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CNN Saturday Morning News

Interview With Pat Brown

Aired August 17, 2002 - 09:06   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: A baby snatched from a parking lot, a girl abducted from her own front yard, a child taken from her home, what type of person commits these kind of crimes? And do these criminals, what kind of motives do they have? Are the motives for men and women different?
A criminal profiler, Pat Brown, joining us now from Washington to discuss all of these questions. She is the CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange. Thank you for being with us this morning, Pat.

PAT BROWN, CRIMINAL PROFILER: Good morning.

CALLAWAY: You know, this is such a baffling case, the one that Miles was just talking about. When you start to profile a criminal who would do something like this, when you begin your search and you form that profile, how unusual is it when the kidnapper actually kills the parents first?

BROWN: Well, this is probably a different kind of case than we've been looking at recently. We really don't know exactly what happened at that crime scene, we don't know what the evidence shows us.

Somebody came in and point-blank shot one and then shot the other, it sounds to me like they had a grudge of some sort, something they wanted to take care of. Whether the girl was taken as a hostage or as an afterthought or as a witness to the crime that he then wanted to do something about, I'm not sure, and we really won't know because we don't really know the motive of the crime yet.

CALLAWAY: And, you know, Pat, we've seen so many different types of kidnapping recently with male and female abductors. Is there a big difference in the profile that the police develop when there has been a witness and they know it's a male or female? How different are those profiles?

BROWN: Oh, they're very different. When a male kidnaps a child, it's usually for sexual reasons, and that child usually ends up dead very quickly because he is going to enact his power on that child to show society what he can do and what treasure he has grabbed and what he can do with that treasure.

And that's a very dangerous situation, because the child usually doesn't live past 12 hours.

With a woman who kidnaps a child, we have a woman who wants to get some attention by suddenly having have a child in her life. That's how women get attention often, and so they -- this is one thing women rely on, is having someone around that people can ohh and ahh over. And if they bring a baby home suddenly, then they can get that kind of attention.

So that child is a little bit safer, because the women is not necessarily planning to kill that child, they want that child around.

CALLAWAY: Is one more likely to commit the crime than another? I mean, do we see big differences in statistics?

BROWN: Men tend to commit more crimes generally speaking anyway, but yes, men will commit more of the abductions and kidnappings and the sexual homicides.

Women, however, are serial killers, and that's what people don't realize. Women -- there's a number of types of women serial killers. For example, the ones they call Munchhausen syndrome by proxy, where they make their children sick and go to the doctor and get a lot of attention.

Some of these women also kill their children one after the other, because they've learned that if the child dies, they get attention, so they have another child and kill that one and the next one. And they might kill -- there is one woman who killed, Mary Beth Kenny (ph), killed I think it was nine of her children before they kind of figured out maybe she is a serial killer.

And so we -- sometimes we don't realize women are serial killers, but they also kill, you know, their -- children in their charge, and sometimes they will kill men they rent rooms to or they'll kill patients in hospitals, so they are serial killers as well.

CALLAWAY: Wow, that's incredibly different motivation for these same type of crimes.

BROWN: Well, the motivations are for attention on both sides, it's just how females get attention and how males get attention, that's what is different about it.

CALLAWAY: Does it change at all in how the investigation unfolds, on how they search for someone in that situation?

BROWN: Definitely, because we are looking at, you know, different kind of criminal, so the police are -- they are going to have to do a very, you know, solid crime scene search to find out what the evidence is there, pointing to what kind of crime. Because sometimes we are confused about the type of crime it is. And when we get confused about the kind of crime, then we're going to end up looking down the wrong road.

CALLAWAY: You know, after we -- all these high-profile cases that we've been seeing, it is difficult to imagine that you would ever leave your child alone for, you know, even a moment, but that's just physically impossible to be with your child at all moments. You know, do you think it's just that we're seeing overblown coverage on these type of stories, or is it something that you feel like is on the rise in your work?

BROWN: Well, I think there is two aspects to it. One thing, I think we have national coverage now, which we didn't use to have. It use to happen in -- you know, something happened in each little borough, and what we had was a town newspaper reporting it.

CALLAWAY: And that was it, yes.

BROWN: And so even the next town over had no idea what happened. But now with national coverage, we are seeing all types of things that are happening around the country, so that does make it look a little bit worse.

However, I do think that we are also underreporting the number of children that are kidnapped. And the reason we do that, especially when it gets to the teenagers, well, those are often reported as missing teens or runaways.

And we have a case we're working on right now, a man is -- young man was missing -- has been missing for 20 years, and we're still trying to get that moved over to homicide. He's in missing persons, I'm, like, Well, he's been missing for 20 years. His mother is still trying to find him.

And we know he was murdered, but he's still listed as missing. And so we have a lot -- we have a lot of underreporting of those kind of things in -- that should be homicides and are not listed as such.

CALLAWAY: That's very interesting. Pat Brown, thank you for being with us today and sharing your thoughts with us. She is with -- the CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange. Thanks, Pat.

BROWN: All right, it was my pleasure.

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