Psychological Profiling

A psychological profile is mistaken by most people to be a profile for any criminal. A psychological profile is only compiled when a serial killer is involved. This profile is compiled by a researcher who has a great knowledge of psychology.

Psychological profiling may be described as a method of suspect identification which seeks to identify a person's mental, emotional, and personality characteristics, as manifested in things done or left at the crime scene.The researcher compiles a profile by looking at the way the serial killer leaves the crime scene, and the serial killer’s modus operandi. The main objective with profiling a serial killer is to understand his motivation and his behaviour. To determine the offender typology a series of questions have to be asked about the crime scene and the offender’s actions, and then be answered in terms of the psychological typology of a serial killer.



Serial killers differ in many ways, including their motivations for killing and their behavior at the crime scene. A serial killer is a person who kills a series of people. For profiling to be successful, the series of murders has to link the offender to all of them.

Some investigators create a profile and then try to match a person to this profile, but in actual fact, you have to imagine the person and then create a profile that matches the person.