ABSTRACT
The results of the analysis indicated that the centroid for store locations was in the upper middle-class South Hill neighborhood. It was within a half mile of the centroid for the body disposal locations. The results of applying this refinement of the model are presented in Figure 12.5. One can see that the body dump locations and supermarket locations when analyzed using the model, each generates an ellipse and the axis of the ellipses are not aligned. However, the centroid of each ellipse is located in the same general area and both are in the South Hill neighborhood. Four months after this analysis was performed, the suspect who would be convicted for these crimes was discovered and apprehended. The discovery was made primarily on the basis of indications of suspicious activities by the driver of a white Corvette and as a result of a stop by a Spokane police officer of a white Corvette being driven by Robert Yates. Later, latent evidence recovered from the stopped Corvette (which by then had a new owner) revealed bloodstains that were linked to one of the victims. Although GIS and geographic profiling did not solve this case, in retrospect it could have narrowed down the focus of interest to a five square mile area out of 1,800 square miles within the greater Spokane metropolitan area. The suspect’s home residence turns out to have been located within this five square mile “high probability” area; in fact he
lived less than a mile from the mean locations (centroids) of both the body dump and the grocery store clusters. Since approximately 5,000 persons reside in this area out of a regional population of 420,000, that information coupled with other clues (how many of that subset of persons owned a white Corvette?) could have been very helpful to investigators. In this case, the approach to geographic profiling would seem to be a useful additional tool for investigators.
