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PTC = Piece to Camera
Graphix = Computer/Edit generated images
SOT = Sound on Tape
V/O = Voice Over

Mapping Murder

Script ,Programme 1

'Home is Where the Heart Lies' C5/08050/0001B

Voice Script / 1 29/04/02

Visuals:
David walking down a suburban London street.

PTC
On the twenty-sixth of April nineteen-ninety nine, a man walked down this West London street, went in through this gate, and shot the television presenter Jill Dando dead on her doorstep.

PTC
Police searched to Serbia and back looking for the killer, thinking - among many other things - that he might have been a professional assassin. But in actuality the man convicted of the offence lived just a few streets away, as had been suggested early on by a psychologist advising the inquiry.

The fact is that most offenders do not travel very far to commit their crimes. Like you and me, their home is where their heart lies, no matter how black that heart is.

10:00:41:00 Graphix Title sequence.

Thirty-seven year old Jill Dando was at the height of her career, a much-loved national TV personality, and just about to marry.

But, a couple of hours after a CCTV camera recorded her

visiting a local store ... the unthinkable happened.

SOT
"Hello ambulance, I'm walking along Gowan Avenue, 29 Gowan Avenue and it looks like there's somebody collapsed, um, confidentially it looks like Jill Dando. There's a lot of blood.

Is the lady's chest going up and down?

Oh my God, no, I don't think she's alive..."

She was shot in the head, at point blank range.

It won't take me long to retrace the killer's footsteps, but the police began by looking a long way away, rather than amongst Jill's neighbours on the streets of Fulham.

Well known for helping to catch criminals through Crimewatch, and her appeals on behalf of Bosnian refugees ... they first suspected links to Serbian terrorism, or the criminal underworld.

But could it have been a deranged fan: an obssessed stalker who had more in common with a local criminal than a professional hit man?

He had chosen a time and place when he was lucky not to be disturbed. He was seen by many people, and it was an accident that he had not been recognised or a clear photo-fit produced.

PTC
It was only as a result of all the more imaginative and far- fetched possibilities running dry that a young police officer following routine procedure interviewed a local sex offender and who had harassed many women in the area.

Visuals:
Camera pans to building/flat where Barry George lived. Still of him.

V/O
Barry George, who was eventually convicted of the murder, lived in this house, a five minute walk from Jill Dando's home. An obssessed loner who stalked many women and with a history of violence, there's every chance that he could have offended again

But if the police had accepted the well-established principal that even the worst criminals commit crimes close to home, they would have examined Barry George more closely much earlier. Before the trail had gone so cold that getting a conviction would be problematic.

10:03:11:10
At our Centre for Investigative Psychology at The University of Liverpool, I teach police officers and other students from around the world - that offenders can be predictable. And one way of finding them is to look at the way they use their surroundings … I call this Geographical Profiling.

Visuals:
David is in a lecture theatre, lit by an OHP, he is placing coins on the glass, which are projected onto the screen behind him.

VO
I do a simple trick with coins to show how an offender operates when he is trying not to be caught and how it can get him caught.

10:02:39
David SOT:
Let's just think of an offender who has some sort of base he has a base in this particular location. And if the opportunity for crime is reasonably distributed around that area the offender really has to travel to some location far enough away from where he may be living to be a place where he is not going to be recognized but not too far away where he may be somewhere unfamiliar and where he doesn't know what the opportunities are. So there will be some sort of optimum distance that he might go to.

But once he's been in that location he's now in some sort of danger, the people might recognize him. And so that will influence the pattern of activities and locations in the area that he knows at some sort of distance away from where he may be living. But still defining the area in which he may be operating.

Now the fascinating thing about this is a very simple principle but a very powerful one is that what the police have this map, this indication of where the crimes occur and they can form the view that the offender can be living somewhere fairly central to it. So that these locations can almost be treated as some sort of bloody footprints leading police back to the location of the offender.

Visuals:
A darkened room, with David sitting across a table from a figure - who is never identified - drawing a sketch map.

10:05:04
V/O
Bob is a reformed professional burglar and heroin addict, who fed his habit by breaking into homes. Day after day he stole throughout this neighbourhood.

'Bob' SOT:
As time went on obviously I just started to branch out. Just two or three on each street as the opportunities arose as I was walking. I'd say I burgled on most streets in this particular area.

David SOT:
And then what happened?

'Bob' SOT:
Well, I was still based in the area so I came down to the other side of the park. And just pretty much repeated the pattern in a different area.

David SOT:
Where were you living at the time?

Bob SOT:
At the time I was about here.

Visuals:
The figure draws a circle at the centre of the crimes.

V/O
This is no surprise to a criminal psychologist, like me. Criminals are no Einsteins. They're impulsive, often lazy, and many are below average intelligence. They do what's easiest, but they don't want to be caught.

David SOT:
How would you go about choosing the particular houses you were going to break into?

'Bob' SOT:
Well like you know the first ones that I started off on were the closest to me but the furthest removed from me. There were a series of streets that that I knew to get out of that area but I could get back to my base. And then as time went on and opportunities on the first street became less and less I moved onto the second and third but remaining in that sort of safe distance. This area was a council estate and I never burgled council estates. Down here, dual carriage way ran through here and down. And this was an industrial estate so there was just no opportunities really.

V/O
Bob's map shows us how daily activities around his house shaped his criminal actions. It also shows that without realising it, Bob's crimes reveal where he was living.

And that idea is at the heart of Geographical Profiling.

V/O
As a criminal psychologist, I know that this pattern recurs again and again.

It struck me clearly first in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when I was asked to help solve a series of very nasty rapes around the west of London, by one and sometimes two men who finally killed.

Visuals:
David gets off train at deserted station.

We will shortly be making full transcripts for the whole series available. To be informed when these are available make sure you have signed up for I-psy enews here.


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