Who Were the Profilers?
Most of the profilers were veteran FBI agents. Some of them obtained degrees in Psychology or related disciplines, often from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. However, their criminal profiling skills were fundamentally an extension of their investigatory experience, with psychological studies serving mostly as an embellishment. Contrary to the mythology, criminal profiling was not primarily developed by psychologists plumbing the minds of killers, but rather by detectives observing the details of crime scenes to deduce qualities of the killers. For example, if the crime scene characteristics indicated that the killer had carried the corpse out of his vehicle and into the woods, rather than merely dropped the victim the side of the road, it could be deduced that the perpetrator was a large male, with enough strength to carry the body. Other characteristics indicated whether the crime was impulsive or carefully planned. A crime using something close at hand for a weapon, and whe
