This study will discuss in full the investigative aid of profiling serial murderers and other types of criminals. The study will describe what psychological profiling is, how it is carried out, and its potential and effectiveness. Included in the study will be the consideration of the question of whether such profiling could have brought about a more swift capture of mass killer Ted Bundy.
The case of Ted Bundy is particularly instructive in any
consideration of the effectiveness and potential of profiling mass killers and other serious criminals, because of the fact that Bundy did not fit in any way the categories generally associated wit the typical mass murderer.
That is, as Richard Larsen makes clear in his book, Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger, the use of profiling in the Bundy case, as much as it was actually used or as much as it might have been used, could not have been especially effective because it relies on the formation of a suspected personality on the basis of the crimes committed. The horror of Bundy's murders caused the detectives on that case to suspect a man who was living an
isolated and outwardly and inwardly miserable life.
Bundy, however, seemed to most of those that knew him as a happy, energetic, generous and ambitious man who would inevit-ably succeed as a professional and well-educated man.
The problem with the profiling method, then, in the Bundy case, is precisely the strength of the method in many other cases. The basis of the success of the profiling system in those cases where it does prove successful is its reliance on the principle of cause and effect.
In the case of mass murderers, for example, the profiler begins with the assumption that the killer lives on the fringes of society to some degree or another. And he (another assumption of the profiler), is a man, based primarily on the fact that men have been the mass murderers in the past and that men kill through careful pl...