The Profiler Diaries: From the case files of a police psychologist
Information about the book [1]
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‘I wanted to write this book before I forgot the finer details. As strange as that may sound, you can forget these things, and it is probably healthier to do so. You can visit the depths of hell – just don’t hang around there for too long.’ – Gérard Labuschagne
In this gripping – and sometimes terrifying – account, former South African Police Service (SAPS) head profiler Dr Gérard Labuschagne, successor to the legendary Micki Pistorius, recalls some of the 110 murder series and countless other bizarre crimes he analysed during his career. An expert on serial murder and rape cases, Labuschagne saw it all in his fourteen and a half years in the SAPS. He walks the reader through the first crime scene he ever attended, his arrest of the Muldersdrift serial rapist, his experience as the head of the task team mandated to catch the Quarry serial murderer, his involvement with the Brighton Beach axe murders, and more. Despite often being stymied by a lack of resources, office politics and political interference, Labuschagne and his team were always determined to get their man – or woman, as in the Womb Raider case.
The Profiler Diaries is a fascinating – and often hair-raising – glimpse into what it was like to be a profiler in the world’s busiest profiling unit.
EXTRACT
I can confidently say that the IPS is probably the busiest profiling unit in the world.
Most of my colleagues overseas (except for FBI pro-filers) might get involved in one or two murder series during their pro-filing careers.
By the time I left the SAPS, I had been involved in over 110 murder series, and Lieutenant Colonels Elmarie Myburgh and Jan-nie de Lange
probably have far more than that under their belts by now.
Elmarie was a founder member of the IPU, having joined Micki right at the beginning. She is still there today and is the longest-serving member,
and probably the longest-serving law-enforcement profiler, in the world.Jannie joined us in 2005, and by then he was already a highly experi-enced detective,
having been a detective branch commander at two dif-ferent stations and was later stationed at the SAPS Special Inves-tigations Unit (SIU).
Before he joined us, he had been trained in, and worked on, serial-murder investigations. He is a major-crimes specialist of note and is still with the unit today.
While the main purpose of the unit was to assist with serial-murder cases, I worked on serial rapes, muti murders, mass murders, spree murders, intimate-partner murders,
cannibal murders, child murders, paedophile cases, child pornography cases, single sexual murders, ter-rorism cases, stalking cases, family murders, murder-suicides,
suicides, bestiality cases and weird housebreakings, to name but a few. Some of these you will read about in the ensuing chapters.
If you watched the Netflix series Mindhunter, which covers the start of profiling within the FBI, you will find many parallels with the start and development of the IPS.
When I watched the first season, I had to chuckle at some of the problems they experienced, as ours were similar.
And no, in general I actually can’t stand watching crime documentaries or fictional crime dramas, as I spend more time getting irritated about inaccuracies
than actually enjoying what I’m watching. And besides, I was living that life; why on earth would I want to watch more of it when I wasn’t working?
While I had studied and interviewed serial murderers for my Clini-cal Psychology Master’s dissertation and later for my doctorate,
and worked in a psychiatric hospital doing forensic assessments, nothing prepares you for the reality of this type of work.
No academic course or degree can make you a profiler. At one point, UNISA offered a BA de-gree that contained the term ‘offender profiling’
in the course content, and some students signed up thinking that they were going to be trained to do the work we did at the IPS.
But the course actually focused on classifying offenders in a correctional setting; there wasn’t really any investigative profiling involved,
and you definitely didn’t exit the pro-gramme as a trained offender profiler.
A number of students who were either doing the course or interest-ed in it asked me if they would qualify to come and work at the IPS up-on completion of the course.
I met with the course coordinator and raised my concerns that the title was misleading; it could lead to a situation where people might advertise themselves as investigative offender profilers without actually having been properly trained in it. As far as I know, the course was eventually discontinued. I will discuss my own training as a profiler in a later chapter.
To get back to profiling: whatever you’d done or studied was just the foundation for what you were going to need once you’d joined the IPS.
I wisely decided that I wasn’t going to walk in pretending to be the smartest person in the room, or ‘the boss’, just because I was the commander
and had a string of degrees behind my name. I shut up and listened. I was fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, more experienced people in the unit,
which at that point consisted of Captains Elmarie Myburgh and Lynne Evans.
At the time, the Serious and Violent Crime (SVC) Units, which were a revamped version of the old Murder and Robbery Units, had for the most part top-quality investigators
who could compare to the best of any similar unit in the world. Typically, they would deal with the types of cases that required our assistance, especially serials,
which would automatically be part of the SVC mandate. I learnt about investigations from those detectives.
Sadly, by the time I left there was a noticeable decrease in the standard and quality of investigations. In the beginning we would focus on only giving our specialised input,
because all the basics would have been taken care of by the investigators, but towards the end of my career we spent more time trying to get the basic investigation up to standard first.
Often, if you do that, you don’t even need the fancy stuff we had to offer. The biggest problem seems to be that we no longer have enough experienced people to supervise the detectives.
The captains are typically in charge of a group of detectives and inspect their dockets. You can have mediocre detectives,
but as long as their work is supervised by an experienced captain, the investigation will move forward and, hopefully,
the detective will develop through this mentoring process.
In previous years it also took a long time to get into a detective branch. Often members would start in what was referred to as ‘uniform investigations’;
then, if they performed well, they would get a trial pe-riod in a detective branch, and eventually be sent on a detective’s course.
To get into a specialised unit took even longer, again with a trial period. But nowadays you can get employed directly into a specialised environment
like organised crime or crime-scene investigation. There also seems to be very little accountability when someone makes a mess of things.
Then the SAPS took a huge knock in 2006, when then National Commissioner Jackie Selebi shut down all task teams and most specialised units.
This impacted one of the serial-murder investigations we were busy with at the time, the Quarry murder series, which I will be discussing later.
The SVC Units and Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences (FCS) Units were among the specialised detective units that were disbanded.
This was the situation while I was involved with the Muldersdrift serial-rape investigation, which I will also discuss in the book.
The argument was that police stations needed to be empowered to do these types of investigations.
They then took the detectives from the specialised units and sprinkled them among normal detective branches.
As a result, many SVC detectives left the SAPS and were snapped up by corporates or went into private practice.
Such ill-conceived ideas are born when you appoint someone with no policing experience to run a law-enforcement agency.
I am all for civilian oversight, via cabinet ministers, but not when they are the operational head.
The experiences I had in the SAPS shaped who I am today. I am grateful that I got to know my beautiful country and its people.
Before joining the police, my exposure to the different parts of South Africa was limited. I had been to Cape Town and Durban a few times,
driven through Bloemfontein, and been to the Eastern Cape once or twice. But by the time I left the SAPS, I had been to all four corners of my country
numerous times and interacted with all sorts of people, from the CEOs of companies to the homeless.
There were times when my colleagues and I would be away every week for six weeks at a stretch, only returning to our homes at the weekends to relax
and pick up a change of clothes. Then we’d be back on the road by Sunday. In the early years, until I became a brigadier in 2011, we had to drive everywhere.
Flying was considered a luxury, and besides, when you landed at your destination, there was invariably no vehicle for you to use.
Driving allowed you to see even more of your country. I would often travel alone, but at other times I’d have the company of Elmarie and, later,
after he joined us in 2005, Jannie, who has now served longer than me in the IPS. I am now the third-longest-serving member of the IPS.
Even when I worked at Weskoppies, I enjoyed serving the community. I used to get quite a kick out of the fact that patients at Weskoppies
were getting the same service from me as those in my small, after-hours, part-time practice who were paying a premium rate for it.
I offered the same standard of service when I was in the police, whenever the IPS was called in to assist the most disempowered and disadvantaged people in society.
I got a real kick out of it. Self-reward is very important in this line of work because nobody is going to thank you.
The satisfaction you gain from having done something well, and the appreciation of your colleagues, is probably all you’re going to get.
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by Gerhard Labuschagne
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