The latest method of those presented in this work is that developed by Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and private criminal profiler operating out of California. Brent has somewhat of an interesting history with regards to his entrance into the world of criminal profiling, with his motivation to study human behaviour and the justice system arising from a gross miscarriage of the rights of a good friend whilst a teenager [for a full report, see Reference 6, Author’s Notes]. Brent began studying sex offenders when he undertook undergraduate work in the field of psychology. He later moved on to interviewing convicted sex offenders in prison with the hope of developing a further understanding about their crimes.

Early in 1991, Brent interviewed incarcerated serial murderer, Jerome Brudos. Prior to his first meeting with Brudos, Brent spent months examining court records, transcripts and other reports of the crimes. If he had not have done this, it may have been easy for Brudos to misrepresent the facts of his criminal behaviour, and ultimately his responsibility for the crimes. Brent was able to compare the established and documented actions of the perpetrator with the verbal reports provided by the perpetrator and realised that much of the information was in conflict. The following extract from the Author’s Notes explains more fully [Reference 6]:

“It was after my first interview with incarcerated serial murderer Jerome H. Brudos that I realised how truly naïve my understanding of sex offenders was. I spent the first five hours with him, and he lied to me almost the entire time. He lied about almost everything he had ever done (or rather, he claimed, everything he hadn’t done). The only reason that I was not completely taken in by his charming personality and generous, affable nature was the fact that I had reviewed the investigative file. Prior to the interview, I had gone to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in Salem, Oregon. I had read the autopsy reports on all the victims, looked at the crime scene photos, and read the investigators’ reports. I had even seen some of the photos that Jerry had taken of himself posing with his victims.”

The method of profiling he later developed took into account things such as the fact that offenders will lie about their actions, and that sometimes the most objective record of what happened in a criminal event is a reconstruction of offender behaviour. Hence, Behavioural Evidence Analysis was developed to fill the gap left when many methods departed from an examination of offender behaviour, relying more on an intuitive approach to criminal profiling.

Behavioural Evidence Analysis (BEA) is broken down into four main steps, which can be adopted during two phases. Firstly, those four steps of BEA will be outlined, so the reader might develop ideas as to how they are used during the two phases.

The first step in the process of BEA is known as the Equivocal Forensic Analysis. It is equivocal in the sense that the interpretation of the evidence could have more than one meaning, and the purpose of this step is to assess the most likely meaning of the evidence. This step is important because “one cannot render a thorough criminal profile until the physical evidence has been analysed and interpreted” [Reference 6, page 57].

The equivocal forensic analysis draws upon a variety of sources, which may include but is in no way limited to [References 1, 4 and 6]:

• crime scene photos, videos and sketches
• investigators reports
• evidence logs and evidence submission forms
• autopsy reports, videos and photos
• interviews of witnesses and neighbours
• any other relevant documentation, interviews, or information
• map of the victims travel prior to death
• background of the victim

The second step involves an in depth assessment of the victim, or Victimology. It is recognised that the victim should be profiled in a similar fashion to the perpetrator [Reference 5 and 6] though historically, victimology has been one of the most neglected fields of criminal profiling [Reference 8]. In the situation where you have a living victim, they may be the richest source of information relating to the perpetrator, though the involvement of the victim is not to be discarded should they be killed during the incident.

A complete victimology is designed to produce as accurate a picture of the victim as possible. Determining why, how, where, when and why a particular victim was chosen will tell you a great deal about the offender. One victim characteristic that may assist in profiling the offender is the victims physical build. If during the reconstruction stage of the investigation we can say that the perpetrator carried the victim some distance before disposing of the body, we could likely infer that the perpetrator is of a muscular build, or perhaps was not working alone. Similarly, if the offender has been able to abduct the victim without struggle, and we know the victim is naturally suspicious, logical inferences may include the victim knowing the offender, or that the offender was socially adept and able to con the victim into accompanying them. While these inferences may not be able to be made alone, other supporting evidence is usually available which may support these suggestions.

The third step is known as Crime Scene Characteristics, and these are the “distinguishing features of a crime scene as evidenced by an offender’s behavioural decisions regarding the victim and the offense location, and their subsequent meaning to the offender” [Reference 6, page 121]. This step involves the determination of a number of factors relevant to the location of the crime scene, where this crime scene is placed relative to other related crime scenes, and how the offender approached the victim/s. For example, if you have a crime scene that you can reasonably determine is relatively devoid of forensic information, then it is safe to infer that this scene is one of several. If by elimination, deduction, or luck (yes, profilers do occasionally have luck!) you are able to find the previous crime scenes you have the potential to increase the available forensic information relevant to the current crime. Also, what is known as the primary crime scene (that scene where the majority of the interaction took place) may have special significance for the offender and therefore may provide vital clues about who the offender is.

The final phase of BEA is known as Offender Characteristics, and it is this step which will contain the offender’s behavioural and personality characteristics that are derived from, and informed by, the three preceding steps. It is not a final rendering of all of the offenders characteristics, and should be constantly updated and reviewed as new material comes to light, and old material is refuted or disproved. The offender characteristics that may be interpreted from the previous steps may include such information as [Reference 1, 4, 6 and 8]:

• Physical build
• Offender sex
• Work status and habits
• Remorse or guilt
• Offender vehicle type
• Criminal history
• Skill level
• Aggressiveness
• Offender residence in relation to the crime
• Medical history
• Marital status
• Race

Collectively, this information will produce a "picture" of the offender, which investigators may check off against known offenders, suspects, or suspect pools. This may produce further suspects, or may aid in reducing the amount of suspects investigators are currently looking into.

There are two broad phases during which the core assumptions of BEA are useful. The first of these is during the Investigative Phase when crimes are initially being committed by a perpetrator and investigated by law enforcement [Reference 1]. This is also referred to as the unknown offender for the known crime.

The main purposes of this phase are [Reference 6]:

• To reduce the viable suspect pool in a criminal investigation, and to prioritize the investigation into those suspects
• To assist in the linkage of potentially related crimes by identifying unique crime scene indicators and behaviour patterns
• To assist in assessing the potential for escalation of nuisance criminal behaviour to more serious or more violent crimes (i.e. harassment, stalking, voyeurism).
• To provide investigators with investigatively relevant leads and strategies
• To help keep the overall investigation on track and undistracted

The Trial Phase involves assessing a known crime for which there is a suspect of defendant. This phase may also be referred to as the known offender for the known crime. The primary goals of this phase are [Reference 6]:

• To assist in the process of evaluating the nature and value of forensic evidence to a particular case
• To assist in the process of developing interview or interrogative strategy
• To help develop and gain insight into offender fantasy and motivations
• To help gain insight into offender state of mind before, during and after the commission of a crime (i.e. levels of planning, evidence of remorse, precautionary acts, etc).
• To help suggest a crime scene linkage by virtue of modus operandi (those things the perpetrator had to do to commit the crime) and signature behaviour (those things the perpetrator did not have to do to commit the crime, which usually fulfil a physical or psychological need).

Because BEA does not use a statistical reference group from which to create a criminal profile, this author views it as the method with the greatest cross-cultural applicability when assessing criminal behaviour. It is a robust method, which takes into account all of the physical evidence left behind at a crime scene, the offender behaviour and the victim characteristics, which collectively produce the profile of the individual responsible. If there are any criticisms of this method, it is that it requires a great deal of time and training on the part of the practitioner, and that the quality of the final product is directly influenced by the amount of information available to the analyst.