From the first time we met, I’ve been fascinated hearing Mike talk about how he profiles. The method of profiling I’ve given to Tony Hill has its roots in the way he does things. The shelves of Mike’s office are bursting with books about forensic psychology, including memoirs of profilers detailing their experiences. Mike is very aware of the pitfalls that some of them have fallen into. ‘You’ve always got to say this is the characteristics of the likely killer, not the characteristics of the killer. Psychologists should not attempt to identify a specific individual as the killer.’
Mike’s profiles are based on both empirical studies of offenders, and on his years of experience working with offenders in therapeutic and investigative settings. This gives him rich background material for his profiles which, like Dr Thomas Bond in 1888, he qualifies with ‘likelys’, ‘possiblys’ and ‘probablys’, unless he is absolutely certain of something.
Once Mike has visited the scene of the crime, he studies photographs and police notes, witness accounts, the autopsy report and photographs, and any other relevant information he can get his hands on. At this stage, it’s important that the police keep suspect details to themselves, so the profiler is not influenced by the investigators’ preconceptions. The most valuable profiles have to avoid any kind of bias or prejudice.
For Mike, the next stage happens inside his head. ‘I sit at a blank screen and think, as part of developing the initial hypothesis to build up a profile. I go for walks and talk it over in my head and occasionally, if there’s somebody I work with who I trust, I bounce ideas off them. Then it goes to the rejection model. OK, can we assume that it is a man? And of course nowadays it’s becoming more common to see female killers … I see what I can put in there and what I can reject … If it’s a sexual offence I’m looking at suspects from possibly ten years up to sixty years old. But they are likely to be slightly older than young teenagers who are having sex for the first time. You start with very crude things. If a condom is used then you think, “Why?” Because he has criminal knowledge, criminal experience, and he doesn’t want to leave evidence … I set up a model and the whole time I am looking at trying to reject it, asking myself, “Where’s the evidence for that?” You can work on something for several hours and then something says, “No,” so you throw it out. I think sometimes police officers and profilers make mistakes when they have a hunch and they stick with it. What we all have to do is to learn to let go. If the evidence doesn’t support a hypothesis, you throw it away, start on Plan B and work your way through to Plan Z.’ The profile would concentrate on a number of characteristics such as gender, age, racial group, occupation, relationship status, vehicle type, hobbies, criminality, relationship with females, with the victim, choice of victim, social class education, post-offence behaviour, interview behaviour and so on.
Once they have looked at all the information about the crime, some profilers have a pre-prepared set of question to ask themselves. David Canter asks: What do the details of the crime indicate about the intelligence, knowledge and skills of the offender? Does he seem spontaneous or methodical? How has he interacted with the victim and does that tell me how he may have interacted with others? Does it seem like the criminal was familiar with the crime he committed or the scene he committed it in?
Rather than trying to find one man, like Colin Stagg, the goal for profilers should be to give Senior Investigating Officers a report that makes the number of potential suspects more manageable. As an example, the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry gave investigators 268,000 named suspects to look into, and led them to make 27,000 house visits. Mike Berry says, ‘If we’ve got a sexual murderer then we’ve got about 30 million men. If we cut the higher age and lower age we can bring it down to about 20 million …’ Anything that a profiler can do to safely bring that figure down further is very valuable for the police. Mike says, ‘Some people still have a false image of profiling. They think that the profiler is going to come along and say he’s left-handed, ginger-haired, five foot six, and supports Man City. But more people see it now as a tool in the detective tool bag, similar to DNA and pathology. It’s very much a tool rather than a major source of information, and I think that’s right.’ Does the glamour and thrill set in motion by James Brussel and Clarice Starling live on? ‘It’s a challenge but it’s also very draining because you are dealing with sometimes very horrific offences. Certainly when I first started profiling I kept thinking it’s my fault if I didn’t get the information to the police that led to the right guy, but after a while you realise all you can do is say “here are the likely characteristics”, it’s still up to the police to collect the data and capture the criminal. Nowadays many SIOs contact Bramhill, the police college, directly. The police have become more self-contained and more likely to use their own people. You rarely get psychologists doing it publically now.’
Of course, forensic psychologists do much more than help in the hunt for killers. Most work with institution-based offenders and patients, with some undertaking work in the criminal and civil courts. Mike Berry reckons he and his colleagues seldom do more than five court appearances each per year (although they may do a hundred or so reports in the same time frame, of which 5 per cent are contested, resulting in a court appearance to defend it). Outside the courtroom, forensic psychologists do a lot of work with criminals in Secure Units and psychiatric hospitals, sometimes trying to help them prepare for life outside, and other times trying to get them to provide information that can close other cases, as Jenny Cutler did with John Duffy. Mike says, ‘I work with offenders and victims. It’s very challenging. You have the challenge of trying to break down a story, trying to make sense of it … sometimes you don’t get the full story for several months or even years.’
Mike Berry is quick to praise the input of academic psychologists as well: ‘Academics tend to be much more likely to ask “where is the evidence?” They are undertaking research in areas as diverse as speech analysis in rapists, movement in serial offenders, interviewing – all of which is very useful and we can extract some of the good points and use that in profiling. Interviewing offenders, victims and witnesses to get their full story is the area that David Canter, who Berry describes as ‘the major force in the field’, believes psychologists have contributed to most in crime investigation. An interview is all about asking someone to recall things, which is a notoriously tricky and error-prone activity. Psychologists have studied the art of the interview and have come up with some key points for detectives to follow: They need to build an open atmosphere with their subjects, recreate the context around the events in question, ask open questions which can’t be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, avoid cutting off the subject in mid flow, and be interested in every point they make even if it appears irrelevant. Although everyone is different, encouraging interviewees to tell the truth often comes down to the elusive qualities of trust and respect. The other proven technique to improve your chances of getting a suspect to confess is to make sure that they are fully aware of the weight of the evidence against them. But, contrary to the movies, a coercive approach can lead interviewees either to shut down or to make false confessions. And, of course, in these days of recorded interviews, any attempt at coercion will see the evidence thrown out in the courtroom.
Forensic psychologists are also increasingly involved in ‘psychological autopsy’, an attempt to discover the state of mind of someone before they died. A pathologist may have established the cause of death with a physical autopsy, but will not necessarily know whether it was suicide, murder or an accident. Psychologists look at diaries and emails, online activity, the mental health history of the deceased’s family and may conduct interviews with people who were close to them.
In 2008, Mike Berry commented (for Sky Television) on the extraordinary case of the disappearance of schoolgirl Shannon Mathews, in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. His analysis of events relied on exactly the sort of sensitivity to nuances of expression and behaviour which are needed for a psychologica
l autopsy. ‘I noticed that when her mother [Karen] was being interviewed on the sofa with her young partner, one of her children was trying to climb up on her lap and she kept pushing the child away. I thought if you’ve just lost one of your children the expected reaction is to hug the others tightly to you, and she didn’t. Then she said something about “The street will be pleased when they find her”, rather than “I will be pleased. I’ll be over the moon.”’ It turned out that Karen had drugged her 9-year-old daughter with temazepam and given her to an accomplice, who had kept her for a month in his nearby house. The plan was for Karen’s boyfriend to ‘find’ Shannon and then split the reward money with Karen. But, following a tip-off, police found the little girl in the accomplice’s house, bundled into the drawer of a divan bed.
A more conventional psychological autopsy was carried out following the death in 1976 of Howard Hughes, the eccentric American businessman who, at the age of eighteen, inherited his father’s family business in Houston, Texas. By the age of sixty, Hughes was the world’s richest man, but had developed a terror of infectious diseases. He moved to Mexico, where he injected himself with codeine, wore no clothes, let his hair and nails grow, never took a bath or brushed his teeth, and would spend up to twenty hours at a time sitting on the toilet. Because of his reclusive and bizarre behaviour, his will was challenged, and this led to Dr Raymond Fowler, president of the American Psychological Association, preparing a report to determine whether he was psychotic, and had therefore lost touch with reality. Fowler concluded that, although Hughes was mentally disturbed and extremely eccentric, he always knew what he was doing and was not psychotic. His will was accepted.
In his 1827 essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, the writer Thomas de Quincey playfully suggests that murder should be examined from an aesthetic perspective, rather than a legalistic one. In a sense, that’s what the forensic psychologist is doing. She (85 per cent of forensic psychologists are female) is trying to paint a picture that makes sense of the inside of someone’s head. It may be a long way from beautiful, but it has meaning for the person who is home to those thoughts. And the better we understand these strange universes that our fellow human beings occupy, the closer we may come to fixing them before they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
TWELVE
THE COURTROOM
‘Unlike the prosecution, which has to prove its case, the defence merely has to introduce doubt in order to win’
Tim Pritchard, Observer, 3 February 2001
Working as a lawyer for thirteen years, Fiona Raitt treated scientific evidence as just another ‘part of the process’. But when she went back to university, in Dundee, she started talking to scientists and psychologists about ‘how it’s collected from the crime scene, how it’s stored, how it’s used and eventually how it ends up in court’. Now, as Professor of Evidence and Social Justice, she writes about the tensions at play in each of those evidential steps: ‘Everyone has a different vested interest in how the science is used, from the earliest stage of its discovery right up to its appearance in court.’ The police may look particularly hard at evidence when they think it will help them build a conviction. A prosecuting lawyer will ignore facts that make a defendant look innocent. Meanwhile, the defence lawyer will ignore incriminating facts and try to persuade the judge to exclude important witnesses. In the middle of this courtroom tug-of-war hangs the evidence itself, and the forensic scientists who have used all their expertise to produce and interpret it. If it suits the lawyer’s narrative, they will undermine first a scientist’s testimony and then their good name.
Let’s take a typical piece of evidence, the jacket of a murder suspect. As quickly as possible a CSI uses tape to lift any suspect fibres or hairs off the jacket for analysis. Then she puts the jacket in a plastic evidence bag and sends it off to a laboratory scientist who looks for things like bloodstains. After running appropriate tests, the scientist rebags the jacket and stores it ready for a possible appearance as a courtroom exhibit. If the scientist can’t find anything useful, the jacket will go into a warehouse to await the next scientific breakthrough that might produce useful evidence, such as extra-sensitive DNA testing.
This is what happened to the jacket belonging to a member of the gang who murdered 18-year-old schoolboy Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in an unprovoked racist attack in south-east London. Stephen was studying for his A-levels, hoping to become an architect. He and a friend were standing at a bus stop in Eltham, on their way home after a night out, when the youths forced him to the ground and stabbed him to death. One member of the gang, Gary Dobson, was wearing a grey bomber jacket. He and his friends always denied murder, although the alibi they gave the police later proved false. Other circumstantial evidence also stood against them, such as footage from a covert camera which the police planted in Dobson’s house. Although the gang never discussed the killing on camera, Dobson did call a colleague who took his baseball cap a ‘black c***’. When the colleague tapped Dobson on the back of the legs, Dobson said that he unsheathed his Stanley knife and threatened, ‘You tap me once more, you silly c***, I’m going to f***ing slice this thing down you.’
Dobson stood trial in 1996 but was acquitted in the absence of physical evidence. However, because of improvements in the sensitivity of forensic tests, and the repeal of the double jeopardy law in 2005 (which means people can now stand trial a second time for the same offence if new evidence has been developed that couldn’t have been known at the time of the first trial), the police were ready to launch a major cold case review of the evidence by 2006. They handed the evidence bag containing the bomber jacket to LGC Forensics. And this time scientists found compelling new microscopic evidence – enough for the police to charge Dobson with the murder again.
The brown paper bag used to store Gary Dobson’s bomber jacket, which was found to be stained with Stephen Lawrence’s blood
At his trial in November 2011, Mark Ellison, the prosecution lawyer, played the video of Dobson’s racist rant to the jury, along with footage from the same camera of another member of the gang saying, ‘I’d go down Catford and places like that, I’m telling you now, with two sub-machine-guns and I’m telling ya, I’d take one of them, skin the black c*** alive, mate, torture him, set him alight … I’d blow their two legs and arms off and say, “Go on, you can swim home now.”’ Ellison also called eyewitnesses to recount the murder for the jury. But the crux of his case against Dobson was what Edward Jarman of LGC Forensics had found on his bomber jacket.
Jarman had spent two days examining the jacket with a microscope and discovered a tiny bloodstain, half a centimetre across, inside the weave of the collar. The jury heard that, after DNA tests, Jarman felt there to be a less than one in a billion chance that the blood belonged to someone other than Stephen. The stain had been made by fresh, wet blood either from Stephen’s knife wounds or from the knife itself. Jarman had also found several dried blood flakes belonging to Stephen at the bottom of the evidence bag. Trapped inside some of these were fibres from the jacket and polo shirt that Stephen had worn on the night of his death. And he found more fibres matching Stephen’s clothes when he re-examined the sticky tape that had been used to lift them off Dobson’s jacket after the murder.
The journey that physical evidence goes on, from crime scene to courtroom, doesn’t get many newspaper column inches. But a trial is the ultimate test of forensic evidence: if isn’t well documented, the evidence will not stand up in court. And if it fails in court, all the efforts of the forensic scientists – digital analysts, pathologists, entomologists, fingerprint experts, toxicologists – have been for nothing. At Dobson’s trial the defence lawyer, Tim Roberts, made huge efforts to introduce doubt about the journey of the jacket. In his opening statement to the jury Roberts said, ‘The charge brought against Gary Dobson is based on unreliable evidence. At the time that Stephen Lawrence was being attacked, Gary Dobson was at home in his parents’ house. He is innocent of this charge. The
papers in this case are voluminous, but the actual physical evidence, upon which this charge is brought, the fibres and fragments, would not fill a teaspoon.’
For eighteen years the jacket had lain dormant in a paper bag, sealed with tape. Roberts pointed out that in the early 1990s suspect and victim exhibits were often stored in the same room. Over the years many scientists had examined the Stephen Lawrence exhibits in different laboratories around England, and not all of them had worn white plastic suits. Roberts argued that the stain on the jacket collar had not come from fresh blood. He said that the dried blood flakes had got into the evidence bag via a careless scientist who had also handled Stephen’s exhibit. He suggested the bloodstain was the result of one of these flakes dissolving when scientists conducted a test for saliva. The test involved wetting and pressing the jacket. Edward Jarman countered that he had tried this theory out using control blood flakes. They had turned ‘gel-like’; too viscous to absorb into the fabric. The arguments were extensive and detailed. One journalist who was present for every second of Dobson’s six-week trial said, ‘During these long days of continuity evidence at the end of November – as the barristers argued at length about the safety of brown paper bags – the jury looked bored.’
Gary Dobson and David Norris, who were both convicted of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 2012
Roberts was also desperate to get the judge to rule the next witness, Rosalind Hammon, out of testifying. LGC had given her the job of examining the jacket’s chain of continuity. He argued that, because she was an employee of LGC, her view could not be trusted. The judge disagreed and allowed her to speak. She testified that, despite the jacket’s complex journey, there was ‘no realistic probability’ the blood and fibres were the result of contamination. On 3 January 2012, Gary Dobson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to at least fifteen years in jail. He had remained out of the reach of justice for eighteen years and 256 days – that’s thirty-five more days than Stephen Lawrence was alive. Writer Brian Cathcart said after the trial, ‘The idea that there might one day be a conviction was at one point nothing but a fantasy. It’s remarkable that you can go back into the evidence and find these microscopic particles which can lead to a conviction.’ One other member of the gang, David Norris, was brought to justice at the same trial as Gary Dobson, largely because of a single strand of Stephen’s hair found on the jeans that he had been wearing on the night of the murder. Eyewitness accounts suggest that there were three or four other men involved in the murder. Their names are known, but no forensic traces have been found to link them to the scene.