western louisiana serial killer mixed race

'There are many errors and frustration from this sort of information ' McCree said. She has been recommending more emphasis on a 'bullet point chart,' which describes common facts about suspected serial crimes to get potential leads.įor example, she said, police might say the crimes were all committed between certain times, or in a certain area, which might be more fruitful than putting up a hypothesized description. ' would get out there whether we held it back or not.'īrown said there are better ways to involve the public.

'I don't think it's possible not to publicize' said Harris, author of Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work. Yet, when a killer is on the loose, the public is thirsty for information, and it will seize on anything it can find. 'Most profiles generated are what I call a 'duh' profile,' she said. Otherwise, Brown said, they contain vague generalizations that are true for most any serial killer - describing a 'loser' between the ages of 25 and 35, who has trouble with women. 'If it's a slam dunk and you apprehend the suspect within 12 hours, you never get a profile,' said Fox. It's practically the nature of a profile to be wrong, he said, because they're not used for easy cases. 'People get a sense that more useful than they really are,' Fox said. 'Profiles just aren't that reliable and they never have been.' 'A profile is never used to definitively say who did it,' he said. case,' he said.īut Fox said that profiles are more often a crime-solving tool than a proof. 'Sometimes juries do not believe that, as in the O.J. The case against Lee is not based on the profile, but DNA evidence.Įven with the DNA evidence, Carlson still saw the case as far from foolproof. 'They'll only throw it out if the arrest was based on the profile,' said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio and a former prosecutor. Others said it was unlikely that such a mistake could open an escape hatch for Lee. can confront with the misidentification at the trial in a similar fashion that the killer was profiled as a white male,' said Ron Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia. Such equations are especially needed, because a mistaken profile might form the basis of a defense.

Western louisiana serial killer mixed race