John Douglas (14:04)
Yeah, the. With. Well, with the Zodiac, we never. The unit really never got involved with the analysis of that case. We've had a lot of people come forward over the years. There's been different suspects, you know, developed. When that case was going on. We really didn't even have a behavioral science unit. When we finally got the case, it was when so called Zodiac was writing a communication, wrote a communication to the detective who was assigned to the case. He had a private office, a private line hotline. And so we got. We were going to do an analysis of the communication. We call it psycholinguistic analysis. All it is is just you're doing a profile of the author of the communication. The police immediately called us up and said, stop, forget about it. Why? We figured out who wrote the communication. Who was it? The detective. What? The detective wrote the communication himself to. He's trying to. Because he had not had any good leads, no lead. Everything just died. There was nothing going on. And to perpetuate case. He wrote this so called letter from the, you know, the Zodiac. But as far as, I mean, it's a case. If it was a case today, I think we'd be successful when you get a case like that. And how I was evolving when I was the unit chief in the bureau and training others, I was kind of de emphasizing the profile because the idea of a profile is you're trying to generate leads, you're trying to pique the mind interest of people who may know some of the characteristics that are fitting this character, the person responsible for the crime. So I began to focus in more on proactive techniques and to maybe get the subject to inject himself in the investigation or get the subject to go to a particular location because we may have planted something there, we may have had a memorial service there. And just give you an example, I was sent to go before the Internal affairs, they call opr, Office of Professional Responsibility, which is not good when you go before Internal Affairs. And so I went before a whole group and they said, john, you're not lying, are you? To the media, through the media, to the public. You're not lying, are you? I said, what do you mean? Are you telling the truth? I said, well, I don't know. I said, let me give you an example. I said, there's a case. And I told him, there's a case in San Diego that a woman, car was broken down off the side of the road. She determined she ran out of gasoline. No one knows where she is for a day or two. Then they find her up outside of San Diego in some foothills and she has a dog collar around her neck. She's been sexually assaulted and she's been garrotted. I worked with the police. I'm telling the Internal affairs this. I worked with the police. We came out with a series of articles. I said, because it was my opinion that whoever killed her was the guy who picked her up to take her maybe to a gas station. So she thought. And so we want to put a series of communications out looking for lead value. Did anyone see anything? Did anyone see anything? Any vehicle stop, any description of a vehicle or car? We put that out, we fled the airways and we waited a couple days and now we come out with another. We're getting very good leads, thanking the public, we are now getting a description of not only the vehicle, but the individual who stopped alongside of the victim's car. The purpose of that was to get the subject to inject himself into the investigation to come up with a legitimate reason why he may have been spotted there. And sure enough, the guy injects himself into the investigation. Just so you know that I was there. I offered her a ride. She said she ran out of gas, but she said no. So I went on my merry way. So I told internal affairs that was. That was the guy. We arrested him or the police arrested him. Now, if you're telling me, you're telling me, am I lying to the press or whatever. Well, it's not exactly the truth. It's not the truth, but we caught this. The police caught it by using this technique. And so they look at me and they say, well, we'll just tell you something, we understand what you're saying, but if it ever gets out or anything, or you screw up, man, we're going to have your head. We're going to have your head. I'll be working cattle rustling cases in Butte, Montana or someplace, if not fired from the bureau. So I started really working on proactive kinds of things and interview techniques and suggestions because sometimes you may do a profile and it doesn't fit every characteristic. So someone will say, well, that profile, they said he would have a college education and this guy, only he's a high school educationer. We may miss the age, which is difficult. Age is difficult because there's chronological age and behavioral age, and you may miss that. We missed the Arthur Shawcross case up in Rochester, New York. We missed it by about 15 years. And the reason we missed it was because he was incarcerated for those 15 years for a double homicide where he killed two children. And then he gets out of prison. It's unbelievable. They let him out of prison. They have to serve him 15 years. He goes up to Rochester and he starts killing prostitutes up in Rochester. So we got everything right, missed the age. But we staked out. We told him to stake out. If you find a body, don't recover it right away, but stake it out. And so the cops, they get a lead. There's a body below a bridge, an overpass below a bridge, and in the country, and there's a victim down there and it's frozen over with ice. And they stake it out. And guess what? Police are surveillant. Here comes a guy, just sits on the edge of the bridge, eating, having a drink, and the victim is right below him. And that was Arthur Shawcross, serial killer in Rochester, New York. So it's. I like the idea of developing, you know, using imagination and creativity to catch these guys and kind of de emphasize, like I said, de emphasize the profile. Sometimes you can Be right on the money. Some cases you can forget, you can't do it because too many, maybe too many types of people could perpetrate this kind of type of crime. And rape cases, we have surviving victims, we could be pretty good once, if we do the right kind of interview or we coach the police to determine what was the verbal assault was, what the sexual assault was and what the physical assault was. Verbal, sexual, physical. And what was it like throughout the first encounter with the victim during this sexual assault and afterwards, verbal, sexual, physical. And if we have that information, we do a good interview. That kind of case we can do a very good profile and come up with. Because we have a rape type, we have like five or six rape typologies based upon, if we have that kind of information, where we can determine pretty good who the offender is.