The Profiler by Pat Brown

 

When Pat Brown, a housewife and mother, was in her forties two things occurred that would change her life.  She and her husband rented a room to a new tenent.  Shortly after he moved in a woman was brutally murdered a short distance from their house on a path that the man was known to walk on almost daily.  Suspicious, Brown searched his room and found evidence that she thought pointed directly at him as the perpetrator; muddy and wet clothes thrown away although they seemed new, a letter opener filed down to serve as a knife and pornographic magazines.  She bundled up the items and took them to the police where she laid out her suspicions and the strange way he talked and acted.  Much to her disbelief, the police pretty much ignored her and the evidence she brought them and the case remained unsolved.

Brown was determined to find out more about killers and crime detection.  She was too old to start a police career and she couldn't find any schools that specialized in the subjects she wanted to study.  So she became a self-taught forensic investigator or profiler.  Far from mimicking  the practices of the legendary FBI unit that men like John Douglas set up to profile criminals, especially serial offenders, she used a different method and often disagreed vocally with the FBI and its conclusions.

This explanation of how Pat Brown began her career starts out this book.  The rest of the book is composed of various cases she profiled.  There were cases such a woman killed and found in the parking lot of a club, a young girl who disappeared during a sleepover with a neighbor and was found murdered and several suicides.  Interestingly, she reports that her work is made up of more suicide cases than murders as it is a verdict that families have a hard time accepting.  

While interesting, the book may leave readers with questions.  While Brown lays out the facts of the cases and gives her solutions and how she arrived at them, there is little to no evidence that her work is taken seriously and led to prosecutions.  She often is working with little evidence and no police cooperation and she puts the fact of prosecutions down to politics and shortsightedness.  Her work would seem more authoritative if her conclusions led to more prosecutions.  Her explanation of her methods and how she reached her answers is intriguing and will give the reader much to consider.  This book is recommended for readers of true crime.