CSI Week Coming Up at Guilford, with Forensic Expert Richard Walter, Scanning Equipment Demo March 13-14-15
Richard Walter, one of the world’s foremost forensic psychologists and co-founder of the Vidocq Society, will visit Guilford on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 13-14.
Guilford will also be demonstrating its new Leica 3-D ScanStation for area law enforcement agencies on March 15, with representatives on hand from Greensboro, Guilford County, Burlington, Forsyth County, Rockingham County, Randolph County and Winston-Salem.
He will give a lecture on Wednesday from 1-2:30 p.m. in Joseph M. Bryan Jr. Auditorium, and will be visiting with students in classes both days. His visit is sponsored by biology, forensic biology, psychology, criminal justice, interdisciplinary studies and the Forensics Institute.
Walter is a crime scene analyst and one of the creators of modern criminal profiling. He developed a number of psychological classifications for violent crime, and is a co-founder of the Vidocq Society, an exclusive organization of forensic professionals dedicated to solving cold cases. Through his 22 years with Michigan’s prison system, he has interviewed more than 20,000 convicted felons.
He and Robert D. Keppel, former chief investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, wrote Profiling Killers: A Revised Classification Model for Understanding Sexual Murder. Keppel created the Homicide Information Tracking Unit (HITS) database, of which Walter was a prolific contributor. Walter was the first to develop a matrix as a tool of investigation using pre-crime, crime and post-crime behaviors to help develop suspects.
Author Michael Capuzzo has completed a book about the Vidocq Society and its three co-founders. The book is titled The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases. Walter is also a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Medicine/Clinical Forensic Medicine and the Australasian College of Biomedical Sciences.
His notable cases include:
- In 1989, Walter provided the psychological profile for mass murderer John List, who had been in hiding for 18 years. Using Walter’s profile, forensic sculptor Frank Bender was able to appropriately age the suspect in a bust displayed on America’s Most Wanted. List was captured the next day.
- In Lubbock, Texas in 1999, city police solved the murder of Scott Dunn with Walter’s aid. This is a rare case where a conviction was garnered in the absence of a body. The case is chronicled in the book Trail of Blood.
- In 2005, police in Hudson, Wisc., consulted with the Vidocq Society on the double homicide cold case of Dan O’Connell and James Ellison. With the help of Walter, the case was solved and the murderer was found to be a priest who was trying to keep child molestation allegations from surfacing.
