I recently read this article on F.B.I. criminal profiling in The New Yorker. It gives a brief history of how profiling came to be and discusses the BTK killer profile, as well as several other murders on which profiling was used. What’s interesting is that profiling is not as exact a science as most people would think. In fact it’s a lot like writing a horoscope. If you make enough guesses and generalizations, eventually something is going to look familiar, and people tend to forget the stuff that didn’t match at all.
