6.3 Technology and Modus Operandi

As already alluded to at that beginning of this chapter, technology has long shared a relationship with criminal behavior. For example, without notable exception each successive advance in communications technology (including most recently the proliferation of portable personal computers and Internet related technologies) has been adopted for use in criminal activity, or has acted as a vehicle for criminal behavior. Some prominent examples include, but are not limited to:

Spoken language has been used to make threats of violence and engage in perjury.
Paper and pencil have been used to write notes to tellers during bank robberies, to write ransom notes in kidnappings, and to falsify financial documents and records.
The postal system has been used for selling non-existent property to the elderly, distributing stolen or confidential information, distributing illicit materials such as drugs and illegal pornographic images, the networking of criminal subcultures, and the delivery of lethal explosive devices to unsuspecting victims.
Telephones have been used for anonymous harassment of organizations and individuals, the networking of criminal subcultures, and for credit card fraud involving phony goods or services.
Fax machines have been used for the networking of criminal subcultures, distributing stolen or confidential information, and the harassment of organizations and individuals.
E-mail has been used for anonymous harassment of organizations and individuals, the networking of criminal subcultures, for credit card fraud involving phony goods or services, distributing stolen or confidential information, and distributing illicit materials such as illegal pornographic images.
Web sites have also been used for anonymous harassment of organizations and individuals, the networking of criminal subcultures, and for credit card fraud involving phony goods or services, distributing stolen or confidential information, and distributing illicit materials such as illegal pornographic images.

The proactive aspect of this relationship has been that criminals can borrow from existing technologies to enhance their current modus operandi to achieve their desired ends, or to defeat technologies, and circumstances that might make the completion of their crime more difficult. If dissatisfied with available or existing tools, and sufficiently skilled or motivated, criminals can also endeavor to develop new technologies.

The result is a new technological spin on an existing form of criminal behavior.

In a variety of forms, computer, and Internet technologies may be used on their own to facilitate of accomplish the following types of criminal activities:

victim selection;
victim surveillance;
victim contact/grooming;
stalking/harassment;
theft of assets such as money from bank accounts, intellectual property, identity, and server time;
destruction of assets such as money from bank accounts, intellectual property, identity, and network functions;
locating confidential and/or illicit materials;
gathering and storing confidential and/or illicit materials;
narrow dissemination of confidential and/or illicit materials;
broad dissemination of confidential and/or illicit materials.

The following examples are provided to illustrate some of these situations:

CASE EXAMPLE 1 (REUTERS 1997):

In August of 1997, a Swiss couple, John (52 years old) and Buntham (26 years old) Grabenstetter, were arrested at the Hilton in Buffalo, New York and accused of smuggling thousands of computerized pictures of children having sex into the United States.

The couple were alleged by authorities to have sold wholesale amounts of child pornography through the Internet, and carried with them thousands of electronic files of child pornography to the United States from their Swiss home. They were alleged to have agreed over the Internet to sell child pornography to US Customs agents posing as local US porn shop owners. They were alleged to have agreed to sell 250 CD-ROMs to US investigators for $10,000. According to reports, one CD-ROM had over 7,000 images.

It is further alleged that their two-year-old daughter, who was traveling with them at the time of their arrest, is also a victim. Authorities claim that photographs of their daughter are on the CD-ROMs her parents were distributing.

In Case Example 1, digital imaging technology and the Internet allegedly enhanced an existing MO, which consisted of manufacturing and marketing child pornography to other distributors. Alleged contact with international buyers was first made using Internet technologies, through which communications resulted in an agreement for sale of illicit materials. The illicit images were then alleged to have been digitized for transport, ease of storage, and ease of duplication once in the United States.

CASE EXAMPLE 2 (WIRED NEWS 1998):

From an article in Wired magazine from February 1998:

Police in four states say they're the victims of what amounts to a cybersex sting in reverse, the latest in a string of Internet pornography cases getting headlines around the United States.

The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, reports that the officers encountered a 17-year-old Illinois girl in chat rooms - and that their e-mail relationships quickly became sexually explicit. The girl then told her mother about the contacts with deputies in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, and her mother informed authorities in those states. Discipline followed.

The chain of events - which included one North Carolina deputy sending the girl a photograph of his genitals - led an attorney for one of the officers to decry what he suggests was a setup.

"This young woman has gone around the country, as best we can determine, and made contact with a very vulnerable element of our society - police officers - and then drawn them in and alleged some type of sexual misconduct," said Troy Spencer, the attorney for one suspended Virginia officer. "She's a cyberspider."

The same teenager from the above instances, who acted under the alias "Rollerbabe," was connected to other similar incidents which were published in The News Observer of North Carolina in November of 1998 (Jarvis 1998):

"... Earlier this year, Wake County sheriff's deputies were accused of taking advantage of a Midwestern teenager in an Internet sex scandal that eventually snared law enforcement officers in several states.

Now another officer has been caught in the Web, raising questions about who is snaring whom. A rural county sheriff in Illinois said this week that he had been enticed into a romantic e-mail correspondence with "Rollerbabe" - who claimed to be an athletic, 18-year-old blonde from suburban Chicago named Brenda Thoma. The summer relationship surfaced this month when her mother complained to county officials about it.

That pattern also emerged in Wake County and in three other states - prompting one officer's attorney to call the young woman a "cyberspider" - where e-mail friendships between law enforcement officers and Rollerbabe escalated into sexually explicit electronic conversations. Scandals broke out when her mother, Cathy Thoma, 44, complained to the officers' superiors. One officer whose career was ruined by the encounter, former Chesapeake, Va., police detective Bob Lunsford, said Friday that he is convinced the young woman's mother is involved with the e-mail. No one has brought criminal charges against the pair, nor has any one claimed that the women did anything illegal.

In March, Mrs Thoma insisted her daughter was courted by the police officers whom she trusted after meeting them online. She said she wasn't troubled by her daughter's computer habits. The Thoma family - a husband and wife and several children - was living in Manhattan, III., until several weeks ago when they moved to Lansing, Mich. An e-mail request for comment about the incident with the sheriff brought a brief response Friday, signed by someone identifying herself as Brenda Thoma.

... Earlier this week, (Paul ) Spaur, 56, a Clinton County, III., sheriff, acknowledged carrying on an Internet romance with Rollerbabe from his county computer this summer. When Mrs Thoma complained to county officials, Spaur said he had done nothing wrong but offered to pay $1,222 for 679 hours worth of phone bills spent on the computer.

... In January, Wake County Sheriff John H. Baker Jr. suspended seven deputies and demoted one of them because some of the officers had e-mail conversations with Rollerbabe while on duty; their supervisors were punished because it happened on their watch. Mrs Thoma said the deputy who was demoted had initiated the relationship and sent nude photos of himself over the Internet, but Baker said there was no way to prove who was depicted in the photos.

... Shortly afterward, it was discovered that officers in Virginia, Texas, and Georgia had had similar encounters with Rollerbabe. An officer in Richland, Texas, resigned after Mrs Thoma complained about the relationship.

Lunsford, the Virginia detective, was publicly humiliated when he was suspended and a local TV station referred to the investigation as a child pornography case, because the girl was then 17. Before that he had won several commendations, including for saving another police officer's life. In May, the Chesapeake Police Department formally cleared Lunsford, who had been on leave because of a stress-related illness; he eventually resigned. His marriage also broke apart.

In Case Example 2, we have the MO of what might be referred to as a female law enforcement "groupie." Arguably, she is responding to what is referred to by some in the law enforcement community as the Blue Magnet. This term is derived from the reality that some individuals are deeply attracted to those in uniform, and who, by extension, have positions of perceived authority. In the past, their have been cases where law enforcement groupies have obsessively made contact with those in blue through seductive letter writing, random precinct house telephone calling, the frequenting of "cop bars," and participation in law enforcement conferences or fund raisers. Now, law enforcement e-mail addresses and personal profiles can be gathered quickly and easily over the Internet on personal and department websites, and in online chat rooms, making them more easily accessible to those attracted to the blue magnet. And the truth is that some officers provide this information, and seek out these online chat areas, with the overt intention of attracting just these types of individuals (i.e. registered IRC chat rooms such as #COPS, dedicated to "Cops Who Flirt"; AOL chat rooms such as "Cops who flirt," etc.).

It is important to keep in mind, however, that law enforcement groupies are not necessarily individuals engaged in criminal activity. That is, unless they attempt to blackmail an officer in some fashion after they get them to engage in some kind of compromising circumstance, or engage in harassment and/or stalking behavior, all of which can and does happen. The criminal activity in these instances (if there is any at all), as in the example above, can actually come from the law enforcement officers involved. This can take the form of misusing and abusing department resources and violating the public trust, including but not limited to things like inappropriate telephone charges, vehicle use, and desertion of one's assigned duties. And we are not talking about small misallocations, but rather large ones such as in the example, which are symptomatic of ongoing patterns of departmental resource misuse and abuse.

As in Case Example 2, criminal activity in these instances can also take on the form of the distribution of pornographic materials (an officer allegedly e-mailed a digital photograph of his genitals to the 17-year-old girl), which, depending on the circumstances, can have serious legal consequences.

In both examples, technology facilitated criminal behavior in terms of providing both the mechanisms for initial contact between the involved parties, and a means for communication and illicit materials sharing between the parties over great distances. But as we have shown, less complex and "immediate" technologies do exist which have facilitated the same type of behavior in the past.

A more reactive aspect of the relationship between MO and technology, from the criminal's point of view, involves the relationship between the advancement of crime detection technologies in the forensic sciences, and a criminal's knowledge of them.

Successful criminals are arguably those who avoid detection and identification, or at the very least capture. The problem for criminals is that as they incorporate new and existing technologies into their MO to make their criminal behavior or identity more difficult to detect, the forensic sciences can make advances to become more competent at crime detection. Subsequently, criminals that are looking to make a career, or even a hobby, for themselves in the realm of illegal activity must rise to the meet that challenge. That is to say, as criminals learn about new forensic technologies and techniques being applied to their particular area of criminal behavior, they must be willing to modify their MO, if possible, to circumvent those efforts.

But even an extremely skilful, motivated, and flexible offender may only learn of a new forensic technology when it has been applied to one of their crimes and resulted in their identification and/or capture. While this encounter can teach them something that they may never forget in the commission of future crimes, in such cases the damage will already have been done.

Maury Roy Travis

A glaring example of this type of inadvertent slip-up occurred in a recent case out of St Louis, Missouri, resulting in the apprehension of alleged serial killer Maury Roy Travis, a 36-year-old hotel waiter. In May of 2002, angered by a news story sympathetic to one of his victims, an unidentified serial killer wrote the publication in question to let his dissatisfaction be known. So that he would be believed, he provided details regarding location of an undiscovered victim. According to Bryan (2002):

In the letter that arrived Friday at the Post-Dispatch, the writer said human remains would be found within "a 50-yard radius from the X" that had been inscribed on an accompanying map of the West Alton area. Police followed up on Saturday and found a human skull and bones at that location, just off of Highway 67. The remains were unidentified on Monday.

The letter writer said the remains belonged to another victim, and the author indicated that the locations of even more bodies might be divulged to the newspaper at a later time. St Louis police, who are spearheading a multi-jurisdictional investigation, have refused to talk about the letter.

"The letter writer believes he is brilliant," Turvey added. "And the letter writer has a proficient knowledge of evidence," illustrated by the fact that the letter was typed.

"There's only been a couple of serial killers like this person," Turvey said. "One was the Zodiac killer in the San Francisco area in the '70s who was never caught."

... The remains found Saturday were within 300 yards of where the bodies of Teresa Wilson, 36, and Verona "Ronnie" Thompson, also 36, were found just a few yards apart in May and June of last year.

In October, detectives from several jurisdictions in the St Louis area began comparing notes after they realized that the deaths of six prostitutes whose bodies were found mostly alongside roadways might be the work of a serial killer or killers. The prostitutes were drug users, and most had ties to a trucking area in the Baden neighborhood.

This year, the skeletal remains of three unidentified women were found alongside roadways in the Metro East area. Those cases added to the list of the existing six cases.

Turvey ... said it was fortunate that a police task force had already been looking into the killings here and warned not to make the letter writer angry.

The offender's map turned out to be a crucial form of previously untapped digital evidence. The online service that Mr Travis used to render his map had logged his IP address. A description of the technology involved in associating Mr Travis with the map he generated online, and his subsequent identification and apprehension, is provided in (Robinson 2002):

"Basically, whenever you go online, you're leaving a track," said Peter Shenkin, professor of Computer Information Systems in Criminal Justice and Public Administration at John Jay College in New York. "For instance, when I log on, I have unique number, an IP address, assigned to me by the Internet service provider, and I have that address as I go from one site to another. If I access a site, that site makes a record of my IP address. They know when I was online, how long I was on the site, what pages I looked at."

Accused serial killer Maury Troy Travis had no idea that he would leave police a virtual trail when he allegedly sent a letter to a St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. The letter was sent in response to an article about a slain prostitute believed to be one of the victims of a serial killer in Missouri and Illinois. The note to the reporter read, "Nice sob story. I'll tell you where many others are. To prove im real here's directions to number seventeen. [sic]"

The second part of the letter contained a downloaded map of West Alton, Ill., marked with an X. Police went to the spot marked by the X and found a woman's skeleton. But that was not the only information the map provided. By surfing on different travel sites, Illinois State police found out the map had been downloaded from Expedia.com. After receiving a federal subpoena from investigators, Expedia.com pulled up the IP address of every user that had looked at the map in recent days. There was only one person.

The FBI subpoenaed the Internet service provider to find out who had been assigned the IP address. That user, ISP records indicated, turned out to be Travis, who resided in St Louis County. FBI agents searched Travis' home and found blood spatters and smears throughout his home and on belts and other things used to tie people up.

Travis was arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping. Officials suspected him in the killings of six prostitutes and four unidentified women found in the St Louis area between April 2001 and May 2002 and were reportedly planning additional charges for murder.

However, before Mr Travis could be brought to trial, let alone be charged with murder, he committed suicide in custody. According to Clubb (2002):

The suicide Monday night of Maury Troy Travis, 36, of Ferguson, sent shock waves Tuesday through the law enforcement community and the St Louis area media. Officials from the Clayton Police Department held a news conference late Tuesday to answer questions about how Travis managed to hang himself in his cell, despite being under a suicide watch.

... Travis had not yet been charged with murder, which is usually prosecuted as a state crime. The federal case kept him in custody while prosecutors in at least three jurisdictions considered additional charges.

However, one law enforcement source close to the investigation told The Telegraph that police already had discovered evidence that would have incriminated Travis in multiple torture-killings of women.

The source said the FBI found the evidence when it searched Travis' house in Ferguson last Friday. Investigators found videotapes concealed inside walls at the home, the source said. Police viewed the videotapes this week and found they showed a number of torture-killings of women known to be victims, including some who identified themselves on the tapes by name.

By comparison with other serial murderers, Mr Travis was not foolish, impulsive, or unskilled. In fact, the evidence shows just the opposite: a patient and meticulous offender, conscious of the need for a disposable victim population and nurturing a specific set of sexual control oriented fantasies that required a specific methods of control and "props." According to reports (Home Movies 2003), Mr Travis was among other things sadistic in nature:

Police believe Travis picked up prostitutes along a strip of Broadway just north of St Louis that is riddled with crack houses and prostitution, then took them to his ranch-style home in Ferguson, a nearby suburb.

They found numerous videotapes in Travis' home showing him giving the prostitutes crack cocaine to smoke, then having consensual sex with them. He apparently let some of the women leave at that point.

The "wedding" tape included similar scenes - including a shot of a woman sitting on Travis' bed after an introductory caption "ANOTHER CRACKHEAD HO." But it showed that in some cases - police are not sure how he chose his victims - Travis would start asking the women to engage in bizarre rituals, such as having them dance in white clothes or wear sunglasses with the lenses blackened so they could not see.

Then he would take them captive, binding them with ropes and handcuffs and covering their eyes with duct tape. He would then begin to torment them, either in the bedroom, or after dragging them downstairs to the basement and shackling them to a wooden post.

The excerpts the police released to Primetime show Travis tormenting the women verbally, taunting them about their fate and haranguing some of them over how they had abandoned their children for crack. One exchange, with an unidentified victim, went as follows:

Travis: You want to say something to your kids?

Victim: I'm sorry.

Travis: Who's raising your kids?

Victim: Me, my mom and dad.

Travis: You ain't raising s---, b---. You over here on your back smoking crack. You ain't going home tomorrow. I'm keeping you about a week. Is that all right?

He forced one victim to say to him, "You are the master. It pleases me to serve you." When he didn't like the way she said it, he yelled at her, "Say it clearer!"

When another victim tried to remove the duct tape covering her eyes and knocked his camera out of focus, he told her: "You don't need to see s--- ... Lay down on your back. Shut your eyes."

At one point, a woman can be heard gasping in agony as he orders her, "Sit still!"

There is no question regarding the skill and care taken by Mr Travis in the commission of his crimes. There is further no question that police had failed to link him with all of his crimes prior to his capture, let alone link all of his crimes together. In fact, police had few tangible leads, and the case was apparently growing cold. The only question that remains is whether police would have linked him to his crimes without his inadvertent cybertrail and the work of diligent local investigators examining his correspondence for clues. The most reasonable answer is no.