After Seth Rich died, his homicide investigation became politicized. Seth worked for the DNC, and the DNC had it’s emails stolen prior to his death, so therefore he must have had something to do with the theft of these emails, either as a participant, or as someone who had discovered the theft and therefore had be eliminated. There was never any proof provided that Seth had anything to do with this theft but it didn’t stop various people such a Sean Hannity from implying that his murder and the theft were connected.
What is somewhat unusual is that a particular GOP Lobbyist and Lawyer named Jack Burkman injected himself into the case and then when Seth’s family split with him, he formed his own Baker Street irregulars to investigate this homicide. The Profiling Project was formed using current and former students from George Washington University who study forensic psychology. Here is their press page I’m partial to volunteer efforts myself, however there comes a time in every such effort where one has to judge them by the quality of their product. In this case, their initial report.
My analysis of what they did wrong is contained in a more lengthy article here . However as a general rule, criminal profilers want to start with very good information, including autopsy reports, preliminary police reports, crime scene photographs, and crime scene schematic drawings. (1) The Profiling Project had none of this information and it’s profile demonstrates this. They used media reports to obtain very incomplete information and then piled one assumption on to another to reach the conclusion a serial murderer or hitman (singular or plural) were responsible for this homicide. So:
Do not attempt to do criminal profiling* if:
- You do not have crime scene photographs
- You do not have a copy of the autopsy report
- You do not have a copy of the police report/scene description.
- You do not have the results of any resulting forensic lab tests.
- Do not attempt to analyze the victim's personality and risk factors based almost solely on their internet footprint.
- Do not attempt to make deductions about the crime when your material only allows you to make inductions about what happened. "The offender absolutely must have picked up his brass!"
- Do not reach conclusions when you have left the supporting evidence out of your paper.
- Do not cherry pick your news-sources to support your theory of the case. If you use "facts" that support your case, at the very least explain why you don't agree with the accuracy of other facts which undermine your theory. For example can you explain why Fox News is incorrect that robberies were happening a block away from the site of the murder during roughly the same time period, which is why you are leaving it out of your paper?
- Don't mention things in your report like toxins without explaining why you are bringing this subject up.
- Don't use words that produce false or unwarranted impressions. For example describing a city intersection as "sterile". It's not, you simply don't know if the perpetrator left any physical evidence behind.
- Do not throw lots of irrelevant material into the report while not including needed material. I shouldn't have had to go looking for the MDP's incident report online, it should have been in an appendix because you relied upon it so heavily.
- Similarly a map of D.C. showing where Seth Rich lived, the bar where he drank that night, and his path home along with some photographs of the intersection where he died would have been very helpful.
Once again, a longer discussion of this report can be found here.
*Historical cases are a possible exception to this rule. Sometimes the profiler will not have complete materials for say looking at Jack the Ripper's cases.
(1) For a description of what a profiler actually needs when working on a homicide, see John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (Pocket Books, New York, 1995) pp.169-170.