Inside the 'intensive' reality of criminal profiling

Kris Illingsworth is an FBI-trained criminal profiler and former NSW police detective.

She spends her days examining violent crimes and working with police and private clients to help identify the people who commit them.

We spoke to her about what the job really involves, why it’s far less glamorous than TV suggests, and what it’s taught her about humanity.

While police are trained to collect information and evidence, and whether that amounts to a crime or not, my work is about overlaying the behavioural aspects and insights to build an understanding of who might be responsible.

We help provide some focus and direction into complex, bizarre or unusual cases, but it doesn't solve a crime on its own.

We can't always be 100 per cent accurate, because it’s based on our interpretation.

On any day, I could be working on a sexual assault series, a murder case or analysing extortion letters.

I'd meet with detectives at crime scenes, usually in the days after a crime is committed - or sometimes weeks, months or even years later if it's a cold case.

Having previously reviewed the case material, I want to absorb the scene and comprehend what may have happened.

I do like that time to myself to walk in the shoes of the victim and the offender, so to speak, and see how it all went down.

After that I speak with the detectives at the scene or back in the office and go over everything.

There's a lot of case material to read, and you spend time analysing the crime and figuring out how the behavioural pieces fit together.

You have to be able to look at crime scene photos and read autopsy reports in detail.

You have to be able to separate your feelings, otherwise it'll cloud your judgement and consume you.

It's intensive work, so you need to be passionate about what you're doing and know the reason why you're doing it.

I do it to help victims of violent crimes and their families, and that's always been my motivation.

It's not quite what movies and TV would have us believe then?

Well, there are no personal jets to get around in! It's on the road, usually on your own. I talk with detectives and police about the case, but the actual analysis I do on my own. So, TV wise, it would be incredibly boring watching someone just reading and thinking.

You worked as a detective before becoming a profiler. What drove that change?

As a junior detective, my partner and I transcribed a suspect's conversation for a consulting psychiatrist, and I was struck by how he converted this into layered personality descriptions of the suspect.

We were listening for evidence, but he added meaning to the information.

Then, a few years later I was a detective on the 'Backpacker Murders' case and worked alongside this same psychiatrist. He wove his magic in his reports, and they were just so fascinating to read.

During that investigation, I undertook a two-week behavioural analysis course on violent crime linkage delivered by FBI profilers and I knew that was what I wanted to do.

There was no career path in Australian policing at that point [for profiling], so I wrote a report and essentially said, "pick me!".

I was selected to be the NSW Police Force representative and started what turned out to be a five-year program to become an FBI-trained and certified profiler.

I spent one month living at the FBI academy in Virginia and experiencing all the academy aspects there: going to the pistol shoots, and walking through Hogan's Alley, which is the mock town the FBI uses to train agents responding to sieges and high-risk situations.

I was also shown through the basement where the original behavioural science profilers worked, where Silence of the Lambs was filmed. It was surreal. There was even a poster of Jodie Foster on the wall.

At one point, I stepped out of a building and a Black Hawk helicopter landed right in front of me. I was like, “What? Only in America!”

My time there was a highlight of my career and my life.

When I was in the US, I worked on a sexual assault case which turned out to be The Golden State Killer, and on threats made towards the president at the time, George W. Bush.

What does a criminal profile actually look like?

The report starts off with a case summary, then goes into the victimology, crime scene information, forensic evidence, the post-mortem report, specialist reports like toxicology, any police reports, CCTV or key eyewitness statements, and then you create a timeline from that.

Then you analyse the case: what happened, why it happened, and who would need to do it in that way. This behavioural reconstruction of the crime provides an understanding of the motive and, in turn, the offender.

From that, you create the offender profile, describing the type of offender in terms of behaviour and personality. It's based around probabilities, so we also outline what the offender will be doing after the crime and how people can recognise that behaviour. And then we use investigative recommendations to highlight how to find the offender.

Depending on the case material, this process usually takes two to four weeks and the report is often between 15 and 60 pages long.

What does it feel like when a profile you've done leads to a breakthrough?

There's certainly a sense of satisfaction of being able to contribute in a useful way, particularly when the case has been unsolved for some time. But no celebration. We just have a chat about what worked and what did not, because you want to learn from each case.

What has your career taught you about humanity? Has the way you view the world changed at all?

It's shown me that people can do anything to one another — even the most bizarre, twisted or cruel things.

But there are also people working hard to counterbalance that darker side of humanity.

Profiling is just one aspect of trying to protect people from harm and helping to bring offenders to justice.

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Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.