UBC: The Cases That Haunt Us

[truepenny]

Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Lisa Drew-Scribner, 2000. [library]

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FBI profiling techniques applied to famous unsolved (or dubiously solved) crimes: Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, the Zodiac, JonBenet Ramsey, the Black Dahlia, the Boston Strangler, and Laurie Bembenek. (It's odd, looking at that sentence, how some crimes are known, in shorthand, for their victim, some for the criminal, and some for the person accused. And the Lindbergh case is immediately recognizable from both sides.) Douglas and Olshaker are very rational, very commonsensical, and fundamentally their technique is to say, This is the crime. These are the requirements for a perpetrator. This is how we might (in 2000) go about catching such a perpetrator. This is how the accused does, or does not, meet these requirements. They figure Lizzie did it; that Hauptmann did it, but didn't act alone; and that accusing JonBenet's parents is nonsense.

This was a good read, very engaging, well laid out as a narrative, very convincing. My only complaint is that Douglas and Olshaker have been infected by the Polish Jew Theory of Jack the Ripper, just as Paul Begg has. The vector seems to be Martin Fido--I need to read his book, obviously--and while I understand why the Polish Jew Theory is compelling (three different police officials talk about a Polish Jew as either a top suspect or the man they "know" committed the murders), I'm just dubious as hell about it. The only one who gives a name is Macnaghten, who is self-evidently an unreliable source (he also fingers M. J. Druitt and Michael Ostrog); Anderson and Swenson, writing twenty years or more after the fact, don't give a name, don't have anything more than a lunatic ID'd by a witness (the witness refused to swear to it), and do show bias against immigrant Jews. Also, which witness was it? He must have been a Jew, since both Anderson and Swenson claim he refused to swear to the ID on learning that the suspect was also Jewish, which means he was most likely Joseph Lawende (who always maintained he didn't get a good look at the suspect and wouldn't recognize him again) or Israel Schwartz (who didn't speak English--and, of course, if you argue the theory that Liz Stride wasn't a Ripper victim, he didn't see the Ripper anyway). The fact that Fido found two Polish Jewish lunatics who more-or-less fit the vague stories of Macnaghten, Anderson, and Swenson (one of them has the right name, the other one seems to have been homicidal) . . . all that means, assuming that the Anderson/Swenson story is true, is that the police heard of a likely lunatic, dragged their poor witness to look at him, and got him to agree--though not to swear--that it was the man he saw. There's nothing in the crimes themselves that points to a Jewish Ripper (if you argue that the Goulston Street graffito was written by the Ripper, there's even evidence that he wasn't Jewish), and I'm just deeply suspicious of the police finding a suspect who so tidily fits their preconceptions of what the Ripper would look like (lower-class, "foreign," visibly, violently insane). Especially when our knowledge of that suspect is limited to (a.) Macnaghten's untrustworthy memorandum, (b.) Anderson's coy hints, and (c.) Swenson's extremely weird story, none of which amount to, well, much of anything.

Otherwise, excellent book. Recommended if you're interested in criminology at all.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I started to ask what kind of approach the authors took toward profiling, because I'd read a quite interesting critique of psychologically-based criminal profiling, and then I went and found the article and discovered it was mostly about Douglas. So, I guess that answers that question.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Oh, next you're going to suggest that we can't trust that psychologically-based criminal profiler Fox Mulder.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Heh. The pity is that, while I was never a big fan of the X-Files, some of my favorite episodes were the ones where Mulder was actually operating as a profiler. I think it's because I like seeing characters display their competence, and we'd been told Mulder was a really good profiler, so it was satisfying when that got backed up with actual (fictional) evidence.

Ah well. Now I want to write a story about psychics with empathic gifts that make the profiling thing really work. Except it would probably have to be a story about what psychological wrecks those psychics rapidly become, and that isn't the kind of thing I'm good at . . . .

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. Thank you!

[kate_nepveu]

It does seem like considering a specific existing suspect might be less prone to the kind of things that Gladwell talks about in that article.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I wonder. You will note that the British team that tested the FBI's profiles for perception of accuracy found that the profile was rated just as "accurate" when describing a made-up fictional perpetrator as the person who was caught. As far as I can tell, profiling isn't really usefully eliminative at all -- it can't tell you who definitely didn't do it. The best it can do is say, based on known criminal cases, someone may be more or less likely to have committed this one. But as the study checking the usefulness of the organized/disorganized distinction and the one checking on similarities between perpetrators of similar crimes suggest, there are far more exceptions than not to these "rules" so there's a real question whether profiling really tells you much about the "probable" perp at all. I suspect that, at base, it's really just a parlor game.

[cmpriest.livejournal.com]

Agreed - I really enjoyed this one too, but thought they sort of went down a rabbithole with the Ripper matreial. Ah, well.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Jack the Ripper seems to do that to people.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That looks rather interesting. I've never caught the ripper bug, but the Zodiac and the Black Dahlia do intrigue me, I have to say. Thank you.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't the dubiousness of the method as applied to the case of the Ripper give some pause to its efficacy elsewhere? A well-laid out, convincing narrative may just be evidence of a skillful story teller.

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

I've always been irritated by the prevalence of the Polish Jew Theory. I don't care how many eyewitnesses mention someone "foreign" looking, given Victorians, I just can't take that as meaning anything at all.

There's an A&E special on Jack the Ripper where Douglas gives that same profile; I remember watching it in high school when I wrote my senior English paper on Jack the Ripper. (Well, they told us to pick whatever topic we liked...)