Ellen Roof, Culture & Thought Editor

The Student Union Board brought television-featured criminal profiler and author Pat Brown on November 7 to discuss her work on fascinating criminal profiling cases. Her 2010 book, The Profiler, has been a great success, and this February her new book, The Murder of Cleopatra, examines the death of Cleopatra, making use of historical profiling.

Brown began her talk by expressing the misrepresentation the popular television show “Criminal Minds” has given profiling. “We do not travel in private jets and we don’t have the computer guru Garcia to find out all the key specifics for us,” Brown laughed.  Brown stumbled upon this career after she rented a room in her house out to a man she suspected of being a criminal.  She immediately liked the idea of becoming a profiler. “Profiling is very exciting to me because it’s all in the mind – it’s a puzzle and I want to figure it out,” Brown explained.

To pursue her interest, Brown read nearly 400 books and received a master’s degree in criminal justice.  To be a good profiler, one must be able to logically analyze behavioral and physical evidence. “And you can’t let talking to killers freak you out, either,” Brown added.   Actually, there isn’t a distinct curriculum to become a profiler. Brown developed the first course to become a profiler—an online curriculum consisting of five courses that are specific to criminal profiling rather than criminal justice or forensic psychology. As far as career opportunities in profiling are concerned, Brown stated there are almost no jobs in the field. Most profilers, like Brown herself, are professors who take cases on the side.

In her discussion, Brown highlighted several interesting cases on which she has worked on in the past. While describing what took place in the crime, Brown also described how she drew those conclusions. Brown’s eye for detail and great intuition helped her solve many crimes.

In one case, a mother stabbed her two children and then proceeded to call 911 as a cover for her actions. Brown explained that when a killer calls 911 in order to escape suspicion for a crime, he or she will focus on less important details first, thinking they need to fabricate a story right away for the 911 responders. In the aforementioned case, the mother’s first words to the operator were, “Someone has broken into my house.”  Most worried mothers would begin with the fact that their children have been stabbed, but this mother first wanted to make the operator think someone else was at fault. Thus, with the phone conversation transcript, and additional evidence, Brown deduced that the mother was the killer.

Brown said that criminal profilers should work with police in the very beginnings of criminal investigations. “Profilers need to be there with the detectives from the start to point the investigation in the right direction, to pick up on clues before it’s too late. Each big police department should have one criminal profiler working with the team,” she said. Brown found that when she worked on a cold case, the theories she proposed were often rejected by the police, who may have taken her theorizing as a way of mitigating their efforts or proving them inferior. “If profilers were involved from the beginning, no feelings would be hurt, and crimes would be solved more quickly and efficiently,” Brown earnestly suggested.

Ellen Roof is a sophomore majoring in psychology and business.  Contact her at eroof@nd.edu to rave about the success of our football team.