Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling

Written by David Canter

Narrated by Matthew Lloyd Davies

Criminals reveal who they are and where they live not just from how they commit their crimes, but also from the locations they choose.

This is the claim of renowned criminal psychologist and profiler David Canter. In this groundbreaking book, now fully revised and updated, Canter leads us into the labyrinthine psyche of serial killers, rapists, and other violent criminals, and reveals how geographical profiling is changing the way police work and our understanding of the criminal mind.

From Jack the Ripper to Fred West's house of horror and the recent Suffolk murders, Canter analyzes the geographical maps of killers' actions and the psychological maps of their thoughts to provide a fascinating insight into the most notorious criminals of all time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515941620

Reviews for Mapping Murder

[fnielsen_18 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Author David Canter, one of the pioneers of so-called geographic profiling of crime, details in Mapping Murder quite stirring cases of (mostly) serial crimes and how geographical profiling helped catch the perpetrator. The mathematical theory behind his geographical profiling is never explained in the book, but it may be some kind of kernel density modeling where each crime spot is convolved with a local kernel. Canter shows that the spot where the criminal dwell is usually the site with the highest density from the combined kernels. As such it is not really rocket science, but rather a simple useful technique that helps the police priotizing suspects. Canter has overseen one implementation of a program - Dragnet - to this kind of analysis and some of figures in the book are probably output from the program. One chapter is lifted off a lecture he gave, and his speculations there seems a bit out of place compared to the rest of the book. The book is from 2003 and one of the cases Canter describes is the assasination of celebrity Jill Dando, the use of geographic profiling and the subsequent catch and conviction of a man. It is not updated on the latest twists in this case: the man appealed and was acquitted, and in 2009 a drunken Serb boasted about killing Dando. This case shows that geographic profiling does not give strong enough evidence for a conviction - rather it can only point to suspects whose involvement in the crime must be established by other means. In Dando's case the other means was gunshot residues, and that evidence was ruled unsafe in the court of appeal.