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FBI profilers help police narrow list of suspects down to one
Thursday, September 28, 2000 By Sally Kalson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When FBI profilers enter a murder investigation, their job is to use physicial evidence to build a suspect's behavioral composite that will help police guide their search.
Two profilers, Charles Dorsey and Fred Kingston, came to Pittsburgh this week to assist in solving the murder of Scott C. Drake, the 11-year-old North Side boy whose mutilated body was discovered Monday.
The agents returned yesterday to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Va., without publicly commenting on how they arrived at the profile they gave police.
The most likely suspect, they said, was probably homeless, a first-time killer with a minor police record. Sure enough, a homeless man named Joseph Cornelius was charged with the crime on Wednesday. He had a minor police record.
No one involved in the investigation would say what specific evidence led the agents to those conclusions, but Dorsey told police that in his five years as a profiler, he hadn't seen a body that brutally victimized.
"He was aware of two cases with similar characteristics, one in Oklahoma and one in Germany," said Dennis Lormel, special agent in the FBI's Pittsburgh division.
Cornelius reportedly cited the Oklahoma case in his confession to police, saying that he mutilated the body to mimic that killing to throw police off his track.
"Profilers look at all the available evidence from the crime scene, the medical examiner's report and the autopsy from a behavioral standpoint, as opposed to an investigative one," said Robert K. Ressler, the former FBI profiler whose work formed the basis of "Silence of the Lambs" and who now runs his own private agency, Forensic Behavioral Services of Virginia.
"They'll come up with a composite of the individual and link it to similar types of cases," said Ressler. "The things done at the crime scene can connect it to a certain personality type."
The position of the body, the cause of death, location, activity before and after the death are all considered -- "It's like putting a puzzle together," he said.
Based on the evidence, profilers try to determine whether the killer was most likely male or female, married or single, employed or unemployed, a local resident or a drifter, organized or disorganized. They'll come up with a likely age range, race, mental state, psychological condition.
While the profilers build their blueprint, the police proceed with their investigation. In the best-case scenarios, Ressler said, police will have developed suspects by the time the behavioral profile is assembled, and the profile will fit one person very closely.
Behavioral profiling employs a series of 10 "filters," according to Stephen Johnston, a former Secret Service agent who, with former FBI profiler Greg Cooper, runs Shield International, a private agency in Orem, Utah, that runs profile training sessions for police departments across the country.
The filters begin with figuring out how the victim became the victim, and move through a step-by-step analysis of the crime scene.
"It's like running information through a series of strainers from large to small, sifting things out at each level," Johnston said. "By the end, you've moved from the possible to the probable."
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