[MUSIC] When we talked about the JonBenét Ramsey case, we talked about the ransom letter. So the case of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, is another case where a letter is key to the solution. The Unabomber would send hand made letter bombs to universities and airlines, hence his name. And he killed 3 people and injured 23 people between 1978 and 1996, when he was caught. He was very clever. He did not leave any traces. The FBI were able to get a description from a witness. But as you can see from the sketch, it really doesn't look much like him. However, he gave himself away, because he had a motive and he offered to stop his bombing campaign if his so called manifesto was published in the big newspapers. So two big newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times agreed to publish it. They published his manifesto. And a man called David Kaczynski read it in one of the newspapers, and in the writing, he recognized his own brother's style. Now his brother had been a brilliant mathematician and had briefly been a mathematics professor before disappearing to live off on his own, in a cabin in the woods in Montana. So David Kaczynski informed the FBI. The FBI raided the cabin, and sure enough, they found that it was a little bomb making workshop. Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber. And now, because of the way he wrote his manifesto, he is in prison. One topic that tends to get a lot of publicity these days is psychological profiling. And this is controversial because psychological profiling is not based on a hard science, it's more based on a soft science. And it's based very much on the opinion of the psychologist. Nevertheless, it can be very effective. And it was very effective in the case of a man called George Metesky. In the late 1930s, bombs started to explode in New York City. Well, some of them exploded, some failed to go off. And some of these bombs were very dangerous, planted in movie theaters, for instance. Notes were also appearing, and these were angry notes directed against a company called Consolidated Edison. And Consolidated Edison is a big New York State utilities company. Now these notes didn't say Consolidated Edison, but referred to it as Con Edison. With the United States entry in tho World War II, the bomber promised to suspend his bombing campaign because of his patriotic feelings. But with the end of the war, he restarted his campaign. Conventional police methods gave no leads at all. So the police eventually turned to psychological profiling. Now the man they turned to for their psychological profile was a man called James Brussel. And he gave this opinion, the bomber was male, 40 to 50 years old, and suffering from paranoia. He was probably from foreign extraction, and that was partly based on the language used in the note. Probably a Slav, living with female relatives, neat and tidy, and very importantly, probably a former employee of Consolidated Edison, who had a grievance against the company. Brussel suggested that this man did not live in New York City, part of the reason for that is because real New Yorkers refer to Consolidated Edison as Con Ed not Con Edison. Probably he lived northeast of the city and he predicted that when this man is finally arrested, he would be wearing a double-breasted suit. So now the police know where to look, they know to look through old employment records from Consolidated Edison. And of course in those days, no computers, all these records are in cardboard boxes, printed on paper, and had to be searched through manually one by one. So eventually, from employment records from 1931, somebody came across the name of George Metesky. And he'd been injured in an industrial accident, but for technical reasons, had been denied compensation. There's the grievance. And indeed, he lived to the northeast of New York, up in Westbury. Early in the morning, police went to arrest him. And this is where one of Brussel's predictions didn't come true. He wasn't wearing a double-breasted suit, because it was early in the morning he was wearing pajamas. However, he asked the police if he could change before he was taken away, and he did indeed change into a double-breasted suit. That way, all of James Brussel's predictions came true. But psychological profiling can be dangerous if there's over-reliance on this technique. This is a much more recent case. It's a lady called Rachel Nickell, who was stabbed to death, multiple stab wounds, while she was out on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son. And this poor little child was found next to her body trying to wake her up. At the time the police couldn't find any leads by conventional methods, but they obtained a psychological profile of the murderer. And they seemed to fit a local man called Colin Stagg. They focused on Colin Stagg, even though there was no other evidence linking him to the crime. They set up a very sophisticated honey trap, with a woman police constable posing as a potential girlfriend for their suspect. Well, even though Colin Stagg never confessed to the murder, to this so-called girlfriend, he was still charged with the murder. But when the case came to court and the judge saw the, so-called, evidence, it was just thrown out without a trial. And the judge was right, because DNA tests carried out in 2004 using improved techniques showed that the murder had been committed by a man called Robert Napper. And by that time Robert Napper was already in custody for some other awful murders. This honey trap proved to be very expensive. Colin Stagg was awarded more than 700,000 pounds compensation for what he'd been put through. And the woman police constable was compensated with 125,000 pounds for the stress that she had been put through. So what is the difference between these two cases, the Metesky case and the Rachel Nickell case? Well, in the Metesky case, it wasn't profiling that identified Metesky. It was profiling that led investigators to consider Metesky. And the profiling was supported by his old grievance against Con Ed. In the Colin Stagg case, the profiling was the only evidence against him. And really the technique is not strong enough to be used in isolation.
