Adult Criminal Profiling 17related instead to occurrences of police stress or cynicism. In either case, research
examining the role of psychology in the officer's decision to tamper with evidence is
lacking.
What impact does an officer caught tampering with evidence have on the
courts? The police department? The general public? The Rodney King and O, J.
Simpson cases bring feelings of distrust to the American judicial system. Evi-
dence tampering has never been examined as a function of the public's trust in
policing.
Many other possibilities for research exist in the topic of evidence tampering.
The future will no doubt bring additional cases of police fraud associated with the
manipulation of criminal evidence and will place this understudied topic into the
limelight once again.
ADULT CRIMINAL PROFILING
Introduction
The area of forensic psychology dealing with criminal profiling is an increasingly
popular one. A greater number of movies and prime-time television shows attempt
to portray the glamorous and interesting process of profiling criminals (most often
serial murderers). Although much profiling is accomplished through intuitive pro-
cesses possessed by law enforcement agents or their consultants, a scientific ground-
ing does exist for profiling and is discussed in this chapter. The following vignette
provides an example of a "typical" serial murder scenario and gives a hypothesis or
"profile" used to apprehend the murderer (Turco, 1990).
i'he homicide scene revealed a 21-year-old woman shot on each side of the head
with a small-caliber weapon. She was found nude, lying face up on the stairway of her
home and had been found sexually molested. Crime scene evidence led this author to
the belief that she had been murdered while walking clown the stairs. The investigation
led to the comparisons of similar homicides in the area and "a profile" of the perpetrator
was developed. We believed he was a young, athletic male with a casual acquaintance
with his victims. We believed he was nonpsychotic and "organized" in his behavior. The
detective team hypothesized that he was a "smooth-talker" and capable of easily winning
a woman's confidence. This led to the "hunch" that he likely had good relationships
with women, at least on a superficial basis. The possibility of "splitting" was entertained
as a hypothesis in which we believed the perpetrator "divided" women into good (his
friends) and bad (his victims). Investigators looked for physical patterns consistent with
this hypothesis. This led to an examination of telephone records of public and private
phones in the geographic vicinity of sequential homicides. This revealed a pattern of
telephone calls to the same phone in another city. Interviews with the suspect and his
girlfriend were arranged at the time of his arrest. Police learned that following each
murder he telephoned his live-in girlfriend "just to talk." Examination of his telephone
bills revealed collect calls made from the vicinity of previous homicides. He was an
intelligent, good-looking psychopath who was later convicted of murder, (p. 152)