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Title: Rachel Nickell Case Now a Closed Book - Channel 4 News (Part 2 of 2) View count: 836 Rating: 0 (0 ratings) Description: In 1994, when the case against Colin Stagg collapsed, Paul Britton bore the brunt of press criticism. I guess he was a softer target than the Met. It appears he's coming in for it again now, but to a lesser extent. And this time the police are being targeted too. But it's important to note that behind the sanctimonious headlines and sidebars, the press does not give a toss about Robert Napper, Colin Stagg or Rachel Nickell. David Canter may be sore at Paul Britton, over the latter's brief description of the former's odd behaviour, in Britton's 1997 book The Jigsaw Man. Britton's artistic/instinctive approach to offender profiling is perhaps not to Canter's number-crunching taste. Gloria Laycock suggested that UK law enforcement of the early '90s was 'beguiled' by the FBI's talk of profiling violent criminals. Popular rhetoric is that hit movie The Silence of the Lambs focussed world attention on psych profiling. But watch the film and you'll see that cannot be. There is no actual use of the phrase 'offender profiling' in the film. Hannibal Lecter postulates as to the motivations of an unknown killer, but not in an apparently structured, methodical way. Neither Canter nor Britton appears to have been aware of goings-on at Quantico, when they separately began their profiling endeavours here in the UK. Canter scored notable success in helping to narrow down the pool of suspects in the Railway Rapist case in mid-198Os Greater London. A few years later he did likewise in Birmingham, helping guide police to Adrian Babb, who had been raping elderly women in the city's tower blocks. Also in the mid-1980s, Britton helped Leicestershire CID to identify a likely suspect in the murder of two women around Leicester itself, a few years apart. Not far away, during the same period, two schoolgirls were murdered by a separate assailant, and Britton's profile closely fit a man who was later jailed for those crimes. Paul Britton eventually travelled to the US to consult and compare notes with FBI profiling pioneers; but by then he had become a pioneer himself, independently of the Americans. Incidentally, Britton's original profile of the Wimbledon Common killer, matches Robert Napper. A Tags: news, crime, politics, Author: AndySword |
