You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by two of our favorite people, Jim fitz Fitzgerald and Ray Carr, here to talk to us about profilingist serial killer. Ray and fitz thank you for joining us today and great to be back with you and Bill with the Mix News here. Bill, we know your situation, of course, but I guess there is some good news in this investigation. And Ray and I will do our best to fill in out any blanks or any questions you have in your Oh. Thank you both, and absolutely we think this is fantastic news. We are thrilled for three of our families now. Robin Edwards's family David Noblink's family both received confirmation of who was involved in their murder. It's a rape murder actually, and a case we were less familiar with. Teresa Howell her family also received news, and Kristin and I were talking about this Onmind Over Murder. I've said, I don't think there's a place at the card store where you can go and say congratulations on finding out who killed you loved one. But at the same time, as you both know, when you're looking for answers in this case for over thirty years getting those answers, there's some good in that. There really is. So we're thrilled in that regard. We're excited about helping the FBI and the Virginia State Police move this case forward. Thank you both. One of the things that we wanted to have you both on today to talk about is some of the hallmarks of what happens when you're trying to profile a serial killer. For some of our listeners who may be a little less familiar with profiling. We wanted to pose some questions to you, first overall about serial killers, and then we have some questions from our listeners who wanted to ask our experts some questions in particular. So I want to kick us off with first of all, can you guys tell us about precursor crimes? Are there types of precursor crimes that are common to all or most serial killers or do they tend to differ from a fender to a fender. I'll start here. It does differ from a fender to offender. However, there are some sort of elemental or foundational crimes that many of them will commit. If they're sexual sadists, they may have committed started off with maybe youngsters stealing underwear off of clothes lines or out of doing a burglary and taking the material out of drawers or wherever they may be kept. They could also be leaving shall we say, DNA samples behind sometimes in terms of a precursor crime, so when they're younger and they haven't quite escalated into actually forceful violent behavior. And of course we can go into the whole arson thing and and animal cruelty and urineesis that some of these suffer from early on. But in terms of the crimes themselves that lead up to these, it's usually these property crimes. But have a that's the mo We'll get into a building somehow, break a window, maybe not that sophisticated than first, but the signature behind it is some sexual satisfaction. They're not there to break into the safe or steal expensive jewelry necessarily, these type of serial killers. They're there for some kind of need driven behavior, sexual fulfillment. And as they get older, as they get more freedom, perhaps a little more money, a little more ability of transportation, they can expand their precursor crime zone. And if they get a little bit far out of their own neighborhood, they may feel safe enough in attacking someone in person, raping them, killing them, and that's where they really kick into that violent sort of behavior, which if they are successful a few times, they then become labeled a serial killer. You know, Jim's right, but you look at antisocial behavior, you look at psychopaths. So it's really important when you look at children, you look at those children that are antisocial. And Jim's right too about arson. Many serial killers start out as arsenists and then not to jump on. But Jim's talking about some of the other things, for family life, twitturing as some animals, abuses as a child subsist, abuse, voyeurism, especially when there's a sexual tendency to it. And you find a lot of times that many of these individuals are intelligent as well. To say, the dumb ones as reinos get caught early on and they don't become serial killers. If they do have a modicum of intelligence about them, savby and perhaps lucky too, they can then succeed in multiple killings and getting away with it. Yeah, there's something that's come up in this suspect. He died in twenty seventeen. His name is Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. Unfortunately for their family, is also a junior who was eight years old at the time of the Colonial Parkway murders. So we don't think he's involved, but he now has to go through life with the exact same name of a man that's now been identified as a serial killer. One of the things that I noticed was some of the investigators in speaking about this gentleman, He's not somebody with a lot of higher education. He was a waterman in Virginia. He works on the water. He's an avid hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman, actually quite skilled, a championship marksman. He's one archery contests. He's really very at home in the woods and on the water, which is how he makes us living crabbing, fishing, and oystering. Some of the investigators said a few things about him that I actually thought were disparaging. They were saying, he's a waterman, he's not very smart. And actually, the more we learn about Wilmer, we actually believe that Wilmer may have been getting away with raping and murdering people for as long as forty years. So I don't really think he can say the man's not smart. He's actually gotten away with murder and rape for forty years. Is that fair? And Jim will probably attest to this. Some of the dumbest academic people I know are the smartest criminals. So it's not as though where we say that they're intelligent doesn't necessarily mean we're speaking academically. We're speaking intelligent in the ways of life and how to get things done in an organized, systematic way. In order to cover their tracks as they move forward. There's no barometer for intelligence that way. We just say, like I had a guy that robbed banks for thirty years. Think about a guy Robin Banks for thirty years. Who would ever think someone would get away with Robin Banks for thirty years, but he did. He was also very smart academically. He's more of the anomaly than he is the usual individual. But this individual, and I know I read up a little bit about him that he was an avid fisherman. He was a hunter. He was very well versed in the areas where a lot of these crimes were committed, which is a benefit to him. He's in his comfort zone, as you might call it, where his area of familiarity. And you know what, with these hunting and fishing skills, you could maybe classify him as an apex predatory obviously legally hunting animals and various above water and below water. He knew how to stalk his prey. And I remember from the early there's days of being a plane closed police officer in watching guys getting ready to commit crimes. I didn't catch a serial killer in the act. People rarely do. But car thieves and purse snatchers, you see them very much take their time. The good ones, the ones that usually get away with it. And I used to watch them through binoculars at a mall and Bensalem Township, and their eyes are darting all around. They're looking left and right. They may go back to their car take off. They may if they're on foot, they'll walk around their side of the mall. They're very careful and very astute in knowing their environment. And to be a good hunter, and I would assume a good fisherman, you have to have those skills. You have to have patience. You have to be willing to sit by and sometimes let a potential prey or an animal a deer go by, because you just don't have a clean shot where there could be something else interfering with it. The same with choosing a live human victim potential victim, and that sometimes they may have to be let go. Sometimes they may come very close to getting attacked and violated. Other times not. Yeah, and I've met I've done then directly. I'm familiar with research done on Smith Island, Maryland, as well as Opracoke Island, North Carolina. I met some fishermen. There's some very bright people there I've met some PhDs that aren't that great sometimes so into intelligence, and intellect is measured on different levels and different planes, as Ray said, and getting by on the streets like this guy apparently knew how to do for about forty years, can equate to a certain level of intelligence that works just for him. If you're not going to cite the classics or math formula, but he knows how to stalk a victim and eventually take care of business at the right time, in the right place. One of the things Kristin and I wanted to ask about is regarding Wilmer as a suspect the cases that he's been linked to directly via DNA. He's in his early thirties at the time those rape murders occur. Is there a common age at which offenders start when do they escalate, as you said, into this level of behavior. A lot of people look at these offenders. They don't wake up one morning and go, hey, today is Wednesday, January twenty fourth. I think today I'm going to become a serial killer. You don't go to the school to learn how to become a serial killer, to be able to earmark a certain date that someone says, we know based on research that it happens around nineteen or twenty. There is no research and I'm aware of that tells you that because every individual is unique in and of their own, so there is an escalation in their behavior that you can see if you go back and look at what they've done and how they progress through life. You should be able to pick up on signs. And some people will say that's just boys being boys, and other people say, hey, that's not right. Someone should correct that, and they don't, or for whatever reason, he's allowed or she's allowed to get away with this behavior, and then it just condones that, Hey, I'm out smarting these people, I'm bettering these people, and it bodes their confidence and allows them to move forward. I'll never forget working in the UNIBOM case. He was a serial killer, and we once we got inside his cabin and got all his private writings, his diary, his or to biography, all these things he never expected anyone to read. These are separate, of course, from the manifesto and other letters. Kazinsky clearly delineated a date and a time while he was at the University of Michigan working on his PhD. This would have been the mid nineteen sixties where he decided he wanted to become a woman. He decided that this was before it was trendy and everyone else was doing these things. And he went to see the school psychologist or a psychiatrists and he basically walked in the room and said, hey, I want to be a woman. And the person listened to him and respectfully the way I'm reading Kazinsky's writings years later, and he said, all right, we can talk about this, but first of all, we had to go through a few years of therapy. Then there's some medications we can put you on, and maybe at the five to seven year point, if you really want to be a woman, we can consider some surgery. This is the mid nineteen sixties and he's in his mid twenties, he's well into adulthood. He got really upset at this doctor. He left that room, he came outside, and of course he wrote this. He said, you know what, hell it becoming a woman. Health's going through all this nonsense. I'm going to start killing people. I'm going to start killing people, just like this psychologist or psychiatrist, I forget which one. Now. It took him about twenty years to in fact do his first bombing nineteen seventy eight. But it's interesting we actually have written information from one serial killer, and Kazinski is not representative of them all. But it's one time where he put in writing. There's even a date attached to it. I forget the date, but it's mid sixties, said yeah, forget this becoming a woman. I'm going to kill someone people just like him. Ironically, he never did target psychologists or psychiatrist, was more other types of people. We know his representational targets. But there's a guy that identified some aspect of his life and said I'm going to start killing. He delayed it by twenty years, so he's an outlier in that regard. But I would concur much with what Ray was saying in that there are elements of a person's life the whorre Jupiter aligns with Mars and other things are going on the exact age. It's tough to pinpoint that. Probably in the late teens early twenties is when the ideation starts. But now when they carry through that ideation, be it homicidal, be it rapist, be it both, that could have an extended period to it. Where the man to gather more revenue and means of transportation. And they may and the tools and the weaponry, the rape and the homicide kits. But once they're ready to go, if they can get away with it the first time, they'll try it a second time and move on from there. One of the things that the FBI and Virginia State Police were asking of the public at this press conference is to please provide any information that they may be aware of with regard to Alan Wade Wilmer Senior, his hangouts, his friends, his places of business, and so on and so forth. I'm assuming some of that is because they're trying to get a timeline going on this guy. How far back is a profiler or an investigator going to go in trying to figure out how long this guy has been working? Are they going to go all the way back to childhood? Or like, how does that process work? Exactly? When you're trying to define a timeline for a serial killer? How far do you go back? To me? I don't think there's again, there's nothing set in stone to say, hey, let's go back here. You go back as far as the information allows you to go back. But the thing that's important when you're looking at the individual is you look at the phases of a murder and you look at try and figure out when the thought of identifying this individual, whether they were whether it was a a victim of opportunity, or whether they were selected. It depends because you're looking and we call it the anty cessim behavior, which is the conscious fantasy or planning of the actual killing or what the purpose of it is. And it's a fantasy act towards it as they're going through this fantasy of what it's like, and a lot of times the fantasy never lives up to the reality of what happens, and that's why there's a continued killing. But then from the anty session behavior, do you have the selection or the murder act itself where they selected the person, the method and manner in which you're going to kill the person. And then once they do that, then there's disposal of the body. Do they transport it or do they leave it there, do they conceal it or do they openly display it. A lot of times we don't know anything about that. Law enforcement knows nothing about that. Only the offender knows those things. So going back into his behavior, We may find out about some of those things, but the things that we do have a access to is his post defense behavior. Once that fantasy becomes reality. How does he react? Does he maintain that fantasy through continued killings? Does he get involved in the investigation. Does he attend to wake or a funeral? Does he visit the grave site, visit the murder site, or other significant locations of where these things occurred. So I mean you go where the information takes you. If it takes you back into childhood, my bioll means you go there. Yeah. Essentially, what the investigators are doing their best to build now is a psychological autopsy. There's not much they can do with his body because he's buried and there wasn't much left when they found out. But kudos to whoever took the DNA sample from him. I guess they had to do that to get the to identify him, But he wasn't in any database as far as I know, and that was invaluable that the person knew enough to take that. So they're doing a psychological autopsy of this guy, just as if they were going to take him to trial, because they want to find out every single aspect of his life, and they will go back to childhood as much as they can link him to classmates in grade school, in high school, any woman he's dated, will be a wealth of information. Buddies of his conceivably was before a lot of these crimes were before his murders were before the Internet. But I'm sure in the last twenty years of his life, once the Internet kicked in, I have a feeling if records can be kept that long from someone who died in twenty seventeen, I'm sure that'll be a treasure trove also of information about not only the crimes he committed, looking under the different websites devoted to these cases, but also an active fantasy life of reading about other homicides and reading about how to get away with these types of homicides, and all kinds of most likely violent pornography. Anything they can get on this guy, going as far back as they can from a testimonial or evidentiary perspective, but certainly from a technological perspective too, with the Internet at least in the last ten to twenty years of his life will prove very valuable and perhaps linking him to the other crimes that we still want to get solved. That's fantastic. A couple of other things we wanted to ask you, Jents. Law enforcement investigators have filled us into some extent, and they'd said that Alan Wade Wilmer, Senior Blitz attacked single women. They think he may have attacked single men. He raped and killed same sex couples and straight couples, hetero sexual couples. Do you regard him as a preferential offender or an opportunistic offender? Or are there killers that blend these two different types of killers and their activities and interests vary. I'd go in my opinion, I think I'd go with the latter. There's a combination of both preferential and opportunistic. And the reason why I say that is because every offender that I've come in contact with throughout my career always has a preference or desire for certain image of what they're looking for. But a lot of times that doesn't plan out the way they'd like it to, so then it becomes something of an opportunity for them. They look for something that's just there or happens to be there. Again, it's difficult to speak to this individual's mindset without knowing more about him, But I just if I had to speculate in this, I would say there was a combination of both interesting. How about you, Yeah, a combination, but I would say leaning towards opportunistic. Again. He was a hunter who would like a twelve point buck as his trophy, but if he only sees a six point he'll take that too, as long as whether it's in season or not. He's probably one of these guys. He didn't violate any of the hunting laws or fishing laws. I know Kazinski was that way too. He always got his hunting license and kept his driver's license going. But he's mailing bombs at people. I'll bet you'll find this guy again. As part of his intelligence, the innate part, even if not a formal degrees under his belt, he knew to keep all these eyes dotted and tease crossed in terms of his everyday life. I would see him more as opportunistic. He may have preferences and ideally they would if they fall his way, he would go after them. But it's a special kind of offender. And I know some questions that I looked at before, whether there's more than one person Serial offenders very rarely work with a partner, I would assume, unless evidence provides otherwise he worked on his own. And what is the rarest of Lee's loan offenders is those who go after couples, including a man and a woman, because you are really you're doubling your risk, if not even in different percentages, because the man is typically stronger, and he may have a more fight element to him than flight, and it's just you're just increasing your odds exponentially. When you take on a couple, you have to subdue him right away. And are you the type like Dennis Rader bt K that he ties the man up and forces the man to watch him violate the woman victim before of course he kills them both. So I don't know exactly how that played out in these particular instances, and these two sets of murders we know of one couple and the single person Terry Howell. That adds a whole different dimension, And most likely a serial killer would not first venture after two people. They would try it one first. But this guy may have felt skilled enough after one or two successful killings, and it's very likely we don't know all his murders at this point in time, because I know the investigators are still looking into it. But I wouldn't surprise me at all if he in fact has these other murders under his belt and not linked to him yet, but these are his I won't say practice runs because he may have completed the act. But then he said, you know what, this is enough, I somehow want to get a guy in this. And this is a whole there's a whole psychological element too, to a rapist, a murderer who gets not just the quote unquote pleasure of raping a woman. It's not about pleasure, it's not about sections about power and control, as we know, But then forcing a man to sit through it and watch his loved one being violated, that's a whole different set and a whole different dynamic involved in the psychological makeup of this person. And there may be factors in his life we learn from his childhood. Again, no excuses or defenses here, but there may be something he went through as a kid, or even in his teen years. Was he forced to watch something, or was he in somehow put in a situation like that, And now he basically reacts the same way when these situations present himself. So there's a lot more we have to learn about this guy. But among serial killers, he's more on the rare variety who wants to do these type of double murders where one person is tied up and put in some position of weakness and then the other rape and the action goes on. And it's a whole different breed of serial killer. And this guy got away with it for the number of years that he did, which he was probably lucky, but he had some street smarts and predatory smarts too. Well. Just let me add one more thing to what Jim said, because makes a great point. And the point is this individual's success in being able to get away with these crimes I think was based a lot on his ability to compartmentalize the behavior and kind of put that behavior in silos and almost like a doctor checklmister iber. He was able to just show it, turn it on, and turn it off. And he was very good at that. And I think that's the psychological makeup. When Jim talks about that, you'd love to be able to study someone like that and look at him. We'll never get the opportunity to do that unless we do it through others by talking to family members and people of that nature. But his ability to compartmentalize that behavior and turn it on want to turn it off, I think is what helped in his success over forty years. And let me just add to that, that's what I've used the term earlier need driven behavior. There are some offenders that just can't stop. They have to rape every three or four days, maybe three or four weeks. They usually get caught earlier on. But there are people that can control themselves, and it's while it's still need driven behavior, their psychological makeup is not. They don't need this release, this power burst every few days. They can control and confine their activities. And the ones who can't control and confine their activities get caught early on, even if they have a few quote unquote successes under their belt. But this guy knew picked his victims carefully. And I tell you, for every victim we have of this guy, I wouldn't even know the numbers, yet, there were probably a dozen that he came close to confronting somehow with that something's not right. I hear a police siren in the background. Now it's a little too bright here where they're pulling over. Now that guy's a little too big. I'm not going to mess with this couple. He took off and found someone else that night, a week or a month later. Yeah, there's a lot of different temporal and spatial factors that go into the selection process with these guys, and you can almost project for every victim a serial killer has, there may be dozens more that came really close but somehow didn't make the cut and they're alive to speak of it. You're listening to mind Over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at Mindover Murder. That's coming out in this investigation now, as you can imagine, people are coming out of the woodwork to us, and of course we're urging people to please talk to the FBI and the Virginia State Police, and we're supporting their efforts. But people are coming forward to us and reporting things that they reported to the FBI, the Virginia State Police, or the National Park Service back in the eighties, which is a number of people have reported now that typically couples would be parking and this man driving this very distinctive truck attacked them in sort of a blitz attack. He would show up very suddenly, typically at the window of their car. These couples are usually making out and not paying a lot of attention to what's going on. A lot of these incidents occurred on the Colonial Parkway, which seems to be part of his comfort zone. So he would come up, bang on the window very aggressively. He's not dressed as a cop. He's typically dressed in like a mechanics uniform. He's not driving a cop car, no blue lights, nothing like that. He just uses his high beams to flash people, and then it'll come up and aggressively demand driver's licenses, insisting they're trespassing or they're doing something illegal. A number of these people had already been warned because the other Colonial Parkway murders were way by this point, and local folks were advised not to allow themselves to be pulled over on the Colonial Parkway. And so some of these people are telling me stories in the last two weeks about slipping a driver's license through a little one inch gap at the top of the window. And one woman who was telling me the story the other day, she's a retired architect. Her mail companion gave him the driver's licenses. He really wanted them to roll the window down, and they refused. He didn't produce a gun, although he has used guns in other situations. We know he shot Robin Edwards and David Nobling to death with a small caliber handgun. This guy goes back to his truck, which they could see, which matches the truck described in the new materials that have come out about Wilmer, and they quickly discussed this amongst themselves. Both of them agreed this guy's not a cop. He flashed some sort of id not even a badge, and look more like an idea or a security pass that you would use to go in and out of somewhere. And they agree they've got to get the hell out of there. What they wanted to do is get their driver's licenses and get gone. The female half of the couple is saying she's able to really study this guy, and she realizes he's very short, which matches Wilmer's description. He's only five to five, he's very muscular, he's one hundred and sixty five pounds, and she noticed he had extremely large hands, almost outsized for the size of his body, which he was banging on the window and she was on the other side of the car and she could see all this. She noticed how callous they were. And this is a guy who works on the water, so this would match his description pretty well. They were able to get their driver's licenses back. They kind of gave him some pushback, you're not a cop, We're not doing anything wrong, that kind of thing. He eventually gave them their driver's licenses back. And just like you said, Jim, it appears that there are a number of incidents like this on the Colonial Parkway and people did manage to get away without being raped or murdered, but it sounds like they might have had a close call. What's your take on that. But for the grace of God, who knows what factors kicked into the external environment, his internal environment, and he just decided now wasn't the right time or the right place. Maybe he felt this couple in this one case anyway, would give him too much of a fight and he wasn't in the mood. There may be some other couples that are more amenable and conciliatory, and sure, okay, officer, And if they just somehow think he's a person of authorities, yeah, that's those would be very interesting reading any interview they did back in the day. And I think Bill, you said, you just talk to this woman in the last few weeks. Yeah, and they had talked to the authorities back in the late eighties when this happened. But obviously we're urging all these people to contact authorities again because they need this information. Yeah, and hopefully they will come forward and perhaps and it'll give us some pinpoints on a map where they can put this guy in certain locations at certain times. It's obviously before cell phones, so there's no towers that can be pinged off of in that regard, but even some of these anecdotal instances can really help build a solid map of where this guy was at certain times in certain places. And Yeah, if that's not Wilmer what you just described from what that woman described back in the eighties, I'd be really surprised. It sounds like his mo to a t. Can you talk about the kind of stressors that might prompt an offender into committing a crime and is there always a stressor that kicks off an event or a spree or is it sometimes just I feel like waking up today and raising some hell I think there's really three areas that you would consider here. Number one is the pre offense behavior, and a lot of that is usually an incident in the life of the offender prior to the offense, and that could be anything from a relationship problem to a loss of a job, monetary problems, he has a fight, he could even have a run in with law enforcement. The other is the behavior that goes on during the crime that you can see it actually in the crime scene. When you look at that, you sit there and you say, wow, that could be anything from the way the body is positioned as a sort of struggle. And then the last thing is the post defense behavior. The post defense behavior are actions of the offender that are usually pretty quickly after the incident happens, or it can be days weeks following the crime, and the behavior is going to be noticed by others. But the problem is nobody ever says anything. You really have to look when you're trying to do an assessment of someone like that, is those are the three areas that we would always look at when you look at some of the crime when somebody behave if you're doing the crime, did they display an interest in ownership? Did they protect some property of their own. Is there any signs of staging that may have taken place at the crime. All these different things come into this, and then you look at what did the offender do to place himself in harm's way, So you look at his risk level. Like Jim said earlier when we were talking about that before, Look, it's at night, lack of guardianship, so there's not a whole lot of people that are able to observe he's really a low risk offender. And the reason maybe why, besides the grace of God, is they didn't comply by opening the door or rolling the window all the way down. Had they done that, it probably would have trained changed the whole scenario of what took place. That's interesting. It just struck me here. I was a uniform police officer for a number of years. During my eleven years in Ben Salem Township, Bugs County, just suburban Philadelphia, and there were not only lovers lanes in our area, but every once in a while, late at night, we'd see a car park somewhere, sometimes where stolen cars were dropped off or they're being stripped, and we'd walk up and sometimes the windows are fogged up. So I was that person with a real badge and a real gun and with the authority to walk up to a car and say, what's going on? Is it a dead body, is it just a stolen car? Is it something else? And some of the times it would be two kids or sometimes older people in various acts of will say intimacy. I never got a kick out of that. I just I did need to see the ID. I didn't need to make sure someone belonged to that car or vice versa. And people were at least over eighteen, they weren't drunk all these other factors. Sometimes I just left them there if no one was actually complaining, and other times I did make them leave because it was private property. Then I have authority to be there. So I've been that person who has checked out lovers in cars, and I had legal authority to do it, and I didn't even know they were lovers when I walk up with the car with this guy, he was there for that one reason. He could care less whose property it was. He could care less if the car was stolen or not, or the age of one of the things. I know in one of the killings, the young girl was only fourteen and the guy was twenty Who knows what they were doing. Could be some statutory issues. Back then the eighties, people didn't care about stuff quite as much as that if things weren't actually being physically forced. But this was some kind of a turn on to this guy, and he didn't want to leave this one go by. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the line he was in a car with some woman and some police came up to him, maybe some non police came up to him, and whatever happened, he obviously survived, and he said, hey, this isn't a bad modus operandi to try myself when the time comes years later. It seems like that's exactly what happened, and it worked for him because he was never caught in the act, or even caught after the fact alive. That is, of course, So we're curious how helpful would geographic profiling be in the case of an offender like Wilmer who moves around primarily using the waterways. Is that something that would be more helpful or less helpful in terms of tracking his movement. When you talk about geographic profiling, it's usually a technique that uses locations that are connected to the series of the crime sites, or where the person's first approached to determine maybe the offender lives in that area. I think it's we can comfortably say that the individual that committed these offenses had a great familiarity with the area in which he was doing it. When you look at geographic profiling, it's more like a probability map of where he may live, where he may want to do things. But you're looking at locations of where they were approached, locations of the crime scenes, body disposal. You look at all three of those, and sometimes that can help and pinpointing some things. But that's just a piece of the information when you get in a geographic profiling. There's many other things besides that. Yeah. I know the person who first developed geographic profiling. His name's Kim rossmo. He was a law enforcement officer. He actually wrote a dissertation on geographic profiling and it's been used in many investigations. I think you need at least three points. The more the better, And from my understanding of it, the waterways would present no issue in terms of still from the triangular triangulation or beyond that where someone may live, but Here's where it also gets tricky, and Ray alluded to this, is that what it may point out is the person's area of familiarity, not necessarily his resonance. And there's an old expression, and I'll be a little polite for your audience, you don't poop where you eat. I think I know what you're saying. This guy in San Francisco, I think they do that now. But that's a whole other story. But anyway, anyway, but he knows, this guy, especially because he's been successful. I'm talking about Womber here. He knew not to violate exactly where he lived. But he may have worked in a certain area, he may have grown up in a certain area, he may have spent some time there for whatever reason, and that became his conference zone. I know we have the twenty two miles of the Colonial Parkway between Jamestown and Yorktown, so certainly geographic profiling wouldn't have hurt in that case. I don't think the waterways would make that much of a difference. It would still pinpoint a central location where I think investigators could at least process that information and an attempt to somehow say this person has some connection to this particular area doesn't necessarily mean their residents presently. It could have been one in the distant past, but it's still a viable tool, and I don't think Waterways would have any negative aspect to that. They've described him in the recent materials that have come out, they've described Alan Wade Wilmer Senior as trantient, sometimes even living aboard his work boat, the Denny Wade. There are things that I think can be very helpful in terms of looking for more information because he drove this very distinctive truck, and he sailed a very distinctive boat with a large graphic on the side that said Denny Wade, and then of course he himself is physically distinctive. So they're looking for information like people that used to dock at the places he kept his boat, where he would often stay aboard for weeks or months at a time, and even though he had a family a couple of hours away, apparently he would be down on the water for big chunks of time working as a waterman, fishing, grabbing and oystering. They're trying to pin that down more in terms of home ports and places where he would sell his catch, and that sort of thing which it sounds like that could be beneficial. You're talking about the spatial mobility of Cereal fenders, and we usually find in most of the Cereal cases, usually when you have a series, and this is not always the case, but there is a greater regularity than there is not that Usually the first crime is an area like we call his comfort zone, where he feels most comfortable, because the whole thing about committing this, his mo is to make sure that he's successful in committing the crime. You know, they may start out and they may do it where they live in the same area, and they may do that, and they may kill in that same area and even disposed the bodies in that same area or nearby, and as they gained confidence in what they do, then they become geographically transit. Then they'll start traveling continually. Ed Kemper was that way. His first killings were very close to home, and then they went further and further away. Believe it or not, the guy that robbed banks for thirty years. The first bankye robbed, the first two banks he robbed, was a place right outside of a military base where he was living. And then when he went on to rob banks, he went further and further away so as to he was caught, nobody would know at his hometown that it was him that committed something like this. So yeah, they do. And sometimes they'll even dispose of bodies. They may kill in an area and then take the body and dispose of it far away to give them a period of time. It gives them a chance to distance themselves from the crime itself. And they do that too, because if that happens, that confuses law enforcement. How the hell did this person get one hundred miles up the road or how did they get twelve miles up the road? Were they traveling up here? So that always throws a little bit of a wrench into it for law enforcement because they just don't know. Because all we really know is law enforcement initially, is where we find the body. We don't know where it began. We don't know where it happened. We just know where it ended up. And Bill, if I can go back to the original part of your question, as I mentioned earlier, I've met some watermen over the years. They are a very close knit group. They are a fraternity. They know each other really well. They have their own language, their own jargon. As you can imagine, they only work certain times of the year. But that's been interesting to look at some of the dates of these murders. In what time of season was it for crabbing, for oystering? Regulated? Ye, and this guy probably these guys they really played by rules, you know, in that regard to their profession. They may violate a bunch of others in terms of killing people, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was very much in tune, because he'd be then pissing off his fellow watermen by you know, fishing out of season, woristering out of season, whatever it may be. And the watermen also have a philosophy. And I think there's just a Supreme Court decision of just a few days ago in which a lot of overregulation now that the country, different agencies are putting on them and it's us against them. So I have a feeling if they want to learn, if the investigators will learn more about this guy, interview some of his fellow watermen, people that docked around him, whatever marina he may have put himself up, and what kind of activity is going on and off the boat he was living in. They could be a very valuable source of information if it comes down to it, and they're not going to protect this guy. This isn't like he's he caught too many fish. They don't want to drop the dime. Want to know this guy has crossed the rubicon to use another water reference here in terms of violating the laws, and he's really They'll talk. If they can give anything to do investigators, they will to give you an idea how obsessed I've gotten at different times in the Colonial Parkway murders case. Some years ago, I actually researched the phases of the moon of the four known Colonial Parkway murders double homicides, and interestingly, I'm not saying it was exact, but it seemed that the Colonial Parkway murders all seem to happen at the darkest phases of the moon, when it was either fully dark or in a new moon phase where it's just starting to the crescents just starting to grow. I mentioned this someone who knows a lot more about being on the water than I do, and they actually said, you know something, that low light situation on the water actually is something that they think the investigators should be looking at. Very interesting absolutely. We're gonna take a break here with Fits and Ray and we'll be back with more listener questions from the profilers on our next episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. 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