@Eudaimonium Well, congratulation to your brother. You must be proud of him. I like to write and have had numerous ideas for things, more like screenplay ideas....just never had the time or patience to follow through. During my residency in Baltimore I met a guy who was a homicide detective. His squad in fact had been interviewed by the guy that wrote the book which was the basis for Homicide, Life in the Streets, the TV series. He was the only Jewish guy on the squad and the actor who played Munch was based upon him...
Well, anyway, I came up with an idea for a movie which is kind of like a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Seven...My friend was the protagonist. A woman is found in Baltimore who had been horribly tortured in her home. The kicker....no forced entry and she had absolutely no restraints. How do you do all the terrible things which I describe in gory detail without restraining someone? Additionally, the ME cannot determine COD. No external or internal trauma other than the non-lethal torture....extended tox analysis was negative.
When a second woman is found, my friend realizes he has a serial and he fills out a VICAP form...when it is run through the computer, a bunch of serial homicides with the same signature pop up in NYC expect for one important difference....they are men. Serial killer have never been known to switch ***es.
Our sleuth eventually finds himself on the computer bulletin boards and IRC chat which were available at the time in kinky dating sites.
Eventually, his friend, (yours truly playing the role of a doc,) comes over to the house and sees all the crime photos which leads him to figure out the killers profile, how they were tortured unrestrained, and the COD....
I wrote a letter to the FBI and was actually granted access to the following areas: the lab (I had to be certain that their technology could not identify the COD which at the time they could not,) the brand new computer section...very funny because you saw hard drives and pcs with evidentuary tape wrapped around them, glass and gem analysis, a few others...
But, most interesting of all was a visit to the Behavioral Science Unit where I got to interview one of the guys who created profiling, Roy Hazelwood who is now with the Academy Group...they teach profiling among other things. With my background in psych, he really opened up to me showing me photos that a ***ual sadistic killer took...the pictures were of a crime that was eventually on the History channel's cold case shows.
How profiling is done and how it came to be was and is still classified. I had a pretty good hunch as to how they did it. I waited until he was very relaxed in the conversation and said to him. You know, the only way to create a profiling data bank if one could call it that is to work backwards...you simply created a questionnaire and went to prisons to interview convicted serial killers. Then that information was correlated with the killer, the crime scene physical evidence, victim profile...etc.
He looked me in the eye and smiled saying, well, you know that our methods are classified.
Between the FBI research, my time at my friend's squad in Baltimore, and all I knew about PCs and the related information....I had enough to write it.
It would still work today although it would be difficult to recreate the per-internet, DOS, computer era.
I guess what I need is a ghost writer!
By the way...the methodology utilized for the homicides is real although done in a different manner.
You have motivated me to do something with this...
We could use all the feedback we can get. Thanks!
