CHOLERA CARTOGRAPHY: Profiling the 1854 London cholera outbreak: black circles show addresses of victims, and blue squares, the neighborhood water pumps. The pump at the peak is the Broad Street pump, the source of the outbreak.
View full size JPG | PDFCOURTESY OF STEVE LE COMBERPeter Sutcliffe killed his first victim much as he would others: he struck the woman twice with a hammer, then stabbed her 15 times. Sutcliffe, who would come to be known as the Yorkshire Ripper, followed up that first gruesome murder in October 1975 with 12 more over the next 5 years. Local police gathered tips and interviews from terrorized citizens of the northern English county, and workers had to reinforce the floor of the station’s evidence room to bear the weight of the paperwork. But it wasn’t clever detective work or a sloppy crime that was Sutcliffe’s undoing—it was a driving offense. Officers arrested him for having stolen license plates in January 1981. After he confessed to the crimes, police realized that they had interviewed him nine times over the 5-year investigation.
Though the West Yorkshire police were criticized for their handling of the case, the advent of digital, searchable records would certainly have been an enormous help to pre-computer-era law enforcers. Moreover, a new criminal investigative method called geographic profiling could have cracked the 5-year-long case in a matter of hours.
“Sutcliffe’s name was on the top of the list,” says Steve Le Comber, of Queen Mary, University of London, recounting the results of plugging the Ripper data into the geographic profiling model. But Le Comber isn’t a criminologist or in the law enforcement business; he’s a biologist studying animal foraging behaviors, infectious disease, and invasive species.
Le Comber first read about geographic profiling in a magazine article and saw connections between the way it mapped ...
