Academic Sherlock Holmeses aid detectives

A university department dedicated to busting violent crime has become the focus of attention for police forces in the United Kingdom and abroad which are turning to academic sleuths to capture violent criminals.

The Investigative Psychology Unit, the brainchild of David Canter, professor of psychology at Liverpool University, and Merseyside police force. It will share its expertise with academics from around the world at a conference to be held in Liverpool next week.

The unit is grooming a new breed of postgraduates who specialise in interpreting patterns of criminal behaviour and creating operational systems that help identify rapists, serial killers, violent arsonists and other dangerous criminals.

"The boundaries between academic research outside the police force and the policy and actions within it are being blurred," said Professor Canter. At the conference, Professor Canter and his students will discuss a number of research findings.

Maurice Godwin, a former US police officer currently studying at the IPU, will stress the advantages of concentrating police investigations on the point where a victim is abducted rather than where the killer dumps a body.

These "points of fatal encounter" are likely to be closely related to an offender's residence, he says.

PhD student Nicola Smith will discuss the preliminary results of her statistical analysis of threat letters. The true intentions of a blackmailer can be interpreted through the language used in his threats, she says, making it possible for police to distinguish bogus criminals from their more sinister counterparts through a simple computer programme.

PhD student Samantha Hodge will destroy the popular myth that "serial killers randomly roam the countryside with no real rational thought, killing at will" with the results of her unpublished study linking 129 serial killers with the sites of their crimes.

She says: "Offenders won't travel very far from home to commit a crime and dump the bodies."

A growing number of police forces are also keen to recruit the unit's graduates. Since its establishment five years ago, five police forces in the UK and three overseas have established psychology units as a result of the unit.