The Narrative Within

During the 1970s, the FBI used much tax payer money to create their Behavioural Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Not only many books have been written about criminal profiling but the TV and film industry has made a huge profit from its concept. My main question is this: if we know, as we’ve learned from profilers, that most violent criminals have dysfunctional childhoods in common, why do we spend so much money on prisons and not on prevention? Why not help children grow up to be healthy citizens instead of provoking them into crime? Why not create adequate schools that work with child psychologists who can spot behavioural problems and try to resolve them in time? How much crime are you not preventing but promoting, for example, when you lock up babies in cages as a means of retaliating against illegal immigration?

Before the FBI’s criminal profiling, there was Miss Marple. Miss Marple didn’t need an FBI profiler to know a criminal when she saw one. A careful observer of human behaviour, she relied upon her own experience to identify personality types. For example, she would observe someone then say “Oh, he reminds me of Jack, the butcher’s son, who was a petty theft.” Miss Marple had developed the art of abductive reasoning. That is, arriving at a conclusion not based on standardized theories but on careful observation followed by the search for the simplest explanation as to the why behind what’s been observed.

We should focus less on the crime and more on the dynamics that lead to that crime. If you can obliterate the reason why the crime has been committed, you obliterate the crime. Elementary.

Ted Kaczynski aka Unabomber, for c. 20 years, lived in a 3 x 3.6 m cabin he’d built near Lincoln, Montana. It was here in his tiny spartanic home that he built bombs and wrote his manifesto. His mother said Kaczynski was a happy child until, because of an allergic reaction to medication, he was forced to stay in a hospital in isolation. Even visits from his parents were restricted. Once out of the hospital, his personality radically changed.

Kaczynski was extremely intelligent and his parents pushed to have him skip two grades thus forcing him to be the oddball among his fellow classmates. At 16 he went to Harvard on a scholarship and became even more of an oddball. And, at Harvard, Kaczynski also became the victim of experiments conducted by psychologist Henry Murray. During WWII, Murray had collaborated with the OSS (a predecessor to the CIA) specializing in interrogation methods. Once back at Harvard, Murray experimented personality manipulation (mind control) on students such as Kaczynski. The techniques Murray used were based on humiliation and nothing short of torture.

Linda Patrik is the Unabomber’s sister-in-law. The two have never met. Initially, it was because Kaczynski resented his brother’s marriage as it reanimated those feelings of abandonment he’d experience as a child left in the hospital. He was so angry that he wrote vicious things about Linda in a letter to his brother. Linda read the letter as well as other things written by Kaczynski. When the Unabomber’s manifesto was published in the newspaper, Linda, like Miss Marple, linked similarities. She was convinced that her brother-in-law was the Unabomber and insisted that the FBI be informed. When the Unabomber was apprehended at his cabin, a bomb ready to be sent was found under his bed. The Miss Marple in Linda had saved someone’s life.

The more children you desecrate, the more criminals you generate.

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Related: The anatomy of motive : the FBI’s legendary mindhunter explores the key to understanding and catching violent criminals by Douglas, John E; Olshaker, Mark read for free on Archive HERE + Criminological and Forensic Psychology by Helen Gavin + Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit read for free on Archive HERE + Criminal profiling by Jenny MacKay, read for free on Archive HERE + Miss Marple on Archive HERE + Christiana Morgan, Murray’s lover + MIND WARS and the US govn’t on Archive