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crime-scene analysis to FBI agents or law enforcement professionals attending the National Academy, we try to get them to think of the entire story of the crime. My colleague Roy Hazelwood, who taught the basic profiling course for several years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide the analysis into three distinct questions and phases—what, why, and who:
    What
took place? This includes everything that might be behaviorally significant about the crime.
    Why
did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken? Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every behaviorally significant factor in the crime?
    And this, then, leads to:
    Who
would have committed this crime for these reasons?
    That is the task we set for ourselves.

Chapter 2
    My Mother’s Name Was Holmes
    My mother’s maiden name was Holmes, and my parents almost chose that as my middle name instead of the more prosaic Edward.
    Other than that, as I look back, not much about my early years indicated any particular future as a mind hunter or criminal profiler.
    I was born in Brooklyn, New York, near the border with Queens. My father, Jack, was a printer with the
Brooklyn Eagle.
When I was eight, con cerned about the rising crime rate, he moved us to Hempstead, Long Island, where he became president of the Long Island Typographical Union. I have one sister, Arlene, four years older, and from early on she was the star of the family, both academi cally and athletically.
    I was no academic standout—generally a B-/C+ student—but I was polite and easygoing and always popular with the teachers at Ludlum Elementary despite my mediocre perfor mance. I was mostly interested in animals and at various times kept dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, and snakes—all of which my mother tolerated because I said I wanted to be a veterinarian. Since this endeavor showed promise of a legitimate career, she encouraged me down this path.
    The one pursuit in school for which I did show a flair was telling stories, and this might, in some way, have contributed to my becoming a crime investigator. Detectives and crime-scene analysts have to take a bunch of disparate and seemingly unrelated clues and make them into a coherent narrative, so storytelling ability is an important talent, particularly in homicide investigations, where the victim can’t relate his or her own story.
    At any rate, I often used my talent to get out of doing real work. I remember once in ninth grade, I was too lazy to read a novel for an oral book report before the class. So when my turn came (I still can’t believe I had the balls to do this), I made up the title of a phony book, made up a phony author, and began telling this story about a group of campers around a campfire at night.
    I’m making it up as I go along, and I’m thinking to myself,
How long can I keep pulling this off?
I’ve got this bear stealthily stalk ing up on the campers, just about to pounce, and at that point I lose it. I start cracking up and have no choice but to confess to the teacher that I’d made up the whole thing. It must have been the guilty conscience, proving I wasn’t a complete criminal personal ity. I’m up there, exposed as a fake, knowing I’m going to flunk, about to be embarrassed in front of all my peers, and I can already anticipate what my mother’s going to say when she finds out.
    But to my surprise and amazement, the teacher and the other kids are totally into the story! And when I tell them I’ve been making it up, they all say, "Finish it. Tell us what happens next." So I did, and walked away with an A. I didn’t tell this to my own children for a long time because I didn’t want them to think that crime does pay, but I learned from it that if you can sell people your ideas and keep them interested, you can often get them to go along with you. This has helped me innumerable times as a law officer when I had to sell