"While there are many wonderful police investigators out there doing some very fine work, the majority of the time it is not brains that catches serial killers." -- Pat Brown
Pat Brown, born in 1955, is a criminal profiler, author and commentator.
"All serial killers want to win. They choose victims they can kill successfully.""Evidence can vary depending on the circumstances, the weather, and how long it has been hanging around.""In reality, serial killers are of average intelligence.""In reality, those rare few cases with good forensic evidence are the ones that make it to court.""Killers can seem smart when you can't figure out who they are.""Last but not least among serial killer methodologies, we have women who kill their own children.""Many of the less prolific killers' stories go unheard because they simply don't make good books.""Most well-known serial killers have victims numbering in the dozens, have sent taunting letters to the police or have done bizarre things to the bodies.""Nowadays, with much more racial and ethnic mixing, we are seeing serial killers murdering a variety of victims; whoever comes along will most likely do.""Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer.""Often, a serial killer has no felony record.""Outside of dumb luck, the number one way serial killers are caught is through the help of the public.""Police are reluctant to label a murder as a possible serial homicide.""Serial killers are everywhere! Well, perhaps not in our neighborhood, but on our television screens, at the movie theatres, and in rows and rows of books at our local Borders or Barnes and Noble Booksellers.""Serial killers kill for the power and control they experience during the murders and for the added ego boost they get in the aftermath from community fears, media coverage, and the police investigations.""Serial killing is not about sex at all, but about power and control and revenge on society.""Since there are only so many ways to kill a person, a good portion of homicides look pretty much alike.""Telling the community a serial killer is out there stirs up a lot of unpleasant attention.""The accepted definition of a serial killer is a person who kills at least three times with a cooling off period in between his murders.""The most important issue for the killer is the ability to get a victim easily and successfully.""The one noticeable similarity with almost all serial killer victims is their short height and low weight.""There are many more serial killers living outside the prison walls than inside.""There are two kinds of serial killers as far as the victim is concerned: the kind that you don't see before they pounce on you and the kind you see and don't expect to pounce on you.""Using MO to link crimes can be problematic.""We assume people we know can't be serial killers.""We struggle to understand how any mother could kill her own children.""What does signature mean? Supposedly these are the added touches that make the crime personal to the killer.""While we are being fascinated by the tales of famous serial killers and how they were brought to justice, the real serial killer goes about his business with hardly a thought to being caught.""Without solid connections between homicides, we may have the reverse problem of believing three local murders are the work of one serial killer when they may actually be the work of three!"
In 1981, she graduated with a liberal arts degree from the University of the State of New York. In 2007, she received her master’s degree in criminal justice from Boston University.
After having once rented a room to a murder suspect, Brown was moved to become an investigative criminal profiler. By 1996, she'd founded The Sexual Homicide Exchange (SHE). In 2000, she opened The Pat Brown Criminal Profiling Agency. Today, she is one of the few women criminal profilers, assisting police departments and victims' families by analyzing physical and behavioral evidence to make determinations about crime behavior, suspects and motive.
Since it was founded, The Sexual Homicide Exchange has offered profiling and investigative services at no cost to law enforcement. The Sexual Homicide Exchange is also home to The Society for Investigative Criminal Profiling, which works toward deductive profiling and establishing practice standards for criminal profilers.
Brown wrote about her criminological approach in The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths with co-author Bob Andelman. She also wrote about the psychology of predators in Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers. In addition, she is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to Women in Crime Ink, described by the Wall Street Journal as "a blog worth reading."
Brown has provided crime commentary, profiling, and forensic analysis on national and international TV and radio. She regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC and CBS and is a frequent guest on the "Today," "The Early Show," "Nancy Grace," Jane Velez-Mitchell, HLN "Prime News," FOX TV’s “America’s Most Wanted,” and “The Montel Williams Show.” For four seasons, she profiled crimes on the weekly Court TV crime show, “I, Detective.” She was the host of Discovery Channel’s 2004 documentary The Mysterious Death of Cleopatra. And she consulted, as well as appeared as a featured profiler, on "Jack the Ripper" (2010) for The Mystery Files.
Brown was a writer for The Crime Library, and a content contributor for the 2005 home DVD edition of Profiler: Season Two and the 2006 DVD release of Quentin Tarantino’s crime classic Reservoir Dogs.
In May 2010, Ann Curry with NBC's the Today Show," interviewed Brown about her latest book, The Profiler.
