The application of Newton and Swoope's geographical profile to serial killers

Abstract

Quite possibly, the first application of geographic analysis to identify and characterise the spatial behaviour of the offender concerning the crime scene was developed in 1980 by Milton Newton. Although previous studies have used Newton and Swoope's geoforensic process (Kent, 2009, Essays on the integration of anisotropic landscapes within contemporary geographic profiling models [LSU doctoral dissertations]; Leitner et al., 2007, Police Practice and Research, 8[4], 359–370) to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, there are, to our knowledge, no investigations that have validated the procedure with cases of serial murderers. The main objective of the study is to analyse a sample of 41 serial killers with a minimum number of six crimes and to evaluate the method proposed by Newton (1988, Geographical discovery of the residence of an unknown dispersing localized serial murder). The results confirm only Newton's first assumption in which after the fifth crime in the series, the estimated ‘haven’ is close to the actual ‘haven’, ruling out that the search area becomes progressively smaller and that the ‘haven’ is located in the search area.