The FBI interviewed 36 sexually-motivated murderers and used this data, together with characteristics of their crimes, to create two categories (organised and disorganised).
If the data from a crime scene matched some of the characteristics of one category we could then predict other characteristics that would be likely.
The organised and disorganised distinction is based on the idea that offenders have certain signature ways of working.
The organised and disorganised distinctions generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual.
There are four main stages in the construction of an
FBI profile:
Data assimilation - review of the evidence (photographs, pathology reports, etc.).
Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised.
Crime reconstruction - generation of hypotheses about the behaviour and events.
Profile generation - generation of hypotheses about the offender (e.g. background, physical characteristics, etc.).