Among the cases discussed by Gladwell is the study of the most notorious serial killers in the US by John Douglas and his FBI colleague Robert Ressler. The duo was looking for “what psychologists would call a homology, an agreement between character and action.”

A significant conclusion was that serial killers fall into one of two categories, viz. organised and disorganised. “Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfil a specific fantasy,” writes Gladwell, describing the study. “In a ‘disorganised’ crime, the victim isn’t chosen logically. She’s seemingly picked at random and ‘blitz-attacked,’ not stalked and coerced.”

Each of these styles, the study found, corresponds to a personality type. “The organised killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him,” the author explains. “The disorganised killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability… If he drives at all, his car is a wreck.”

An interesting finding that Douglas and Ressler came upon was that frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman. As a corollary, the two ‘researchers’ came up with a prediction — that the subject ‘would drive a police-like vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice.’

A profile, however, isn’t a test, Gladwell observes. “In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analysed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent.”

The essay includes a discussion of the challenge to the FBI’s assumptions that a group headed by Laurence Alison of the University of Liverpool came up with. “Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organised traits and a random array of disorganised traits,” Alison found.

Sometime later, when at a radio interview on the subject Gladwell found Douglas also to be on the show, he thought that surely Douglas would have come up with some devastating critique of Alison’s work. On the contrary, Douglas knew nothing about the academic critiques of the Bureau’s Behavioural Science Unit. “In fact, Douglas didn’t really have a defence of the bureau’s techniques at all, except to insist, over and over again, that they worked.”

Writes Gladwell: “All I could think, on my way home, was that these are the people who are supposed to protect us from terrorists.”

Gripping read.

D. MURALI

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