[MUSIC]
When we talked about the JonBenét Ramsey
case,
we talked about the ransom letter.
So the case of the Unabomber, Ted
Kaczynski, is
another case where a letter is key to the
solution.
The Unabomber would send handmade letter
bombs
to universities and airlines, hence his
name.
And he killed three people and injured 23
people between 1978 and 1996, when he was
caught.
He was very clever,
he did not leave any traces.
The F.B.I. were able to get a description
from a witness,
but as you can see from the sketch, it
really doesn't look much like him.
However, he gave himself away, because he
had a motive and he offered to
stop his bombing campaign if his so-called
manifesto was published in the big
newspapers.
So two big newspapers, the Washington Post
and
the New York Times, agreed to publish it.
They published his manifesto, and a man
called
David Kaczynski read it in one of the
newspapers.
And in the writing, he recognized his own
brother's style.
Now, his brother had been a brilliant
mathematician and had briefly been a
mathematics professor
before disappearing to live off on his
own in a camp in the woods in Montana.
So David Kaczynski informed the F.B.I., the
F.B.I. raided the cabin,
and sure enough, they found that it was a
little bomb making workshop.
Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber, and now
because of
the way he wrote his manifesto, he is in
prison.
One topic that tends to get a
lot of publicity these days is
psychological profiling.
And this is controversial because
psychological profiling
is not based on a hard science.
It's more based on a soft science, and
it's
based very much on the opinion of the
psychologist.
Nevertheless, it can be very effective,
and it was very effective
in the case of a man called
George Metesky.
In the late 1930s, bombs started to
explode in New York
City. Well, some of them exploded, some
failed to go off.
And some of these bombs were very
dangerous, planted in movie theatres, for
instance.
Notes were also appearing, and these were
angry
notes directed against a company called
Consolidated Edison,
and Consolidated Edison is a big New York
State utilities company.
Now these notes didn't say Consolidated
Edison, but referred to it as "Con Edison".
With the United States entry into World
War II, the bomber
promised to suspend his bombing campaign
because of his patriotic feelings.
But, with the end of the war, he re-started
his campaign.
Conventional police methods
gave no leads at all, so
the police eventually turned to
psychological profiling.
Now the man they turned to for
their psychological profile was
a man called James Brussel, and he gave
this opinion -
The bomber was male, 40 to 50 years old,
and suffering from paranoia.
He was probably from foreign extraction,
and that was
partly based on the language used in the
note.
Probably a Slav, living with female
relatives, neat and tidy,
and very importantly, probably a former
employee of Consolidated Edison
who had a grievance against the company.
Brussel suggested that this man did not
live in New York City.
Part of the reason for that is because
real New
Yorkers refer to Consolidated Edison as
"Con Ed", not "Con Edison".
Probably he lived North-East of the city.
And he predicted that when this man is
finally arrested, he would be wearing a
double-breasted suit.
So now, the police know where to look.
They know to look through old employment
records from Consolidated Edison.
And of course, in those days, no
computers.
All these records are in cardboard boxes,
printed on paper,
and had to be searched through manually,
one by one.
So eventually, from employment records
from 1931,
somebody came across the name of George
Metesky.
And he'd been injured in an industrial
accident,
but for technical reasons, had been
denied compensation.
There's the grievance.
And indeed, he lived to the North-East of
New York, up in Waterbury.
Early in the morning, police went to
arrest him,
and this is where one of Brussel's
predictions didn't come true.
He wasn't wearing a double-breasted suit.
Because it was early in the morning, he
was wearing pajamas.
However, he asked the police
if he could change before he was taken
away,
and he did indeed change into a
double-breasted suit.
That way, all of James Brussel's
predictions came true.
But psychological profiling can be
dangerous
if there's over-reliance on this
technique.
This is a much more recent case, it's
a lady called Rachel Nickell who was
stabbed to
death, multiple stab wounds, while she was
out
on Wimbledon Common with her two year old
son.
And this poor little child was found, next
to her body, trying to wake her up.
At the time, the police couldn't find any
leads by conventional methods,
but they obtained a psychological profile
of the murderer
and this seemed to fit a local man called
Colin Stagg.
They focused on Colin Stagg, even though
there
was no other evidence linking him to the
crime.
They set up a very sophisticated honey
trap, with a woman
police constable posing as a potential
girlfriend for their suspect.
Well, though Colin Stagg never confessed
to
the murder to this so-called girlfriend,
he was still charged with the murder. But
when the case
came to court and the judge saw the so-called evidence,
it was just thrown out without a trial.
And the judge was right, because DNA tests
carried out in 2004 using improved
techniques showed that the murder had
been
committed by a man called Robert Napper.
And by that time, Robert Napper was
already in custody for some other awful
murders.
This honey trap proved to be very
expensive.
Colin Stagg was awarded more than 700,000
pounds compensation
for what he'd been put through, and the
woman police constable was compensated
with 125,000 pounds for the stress that
she had been put through.
So what is the difference between these
two
cases, the Metesky case and the Rachel
Nickell case?
Well, in the Metesky case, it wasn't
profiling that identified Metesky.
It was profiling that led investigators to
consider Metesky, and
the profiling was supported by his old
grievance against Con Ed.
In the Colin Stagg case, the profiling
was the only evidence against him.
And really, the technique is not strong
enough to be used in isolation.
[BLANK_AUDIO]

