Bloodsworth by Tim Junkin Page B

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    F OR HOMICIDE D ETECTIVE Sam Bowerman, a twelve-year veteran of Baltimore County’s police force, the Dawn Hamilton murder provided the opportunity to assist his hometown department with a new and specialized law enforcement tool. Bowerman had been selected as the first local police officer in the country to attend the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to study the art of creating psychological profiles of violent criminals. Thirty-three at the time, Bowerman was in the middle of this fourteen-month fellowship when Dawn Hamilton was murdered.
    For years criminal investigators had informally profiled suspects, trying to narrow the range of a search by keying in on the modus operandi or particular methods a given criminal might use. The characteristics of a crime, the unusual clues left behind, often pointed to certain traits of the culprit, even at times to a form of signature. Profiling first became a recognized, formal, investigative technique in the early 1970s when the FBI created its Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico. Studies of unsolved murders, coupled with the evaluation of serial killers such as Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in Chicago; John Wayne Gacy, who killed thirty-three men andboys; and David Berkowitz of New York City, the notorious Son of Sam, led to the development of a more formal system for analyzing violent cases, particularly those with strange or bizarre aspects to them. In 1978 a research project combined FBI agents with behavioral scientists to conduct detailed examinations of some of the nation’s most notorious crimes. Several dozen of these notorious criminals themselves were interviewed. The findings and conclusions of this study led the FBI to develop a database and a systematic approach to profiling. FBI agents were trained to be experts in the field, and Detective Bowerman, through his fellowship, had become skilled in these same techniques.
    While not all homicides lend themselves to the development of a psychological profile, the FBI felt that the Dawn Hamilton slaying presented the opportunity because the killer was clearly psychopathic. “The public perception is of a monster,” Bowerman told a reporter at the time. “But it’s not the guy in the dirty trench coat hiding behind a tree. It’s the guy who looks to be in the mainstream. Very few insane people commit violent crimes; it’s the people with personality disorders.”
    Bowerman, along with other FBI profilers, and assisted by other Baltimore County detectives, took on the job of developing a psychological profile of the man who murdered Dawn Hamilton. They scoured the photos of the crime scene; studied the autopsy report; scrutinized the physical evidence and the eyewitness reports and descriptions; and closely examined the victim, her family, and social history, attempting to produce a written portrait of the man who took Dawn’s life.
    The final psychological profile prepared by Detective Bowerman and the FBI was seven and a half pages long and presented a disturbing picture of the crime and perpetrator. It concluded that the crime was one of opportunity, as opposed to one that was planned ahead of time. The killer had probably been dominated by womenmost of his life and had repressed rage against females bottled up inside him. When the rage boiled over, he struck. The report re-created the sequence of the attack on Dawn as follows:
    The victim was initially approached because of her vulnerability, age, and what she represented to the assailant. . . . The victim, when offering resistance, was struck in the face by the assailant’s fist. After being rendered semi-conscious from this blow, the victim was probably rammed head first into a nearby tree or into a stationary object on the ground. He then placed his foot on her throat in an attempt to totally silence her. He then rolled her over and stood on the back of her neck, thereby pushing her face to