Meet Pat Brown, The Ex-Housewife Who Stalks Psycho Killers

Meet the ex-housewife who stalks psycho killers
Pat Brown tells how she became one of world’s few female crime profilers

By Mike Celizic
TODAYshow.com contributor
updated 2 hours, 5 minutes ago

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The journey from stay-at-home mom to celebrated criminal profiler was both accidental and direct for Pat Brown. Today, she hunts cold-blooded serial killers with the same gusto she once applied to raising her three kids.

“I had no clue that this was coming down the pike. I had three children, and I had a great life. I was a home-schooling mom,” Brown told TODAY’s Ann Curry Tuesday in New York, where she was promoting her newest book, “The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths.”

It all started for Brown in 1990 with a gruesome murder and a bizarre boarder. The two, Brown remains convinced to this day, were not unrelated.

At the time, Brown and her husband had a son and a daughter, and were in the process of adopting another son.

To make ends meet and allow Brown to be a stay-at-home mom, the family took in boarders. But when they went into the adoption process, everyone who stayed in the house had to be fingerprinted by local police in Maryland, where they lived. Brown said that a reluctance to be fingerprinted inspired the foreign-born college students who usually rented the rooms to move out.

Bizarre boarder
A friend who knew Brown needed the rent money offered a solution. A man who had just started work at her company needed a place to stay. It would also help the friend, since she was dating the man.

“He seemed like a nice guy, personable,” Brown said of the man she identifies as Walt Williams.

But over the next four weeks, the man became increasingly strange. “I’m going, ‘There’s something wrong with this guy.’ He started telling us bizarre stories. He was lying all the time,” Brown said.

And then the nude body of a government intern who had gone jogging along a wooded path was found dead in a stream. The woman had been raped before being savagely murdered.

The night of the murder, Brown’s friend had broken up with Williams. The boarder had been upset and came home along the same path the jogger had been on. He even told Brown of his route.

“This man had just been at the other end of the path and my friend had just broken up with him and he was very upset, and he had walked that path from her house to my house,” Brown said.

Brown was convinced her boarder was evil and suspected he was the murderer. She waited until he went to work and then went through his room.

She found that he’d thrown a new pair of pants and a pair of shoes in the trash. She also found a shirt that was cut and torn, as if someone had worn it through briars and brambles of the sort found along the path where the jogger was killed.

Where’s the evidence?
“I went to the police with this information, and I said, ‘I’m not saying he did this. I’m just saying he moved into town four weeks ago. He was walking that path. He has very bizarre behavior and here’s the information,’ ” Brown told Curry.

And the police did nothing. Although they had no suspects, they didn’t question Williams or check any of the evidence Brown had gathered.

“It took me six years and the case was reopened, and another investigator looked at it and said, ‘How could they have ignored this?’ ” Brown said.

Although Williams would be named a suspect, he was never prosecuted. The problem, Brown said, is common in cases she revisits. Frequently, years have passed since the crimes, and even if she is able to construct a description of the likely killer, there is no evidence left to link anyone to the crime.

Even in the cases that she helps solve, such as the notorious BTK (blind, torture and kill) Killer of Kansas, the years that pass between the first killing and calling in a profile are filled with more killings, Brown said.

Anatomies of murders
There is no licensing required to be a criminal profiler, nor are there qualifications for the job. Basically, you’re a profiler if you say you are.

In Brown’s case, she got a master’s degree in criminal justice before hanging out her shingle. She has developed her own course on profiling, in which she teaches others how to build a picture of a killer that can help police and detectives solve crimes.

It’s not a skill taught in police academies, she told Curry.

“What I have found is we have very, very dedicated detectives and police officers absolutely working their butts off,” Brown said. “But they have so many cases, they’re overwhelmed. They don’t get proper training much of the time. They don’t have time to actually sit down and analyze these cases, do the crime-scene analysis, profile them, so that maybe they go in the right direction. Then the case doesn’t get solved. Then they bring me in five years later, and I profile it and they go, ‘Wow, we didn’t see that, but now, where’s the evidence?’ ”

Brown wants to not only teach investigators how to develop profiles of killers, but also to get profilers involved in tough cases as a first resort rather than a last one.

“I’m trying to get profilers in the first 24 to 48 hours or do the training for the detectives so they can do their own work,” she said. “That’s what I hope for, to solve more cases, and less people will get killed.”


Read an excerpt from Pat Brown’s ‘The Profiler’

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/37211315/ns/today-today_people/

Thank you so much for posting her information, J4A. I'm going to order her book right away. I'm very anxious to read it. It's extremely impressive how she turned her experience into a lifetime of work to get these killers found and off the streets.

Hurray for this woman. She shows what determination can accomplish. So many times in the past, it appears that LE didn't bend over backwards to look into clues turned in by ordinary citizens. Could part of that been due to their egos, refusing to consider information from sources outside of their departments? I believe that presently, with the media able to spread the news throughout the country on horrific crimes, more pressure is put on LE to find the criminals. Often, a lack of funds and manpower is todays excuse for unsolved crimes.

J4A, thanks for bringing her up...

I personally find ppl like Pat, very selfish...

When ppl like Pat refer to themselves as professional, they make me sick.. I question how a " professional" goes on NG. Many ppl have seen and heard NG embellish and condone innaccurate accounts where we see her inability to be impartial. So when I see Pat on her show, profiling ppl and using information that has been completely sensationalized.. well I cud just puke...IMO, Pat is just as bad as NG becasue they are both doing this for one reason and it aint justice.. Its all for notoriety and the almighty $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$..

If she truly was a professional, and honestly wanted to do nothing but help fight crime..she wud not be collecting paycheques from rags, and wud be discreet and not be looking for national recognition... SHe is condoninf and being involved where it is known that facts are misconstrued and embellished and even completely wrong.. How does she share her " professional" opinion about someone where she is so irrespnsible when it comes to her carelessly believing what she hears on these rag shows.. This tells me money is her driving force, not justice.. I cant stand to see her face..

Quote:
"I cant stand to see her face.."

LOL AJ! I've never seen her on NG, I had never heard her name before.

Also,

The article above says that Pat says..

" There is no licensing required to be a criminal profiler, nor are there qualifications for the job. Basically, you’re a profiler if you say you are."

----

Well I suspect many of us who fight for justice, cud consider ourself a profiler as well...

Hats off to her for a degree, but she even says herself, profiling wasnt learned by that course... To think she became famous for continuing to fight for LE to imo ..do their job .. is pretty lucky.. Hats off on her Masters, but please..

How many of us here, wudnt have persued the same struggle if we were in her situation? .. On account that there was never an arrest, I also suspect she was wrong.. How good is she? I question why it took her 6 yrs to get someone to look at it! How effective was she in the first place.. ???

Piper wrote:Quote:
"I cant stand to see her face.."

LOL AJ! I've never seen her on NG, I had never heard her name before.

Lol...

SHe does the same thing as Lillian Glass.. agree with everything NG thinks and corroborates NG's " hunches"... It is too funny when they refer to innacurate accounts and convict the person ... lol

I laughed my head off how she explained on NG what Misty was all about when she was refewrring to Misty with incorrect info..

It was where Misty was pointing into the water at the launch.. and the divers tools were being pulled up.. Pat said it was the remains and also said that she was pointing to where she saw Jo do the toss..

Of course we found out thru proper media the next day that box was tolls and it seems reasonable to think Misty may have been pointing to where she knew Jo thru the dead deer in the river.. this is my point that Pat is only in it for the money.. She was all wrong and just goes along with NG and Mike Brooks.. IMO very unprofessional and irresponsible..