Criminal Profiling - George Metesky "The Mad Bomber of New York"

Criminal profiling (CP) is the practice of predicting a criminal’s mental, emotional, personality, behavioural, and demographic characteristics. It is an investigative tool, a method of suspect identification, we could say, used by law enforcement agencies (LEA), which is a government agency responsible for the enforcement of the laws. This practice is being utilized by police agencies around the world despite no compelling scientific evidence that it is reliable, valid, or useful. Criminal profiling traces its origins back in 1888 with the killing spree of Jack the Ripper and in 1940s when the American Strategic Services’ office asked the psychiatrist Walter Langer to trace Adolf Hitler’s profile.

After World War Two, Lionel Haward, a psychologist that worked for the Royal Air Force and later on for the university of Surrey drew up a list of the characteristics that equated high-ranking nazi criminals of war; the technique was used by doctor James Brussel as well, deputy commissioner for mental hygiene of the New York in the 50s. His most famous forensic contribution was the profile of “The Mad Bomber Of New York”, whose activity lasted sixteen years.

George Peter Metesky, better known as the Mad Bomber, terrorized New York City for 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s with explosives that he planted all over the city. Bombs were left in phone booths, storage lockers, and restrooms in public buildings, including Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Public Library, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the RCA Building, and in the New York City Subway. He left threatening notes made from remnants of newspapers against the Con Ed because of events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier.

One of the notes left by Metesky

The New York Police Department (NYPD) called Brussel, that studied the reports of all the cases, examined the crime scenes and the bomber’s methods and developed what he defined as a portrait: «Studying the man’s actions, I deduced the kind of man he could be». Brussel suggested that the unknown offender would be a heavy middle-aged man who was unmarried, but perhaps living with a sibling. Moreover, the offender would be a skilled mechanic from Connecticut, who was a Roman Catholic immigrant and, while having an obsessional love for his mother, would harbour a hatred for his father. Brussel noted that the offender had a personal vendetta against Consolidated Edison, the city’s power company; the first bomb targeted its 67th Street headquarters. Dr. Brussel also mentioned to the police that, upon the offender’s discovery, the “chances are he will be wearing a double-breasted suit. Buttoned.” On his demand the profile was published on the “New York Times” on Christmas day, 1956. This was probably his biggest contribution to the arrest of the dynamitard. Surprisingly all his predictions turned out to be true and Metesky was arrested on the 21^st of January, 1957 when the police arrived at his house in Westchester, Connecticut.