Manhunt to bug hunt: Cop skills track nature's killers

Where do suspicious characters hang out? (Image: Alexandr Tovstenko/Getty Images)

The geographical profiling that catches serial killers can track bats to their roosts or sharks to their lairs â€" and could close in on deadly diseases too

IT WAS while finishing his PhD on the mating behaviour of sticklebacks that Steven Le Comber found himself drawn to a life of crime. Le Comber was reading a 2003 interview in New Scientist with Kim Rossmo, a Canadian cop-turned-researcher whose mathematical methods for tracking down serial killers were earning him a reputation as a latter-day Sherlock Holmes.

Rossmo's insight was that felons, by and large, aren't complicated characters. "Most criminals aren't Hannibal Lecters," he says. Often they act instinctively, making it possible to spot patterns in their actions. By s tudying hundreds of cases, Rossmo found that serial killers rarely target victims too close to home. But they are ...

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