◆ SpookStack

Ressler etal. 7 CRIME SCENE ANALYSIS for this dichotomy is that facets of the criminal’s personality are evident in his offense. Like a fingerprint, the crime scene can be used to aid in idenufying the murderer, An organized murderer is one who appears to plan his murders and who displays control (e.g., absence of clues) at the crime scene. ‘Vhe disorganized murderer is less apt to plan, and his crime scenes display haphazard (e.g., presence of clues at crime scene) behavior. Our study was an exploratory one. Its major objectives were as follows: (1) to test, using statistical inferential procedures, if there are significant behavioral differences at the crime scenes between the crimes committed by organized offenders and those committed by disorganized murderers, and (2) to identify variables that may be useful in profiling murderers and on which the organized and dis- organized murderers differ. For the study to achieve its objectives, the agents first had to classify the 36 parucipating murderers into the organized/disorga- nized dichotomy. The dichotomy was as follows: 24 organized (with 97 vicums); |2 disorganized (with 21 victims). The method for classifi- cation is published elsewhere (Ressler et al., 1985). Data Set The data set for the study comprised 36 convicted sexual murderers. Data were collected on 118 victims of these murderers. Of the victims, 9 survived the assaults; thus those 9 assaults were classified as at- tempted murders. Each murderer who provided consent was interviewed extensively by FBI agents. The offender was asked questions regarding his back- ground, his behavior at the crime scene, and his postoffense behavior. In addition, FBI agents reviewed criminal records of all participating offenders. The data set for each murderer consisted of the best avail- able data compiled from these two sources. Due to the complexities of obtaining these data and the confiden- ality issues involved, there were “‘no response”’ answers to certain questions by some offenders. Although the missing data appear to have little effect on the univariate analysis, any interpretation of the results should consider this situation. The data for this article were computerized and stored in separate files, which are described below. (1) Background Information (on offender). This file contains 134 variables pertaining to the murderer. Variables within this file are 64