Will Criminal Profiling Help us Find Out Who Larry Murphy has Allegedly Killed?

The Beast of Baltinglass

There should be little to say about the sleepy Wicklow hamlet of Baltinglass,. Nothing more than quite sloping streets, slate roofed terraces, cattle dozily munching grass, a moss covered stone Abbey and the softly ebbing camel hump foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. It has all the indispensable features of an Irish town, a Gardai Station, a Chipper, a Chinese Restaurant, pubs, a graveyard and a church. Providing for the all the necessary needs of the Irish homo urbanus; law, fast food, drink and consolations for death. They should be nothing to say about this place, unless someone follows John Updike's maxim to "give the mundane its beautiful due".

Unfortunately, most people's acquaintance with "Baltinglass" these days is through the grisly sobriquet "The Baltinglass Beast", the name an often rabble rousing media has put on Larry Murphy, convicted of kidnapping, rape and attempted murder of a lady in 2001 and most vociferously disowned son of Balntinglass. After kidnapping the Lady he forced her into the boot of his car and drove to Spinans Cross in the Wicklow Mountains, Murphy would still be in jail for homicide if his power fantasy had not being interrupted by two hunters, who escorted the beaten and violated woman to Baltinglass station.

It is often speculated (without substantive physical evidence) that Murphy is also behind a number of unsolved cases (known colloquially as "Ireland's vanished women") ; a harrowing list of mostly young, vanished women. People are familiar with from fogged images, as cold and worn as the gravestones in Balntinglass cemetery, of which frequently appear in current affairs programs and somber documentaries often filmed years after the events.

However, to put it simply, it is idle speculation. The Gardai (the Irish police force) have no substantive physical evidence to prove Murphy is responsible for what ever happened to these unfortunate women. Should we leave it at that? The Murphy case has thrown up questions about the efficacy of "criminal profiling", an investigative tool where trained "profilers" try and build a personality profile of the unknown perpetrator from the crime he has committed.

The criminal profiler of lore (most memorably,Jack Crowford from Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lectuer series of books/films) treats a murder scene like an art critic treats a painting, scanning between the yellow tape with his psychological microscope, trying to detect psychological fingerprints.

Ireland's Vanished Women

It is undeniable such scientific soothsaying can be enormously effective. The person who many consider the founder of criminal profiling, psychoanalyist James Brussell, profiler of the notorious Con Ed bomber (or Mad Bomber) profile led to the capture of George Metesky. Even his oracle that when the police finally captured the embittered ex-marine he would be wearing a buttoned double breasted suit turned out to be true.

Criminal Profiling is also a highly fallible, statistically questionable if occasionally oracular investigative tool. Some of its limitations are characteristic of the limitations of psychology in general. While psychology is an indispensable art, its inconceivable to return to that post-Freudian, post-Nietzschean world where people's own self-descriptions are treated unsuspiciously and dreams are silly, chaste and harmless fairy tales, James Brussell's thoughts on George Metesky are about as "scientific" as Robert Hughes's reflections on Da Vinci.

Also, psychology, as R.D. Lange and others made clear, is based on analysis of behavior, which is its great weakness. A friend of mine was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder after a ten minute interview with a psychiatrist!! The crank based her diagnosis on the fact he apparently talked two fast, had an intense watery eyed expression (I'm not making this up) and she assumed his declaration that he had a fluent command of several languages suggested he was delusional (actually he wasn't, Christopher is an impressive polyglot.)

It's one of the most shocking stories I have ever heard. What psychologists/psychiatrists call "Bipolar disorder" is an extremely serious condition, treatment often consists of proscribing drugs like SSRIs, who's effectiveness is disputed and whose side effects can leave long emotional and psychological scars. And once diagnosed you will have the "Bipolar" tag stapled onto you for life. A stigma for life on the basis of an interview where you were overly loquacious, your unfortunate enough to be born with an Ed Gein facial expression and you happen to have a psychiatrist less intelligent than yourself who can't believe you could learn a myriad of difficult languages.

Bipolar disorder is arguably a lot more serious than Diabetes, the excepted medical treatments are a lot more risky, but before you are diagnosed with Diabetes the doctor would take a blood sample and check for plasma glucose levels. Its a rigorous test that gives a scientific foundation to the diagnosis. The psychiatrist doesn't have these privileges, there is no sample that can be send off to a laboratory to confirm or contradict the doctor's suspicions, tell-tale physical signs like brain tissue damage don't appear until the disease has advanced. This should mean psychiatrists are a lot more careful in making diagnoses than other medical professionals, since  their diagnosis can't be empirically validated means far greater room for error, but on the evidence of the shocking anecdote above the opposite is the case.

Criminal profiling is even more belabored by scientific inadequacies and reliant on social stigmas. You may notice the vast majority of offender profiles imagine the unknown salient as a "loner", which reflects the old Freudian prejudice against individualism; Freud, like Hegel, thought people were happiest when they accepted social structures and norms; oddness, dissent and refusal to assimilate are greeted with the psychotherapist's suspicious grimace.

However, they are numerous serial killers and serial rapists who are the opposite of the stereotypical loner. Ted Bundy was the most prolific serial killer in American history, yet he had the Rock Hudson hunkish good looks of the Hollywood golden age, was a successful business man, an active campaigner for the Republican Party, had no difficulty in seducing attractive women; he was in other words, any socially conscious mother or overly protective father's dream. John Wayne Gacy (a democrat rather than a Republican) was a wealthy contractor, community volunteer and clown at children's parties; Andrei Chikatilo, arguably the most prolific serial killer in history, was a married Russian teacher.

John Douglas, (the FBI profiler responsible for the "organised"/"disorganised" distinction) received acclaim recently for his book "Inside the Mind of BTK" (the aconymn BTK, bind, torture, kill, is the alias of Kansas serial killer Dennis Rader. Pictured above) However, as Malcolm Gladwell, in a readable and incisive piece for the New Yorker Magazine on criminal profiling points out, Douglas and the consortium of profilers hired by the FBI for the "BTK" case got Rader's personality dramatically wrong. While they disagreed on details all of them agreed "BTK" would be a loner and have difficulty forming relationships with women.

However, Dennis Rader was married with two kids and everything the loner of urban folklore was not. Could you get more sunnily and wholesomely upstanding than dependable electrician, local scout leader and president of the local Lutheran church?

They are also serious scientific flaws in offender profiling techniques. As I mentioned psychotherapy is based on the analysis of behavior, the therapists's role is to to make psychological deductions from his clients testimonsies and behavioural patterns. Therefore its heavily reliant on theory, classification and fallible human interpretation. Psychotherapy is trying to spy on the psychological party through a very narrow behavioral keyhole. A Profiler's job is to cajole distinguishing quirks, demographical facts and a personality type of a criminal from a crime scene. The clink is even narrower. Gladwell in his essay quotes from a study done by a group of pyschologists from the University of Liverpool. Consider the following;

“You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.”

Profiling therefore depends on angle, position, interpretation; its an attempt to classify the color of an iridescent shell. Gladwell goes further and even makes a comparison between the tendentiously scientific methods of profilers and the paranormal methods of psychics often employed by police. (His piece is titled "Real Psychics") Listing out the various fraudulent techniques sceptics allege psychics use, "The Rainbow Ruse" (ascribing two contradictory character traits), "The Jacques Statement" (organises the predictions to fit the age of the person). "The Barnum Statement" (a generalsied assertion that can't be untrue), "The Fuzzy Fact" (a ruse, the psychic makes a vague statement that can be used to tease out of the client a more specific fact) etc, he then compares these methods to the BTK profiling notes often to quite devastating effect. For instance, Rader's profilers speculated that he would find it difficult to have relationships with women but may have women friends, is that not a "Rainbow Ruse" (ascribing two contradictory character traits, therefore covering almost any personality.)

Larry Murphy may well be responsible for Ireland's vanished women, but we should be wary of the dangers of criminal profiling.

The case of Dennis Rader (BTK) was one of the most difficult cases in American serial killer history. The role of criminal profiling in the case is still controversial