East Area Rapists

Another, more recent, case involving serial rape is that of the East Area Rapist, also known as the Golden State Killer. The East Area Rapist was known to take small mementos from his victims after raping them, starting in 1976. It was not until ten years later that he took to killing his victims. The East Area Rapist boggled law enforcement for many years, managing to commit crimes for so long without slipping up. The criminal was connected to the killings after he shot at a woman and her husband, the evidence matching up with previous descriptions of the East Area Rapist. From their investigations and research, the FBI was able to determine the criminal was a tall white male with light hair and an athletic build. THey determined that he was …show more content…
Shortly after the creation of the Behavioral Science Unit, the FBI decided that they should look into hostage negotiation. They began with a handful of agents and psychologists and essentially improvised as they went. They began by talking to the offender during the crime and found that it yielded positive results. This eventually developed into the Crisis Management Unit, now known as the Crisis Negotiation Unit. The FBI worked tirelessly to perfect their negation methods. They came up with different methods and taught them to agents. These agents would then go out and use the methods taught to them and research was conducted based on their successes and failures. Any failure resulted in improvements and new methods being developed. Agents will go through rigorous training and simulations in order to ensure they understand the methods so that they are not improvising when there are lives on the line (Schiff, Neal, and Greg Vecchi. “Behavioral Science Unit – Part III”). The FBI decided to take a closer look into the hostage takers themselves, however. In late 2009, the FBI began to interview hostage takers around the world, similar to Ressler and Douglas when they interviewed serial killers in the ‘70s. They have been working with the Department of Defense, as well as other scholarly organizations to establish strict investigative protocols for …show more content…
These advancements have benefited the FBI by providing insights in to criminal psychology and the ability to predict behaviors in a way to enhance investigations and save lives. From interviews with criminals to analysis of their personal belongings, the methods of creating a criminal profile have greatly improved within the BAU. Behavioral analysts have gone from using clues to make guesses about the thoughts and methodology of criminals to using psychology and intensive analysis to make accurate predictions about the identity of a criminal. If investigators in the ‘40s as they do today, perhaps they could have stopped Hitler by predicting his actions rather than waiting for his inevitable