TWO levels beneath a ground-floor, indoor shooting range at the FBI Academy in rural Quantico, Virginia, is a labyrinth of tomb-like offices where an elite force of agents piece together frightening portraits of America's serial killers. The task is at once gruesome but incredibly rewarding for it maps the extent of evil which some people are capable of and the lengths others go to prevent it.
The most desk-bound jobs in the FBI feed the sprawling network of US law enforcement agencies with crucial information to hunt murderers, rapists and brutal criminals. So far, the investigative support unit of the FBI's National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) boasts an 85 per cent success rate.
The 12-man team gets into the mind of serial killers. They build up a profile of the sort of people who are driven by a desire for power, domination and control. To do this, they enlist the help of convicted mass-murderers such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, 'Son of Sam' killer David Berkowitz and Ed Gein, the character on whom Psycho's Norman Bates was based.
'We try to walk in the shoes of the person who did the crime. It can be quite frightening,' special agent Thomas Salp told the Sunday Morning Post Magazine at the FBI's Quantico headquarters. 'What we are looking for is interaction between the murderer andthe victim during the commission of a crime. That tells us a lot about the person.
'We have an open book on Jeffrey Dahmer [who admitted killing 17 men over a 10-year period] and we have learned a lot just from what Dahmer has confessed. But there is more,' Salp explained. 'A serial killer is someone who kills at least two or more times in separate incidents with an emotional cooling-off period in between. He comes down, he cools down, before he kills again.' Victims also tell a tale, even when dead. Bodies reveal the victims' final horrific minutes, and leave clues about the killer. Injuries can cast suspects. 'The type of injuries, the location of the injuries, the severity of the injuries to the victims - all these things play a part in making that determination,' explained Salp. 'Generally, if you have severe injuries to the facial area or to the upper body area that are very focused, then you ought to start considering the personal aspect of it. But other factors come into it.' Salp, is one of the elite band of men and women who make up the unit immortalised by the Oscar-winning movie The Silence of the Lambs. Pictures of The Silence of the Lambs actress Jodie Foster hang on his office walls near photographs of past presidents Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, and former chief FBI man J. Edgar Hoover.
'A lot of the key things that we have found in the case studies and research is that the method and manner of the crime directly reflects the personality of the person who committed it,' he says. 'It is like they are leaving a signature.