Howard D. Teten

Howard D. Teten was the first FBI profiler.

Career
Howard D. Teten was a veteran police officer from California who joined the FBI in 1962.

He was appointed as an instructor in applied criminology at the old National Police Academy in Washington, D.C. Howard Teten was interested greatly in the application of offender profiling, and had developed the FBI's original approach to profiling as a lecture course in 1970. The title of the course was Applied Criminology, although several instructors later started calling it Psych-crim. The idea was conceived in about 1961-62. However, it was necessary to test the approach using solved cases for about 7 years and to check with several Psychiatrists to ensure he was on firm ground in terms of the characteristics of the different mental problem areas before he felt it was ready for presentation

In 1972 the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico was formed with Teten joining FBI Instructor Patrick J. Mullany's team. Teten and Mullany designed a method for analyzing unknown offenders in unsolved cases. The idea was to look at the behavioral manifestations at a crime scene for evidence of mental disorders and other personality traits, thus aiding the detectives' deductive reasoning.

Soon, their ideas on offender profiling were tested when a seven-year-old girl was abducted from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana in June 1973. Later, the profile led to the arrest of David Meirhofer, a local 23-year-old single man who was also a suspect in another murder case. The search in his house unearthed “souvenirs” (body parts taken from both victims). Meirhofer was the first serial killer to be caught with the aid of the FBI's new investigative technique called offender profiling or criminal investigative analysis. A decade later, and after Teten retirement, the technique became a more sophisticated and systematic profiling tool renowned as Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (CIAP).