Sunday, May 27, 2007

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: Psychopath or Psychotic?

Lancaster’s coroner, Dr. G. Gary Kirchner, has been accused of compromising the investigation of the Haines family, three of whom were slaughtered in their home on May 16 in a gruesome and frightening crime. Basically, the guy said there were multiple stab wounds and some psychotic answering voices in his head out on the loose. The district attorney, Donald Totaro, said that information about the wounds should have not been released because it is something the police didn’t want the public to know and that Kirchner wasn’t a criminal profiler so he shouldn’t be analyzing the offender.

Kirchner fired back that the police weren’t doing so well in their investigation and were down to interviewing school kids.

Well, I have to weigh in here with the DA if these are things Kirchner really said. First of all, he is involved in the investigation and he shouldn’t be giving out information without the blessing of the detectives. Secondly, the police absolutely should be interviewing the kids at school because the crime may well be the work of some violence obsessed kid who wanted to make his fantasies come true.

Finally, Kirchner doesn’t know the difference between a psychopath and a psychotic. This is no psychotic who did this. This is a psychopath who knows exactly what he is doing and no voice in his head is directing him. This is why the police are struggling to catch him. If he were psychotic he would not have selected a family in the night, targeted these specific people, snuck in and snuck out, and left no trail back to his house. His brain was functioning just fine, Mr. Kirchner, and that is why psychopaths are so much more dangerous than psychotics.

I don’t know Kirchner’s motivation behind his comments. Maybe he is fed up with the way the police keep too much information from the citizens in open cases and he wants to see this change. Maybe he wants the public to have enough information to identify the killer. Maybe he just wants publicity. But, one thing is for sure – there is still a violent psychopath running around Lancaster and I only hope the police have some leads they are not telling us about.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm Not sure what Mr. Kirchner's motavation was for the mis-statements he made. I would hope Law enforcement would give carefull concideration as to what should be released to the public during the course of and Investigation. Maybe Mr. Kirchner wanted his 15 minutes of fame as we are seeing more and more of this type of behavior, If Mr. Kirchner didn't aprove of local law enforcements handleing of this case he had other more responsible means of communicating this to them.
Thank You for your "topics of the day " They are very well done.
I hope to hear more from the Investigator Donna Weaver as well.
I do enjoy the Daily Profiler.
Thank You