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Minds and Methods   Geographic Profiling 101: Approaching a Case
A persistent problem in many criminal investigations is "linkage
blindness." That is, investigators fail to recognize when
certain crimes have important links to other crimes because
they're focusing too much on dissimilarities. For example, in
the Zodiac crimes, the cab driver was not immediately linked in
the series because previous attacks had been aimed at couples.
In other words, investigators had developed a tentative
psychological map that did not account for the Zodiac's apparent
reasoning. The need to determine links is one of the motivations
for developing the FBI's VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension
Program), but programs are only as good as the data entered into
them.  Geographic profiling (sometimes known as geoforensics,
but to be distinguished from geoforensics that involves
geological profiling) helps to organize an abundance of
information via geographical links i