Mapping the Trail of Crime

When a violent crime has been committed, the immediate focus for investigators is usually the crime scene itself. Police make inferences about a perpetrator from physical evidence such as fingerprints, footprints, clothing fibers, or traces of bodily fluid. However, the geographical context of the crime can also provide investigators with invaluable insight. What leads the killer and the victim to end up in the same place at the same time? What does the journey made by the criminal tell us about him or her? Most importantly, with serial criminals, can a pattern be determined from the geography of the crimes?

Geographic profiling is a technique that has evolved over the last 20 years to help police answer these questions. Originally developed in Canada in the 1990s by Dr. Kim Rossmo and the Vancouver Police Department, geographic profiling is widely used today by police forces around the world in criminal investigations. Using specially developed techniques, profilers such as Rossmo and British criminologist Dr. David Canter have applied their methods to ongoing investigations (such as the 1980s Railway Rapist in London and the Beltway Sniper in 2002), as well as testing their theories retrospectively on closed cases such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Jeffrey Dahmer (the Milwaukee Monster), and Fred and Rosemary West.

Mapping Crime exposes the behavior of serial criminals by plotting their crimes on specially commissioned maps, allowing the reader to trace their terrible crime sprees. The book explores the geography of the criminals’ actions, examining the decision- making that went into the selection of a place to commit a crime or dispose of a victim.