issues
• Training
• Officer Assistance Programs

So we've identified that there are a series of murders that are all linked. What do we need now?

We need an investigator for sure. He covers the leads.

Identification of Serial Murders. If we're tracking a SERIAL killer, there are going to more murders, not to mention combing through murders we're already aware of. We need someone to do that.

Resource Augmentation. In laymen's terms is about assigning who does what. But one of the golden rules of putting together a task force is that if you are going to bring someone in, they're going to be in it all the way to the end. Having people just dip in and out is how a lot of information could be missed or misplaced. Picking the best people for the job is important. We need someone to do that.

Communication. If we're working between jurisdictions, departments, states, offices; we need someone to keep everyone in the loop. That's vital, sharing all this information to the right people and quickly is vital as well. We need someone to do that.

Data management. All the investigations in all these different areas will produce a ton of data, and we need to be able to compare and contrast that data otherwise each individual crime might as well stay isolated. We need someone to gather all this data and make it accessible.

Analytical tools. So HOW are we looking at/analyzing this data? Are there ciphers involved? Do we need a linguist for code-breaking? How about a forensic psychologist to give us a possible suspect profile?

Medical examiners/coroners. Though not part of the task force specifically, we do need someone to keep tabs on his reports, and make sure that if, for some unusual reason, there is more than one medical examiner, we'll need our lead medical examiner to review the information provided by the other ME.

Administrative issues. Again, it sounds unimportant, but who organizes shifts? Who makes sure there is overtime money available if there needs to be a sting. What if we're doing a road block or random DNA sweep in an area we know the killer has been operating? Not finding the men and the money to do that could mean that a killer could walk/drive away free.

You see, some of these jobs are "investigation" and some are "administration" but every one of them is vital.

Resource Augmentation

As mentioned above, the most important factor in Resource Augmentation is determining who does what on the task force, and whether or not they're the best person for the job. Another of the golden rules for task forces is to keep them as minimal as possible. From the BAU-2:

"As the investigation continues, the manpower requirements of the task force will increase for various reasons, including increasing the number of investigators and support staff. Restraint must be practiced by task force administrators to avoid the use of excess personnel. As previously discussed, the use of fewer personnel may be more effective. The lead investigator is in the best position to recognize when additional personnel are needed. The administrator’s responsibility is to provide the authority for the permanent or temporary reassignment of the requested number of personnel to the task force."

Keeping the Task Force small forces the person in charge of Resource Augmentation to have to pick the absolute best candidates for a particular position, even if it's a seemingly trivial position, because the task force will do everything they can to make sure they have the same person in that position every time. Continuity is important, for the investigation, yes, but more importantly for the prosecution. Having an officer who spent 3 days on the Task Force testify in court as an expert on the case can (and sadly sometimes do) fall apart on cross-examination, when the lawyer of the defendant starts asking the witness questions pertaining to the rest of the case. Now, it's perfectly acceptable for the person who only spent 3 days on the task force not to know every little detail about the case, but this looks bad to a jury.

It's a trick that defense attorneys use to great effect.

Communication and Data Management

Communication involves more than just coordinating with other law enforcement agencies. Communication also involves keeping your own people in the loop. The great part about dividing up all the responsibilities into separate, individual sections is that everyone will only focus on what their job is, and nothing else. The worst part about dividing up all the responsibilities into separate, individual sections is that everyone will only focus on what their job is, and nothing else.

The people in communications fix this. From the BAU-2:

"• Daily briefings are essential for investigators, especially when there are different work shifts. Periodic summary briefings are also necessary for managers and patrol officers. These can be accomplished via e-mails or at roll call and should be conducted by investigative personnel.

• Communication on the operational level is paramount, especially in task force investigations and when serial murder cases involve multiple states. As all information must be shared seamlessly, teleconferences may not sufficiently allow for the flow of information. Face-to-face case briefings are suggested.

• Submitting ViCAP reports on solved and unsolved murders, attempted murders, and sexual assaults for inclusion in the ViCAP database is strongly recommended and may facilitate the linkage of unknown related cases for law enforcement agencies."

You can imagine the exchanging of information via email is losing fashion after our recent experiences.

A snippet from an email exchange I had with Hillary Clint-

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

ViCAP

The BAU-2 quote above mentioned the ViCAP database. So to be brief, the ViCAP database works a little like this; you enter in the information about your crime, including possible suspects, coroners reports, any DNA you might have collected, along with other physical evidence, and you explain the type of crime it is. To abstract a little bit, let's just pretend it is a long note where you explain all the different aspects of your crime, and then you include a fuckton of hashtags at the end where you can compare and contrast other notes with the same hashtags.

This is a phenomenal way of wading through cases that are suspected to be "serial" cases; be that serial murder, rape, etc. To simply comb through every murder file on the FBI's servers would take months with even a powerful computer, and that's only the FBI's databases, not necessarily including all the files from your little podunk town in the middle of nowhere. ViCAP is a way to string together crimes that have all the hallmarks of needing to be strung together. The ViCAP database is a perfect example of what "data management" means with regard to keeping everything uniform. The uniformity of all these reports makes it very easy to compare and contrast.

Part of the "Communications" aspect is to keep the ViCAP database updated.

Again, we go back to Zodiac.

Zodiac knew that making different law enforcement agencies having to coordinate with one another was not easy, which is why he committed his murders in different counties, cities, you name it. One of his murders was actually only yards away from the county line; this caused the Solano sheriff's office to have to get a team of surveyors out to the crime scene to verify it was in their jurisdiction. All of this took time, and in the 60's and 70's when these crimes took place, it took a lot more time than it would have today. No internet, and to some degree, no fax machines, meant that things were going through the mail, and the back and forth of crime scene photos and reports took quite a long time. Furthermore, there was no uniformity in the way these reports were written. Each station had its own system for how the reports were organized which worked great for each station, but sharing them with others made it extra confusing.

I hate to use this as an example, but it's a bit like looking for a book in a library with a card catalog instead of a computer. I hate that about 30% of you reading this are googling "card catalog" to figure out what I'm even talking about.

The "data management" aspect of a task force is to do exactly this: to make sure there is uniformity, and to make sure all the right information goes to the right person.

Analytical tools

The best metaphor I can think of for analytical tools, not surprisingly, has to do with regular tools. If you want to build a bird house, you know right off the bat you need certain tools: a hammer, nails, a saw, maybe glue. But it can get a little more complicated than that; what if you are joining a lot of 45 degree angled pieces together? It'd be nice to have a miter/mitre saw, which is designed to accurately saw pieces at pretty much any angle you like. If you don't have one, thinking about getting a new one is troublesome because you have to think about how much it will cost vs. how much you're going to use it, etc.

This is not unlike looking at analytical tools for a serial murder investigation, only the tools are typically specialists in certain fields, and generally, those specialists don't come cheap. Hiring a behavioral psychologist or code/cipher breaking linguist would be a good example; this is why there are loads of them already working for the FBI. Task forces that are NOT FBI task forces are a bit less fortunate. This is part of the reason that when a big case crops up somewhere, all the different agencies involved decide which among them is going to be the MAIN agency, that way they don't have to have everything divided up between agencies.

There are other tools as well, things like DNA sequencing. Unlike in the TV show CSI, this is not something that every little police station has, and also, it isn't something that you can just send down to the lab and have results back in a few hours. This usually involves packing things up and sending them out to a specialized lab. It's expensive, it's time consuming and it isn't always the best solution.

Ok, so let's say there is evidence of semen in the body of one of the victims, and you decide to do a DNA sweep. Very often you can determine the assailants blood type through semen. This is also possible for saliva.

Collecting the DNA samples is very easy and relatively inexpensive. It's generally a swab on the inside of the cheek. But instead of sending out all those samples to be processed, a MASSIVE number of them are going to be ruled out immediately because that swab on the inside of the cheek is perfectly capable of gathering enough saliva to type the blood, and if the blood type doesn't match, they don't send the samples out to be sequenced.

So like I said near the beginning of this post, every single one of these aspects of a task force are a link in a chain, and the weakest link in that chain could spell disaster for an investigation. If the person in charge of determining the tools to use for a particular investigation spends all their allotted money on sending out hundreds of DNA samples to be processed without typing the blood, that means the resources that could have been used elsewhere will have to be altered in order to account for the mistake on something as simple as typing blood.

OK everyone, I have to try to get some sleep tonight, otherwise I'll be a bonafide crazy person in the morning. I shall finish Part 2 tomorrow afternoon, but since this thing is already massive, I figured I'd post Part 1 now.

And remember,

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