COLUMN ONE : Mapping the Minds Behind Evil : Southland’s only ‘profiler’ used training and insight to catch an elusive child molester. But solving gruesome crimes comes at a high emotional price.

After sifting through 1,100 leads and conducting countless interviews, the detectives on the South Bay molester task force still could not identify the man who had assaulted about a dozen elementary school girls in a southern swath of Los Angeles County.

Finally, in desperation, they turned to Sheriff’s Sgt. John Yarbrough, Southern California’s only “profiler,” who specializes in providing psychological portraits of killers or sexual predators.

Yarbrough scrutinized witness reports. He recorded the sequence of events. He studied victims’ statements. He talked extensively with investigating detectives. He then briefed the task force and provided it with his profile of the molester.

A profile consists of the probable personality traits, characteristics, motivations and compulsions of an offender. The data--a kind of psychological fingerprint--help detectives focus on the most likely suspects. A profile might indicate, for example, that a killer probably knew the victim, had a limited criminal history and was unlikely to kill again.

In the South Bay molester case, unfortunately, Yarbrough’s profile did not yield any immediate results. The task force was eventually disbanded, and the detectives despaired of ever catching the attacker.

Two years later, however, Yarbrough recalled a critical detail from his profile while working on another case, a detail that led him to the South Bay molester and enabled him to solve the biggest case of his career.

Time for Only the Toughest Cases

Although Yarbrough is a sheriff’s homicide detective and has an office in the squad room, he does not visit crime scenes, interview witnesses or head homicide investigations. Instead, he serves as a consultant, advising sheriff’s detectives and police investigators throughout Southern California.

Because only 24 FBI agents and about 15 law enforcement officers across the nation are currently working as profilers, Yarbrough’s time is extremely limited. As a result, he works only on the toughest cases: serial murders, rapes and molestations; kidnappings; random homicides with no suspects and no leads.

There are so few profilers at local law enforcement agencies because most departments do not have the resources to free up detectives for the extensive training required and then allow them to consult on cases full time. And since profiling is still a relatively new investigative tool, some law enforcement officials are dubious about the approach.

Profilers have had numerous successes, but the process is not infallible, and there have been a few high-profile failures, including the error in Atlanta’s Olympic Park bombing case. Richard Jewell, whom police targeted after they were assisted by the FBI, was ultimately cleared.

Last month in Atlanta, when disgruntled investor Mark Orrin Barton killed nine people after bludgeoning his wife and two children to death, an FBI profile proved to have been particularly prescient, although it did not prevent the tragedy. After Barton was listed as a suspect in the 1994 killing of his first wife, the FBI informed local law enforcement authorities that he “fit the profile of a mass murderer.”

Profiling--officially known as criminal investigative analysis--is portrayed by Hollywood as a mysterious, mystical process. Yarbrough, however, has a systematic approach, drawing on wound analysis, personality disorder studies, statistical probability, blood splatter interpretation and computer tracking.

When Yarbrough, who consults on about 500 cases a year, first meets with detectives, he advises them not to identify their leading suspect. He wants to approach the case with a completely open mind. He requests a complete set of autopsy reports and crime scene photographs, which sometimes provide him with the best leads.

Yarbrough knows that each case and offender is different, but he often relies on guidelines that profilers have developed over the years. He can then compile a profile that will give detectives insight into the offender and his behavior during the crime.

Among the guidelines:

* Victims who have been brutally beaten on the face or neck usually knew the killer. This kind of attack is often a crime of passion, and the face of the victim becomes the focus of the murder.

* Sex killings are often beatings, strangulations or stabbings rather than shootings. Because murder is not always the motive, a killer might not have had the foresight to bring a gun, so then--to control the victim--he uses other means.

* A methodical, sadistic murder was probably not committed by a young person. Profilers will tell detectives to search for a more sophisticated, experienced offender with a criminal history.

* A “blitz” attack, in which the victim was quickly and brutally assaulted, usually indicates a killer with few social skills and possibly low intelligence. The killer immediately resorted to violence because he probably did not have the confidence to manipulate the victim and control the situation.

* If the victim is a woman, and a killer removes personal items from the scene such as lipstick or an inexpensive pendant, a homicide detective might be mystified. Profilers, however, will explain that the killer’s motivation might have been to re-create the experience later by himself.

Supervisors in homicide units often suggest that their investigators consult with Yarbrough on onerous cases. Sometimes the detectives seek him out. Occasionally, FBI profilers refer cases to him.

Sheriff’s Det. Steve Davis has been frustrated by the 1989 murder of a 25-year-old woman named Christie Fleming, who was smothered in her Whittier apartment. After investigating the case on and off over the years, Davis recently decided to try a new approach and contacted Yarbrough.

“Before we talked to John, we were looking at four or five people as possible suspects,” Davis said. “But then he gave me a very detailed profile that listed a number of personality traits of the offender. Because of that profile, I was able to eliminate the other suspects we’d been looking at and narrow the suspect list down to one.”

Davis is confident that because of Yarbrough’s help, he will soon be able to compile enough evidence to make an arrest in the case.

Looking for the Criminal’s ‘Signature’

Detectives focus on an attacker’s modus operandi: “what he does in order to accomplish the crime,” Yarbrough said.

Profilers focus on the attacker’s “signature:” “what he does because he wants to.”

After profilers identify an offender’s signature, they can sometimes connect a series of seemingly random crimes to a single suspect. The modus operandi often changes, Yarbrough said, but the signature stays the same.

“A serial rapist might wear gloves . . . that’s his M.O.,” Yarbrough said. “But he might be using gloves only because he’d left fingerprints before and was caught.”

The South Bay molester was a classic example of Yarbrough’s dictum: His modus operandi changed during his criminal history, but several distinct elements of his signature remained constant.

After abducting young girls near their elementary schools and molesting them, for example, he always drove them back to school. And he always used his own vehicle: a gray van with burgundy stripes and a ladder in back.

“Logic would tell you that he would dump the girls off after the act and drive off,” Yarbrough said. “Instead, he did the most risky thing--he drove them back to the school. Logic would also tell you that he wouldn’t use his own vehicle, because it was too risky. He could have stolen a car, or borrowed one or chosen one less distinctive.

“Grabbing the girls at school and driving off with them was his M.O. Using his own vehicle and dropping the girls back at school was his signature. He did this risky stuff, I believe, because he wanted to, because it was part of his fantasy. Why this was part of his fantasy doesn’t matter to me. What does matter to me is that he chose to do this repeatedly.”

To understand killers, Yarbrough says, he must study their victims. What he calls “victimology” is important because the common characteristics of victims can help a profiler identify salient traits of a serial killer. Yarbrough meticulously compiles a victim’s biography, paying special attention to the last 24 hours in that person’s life.

A few years ago, the crime scene photos of a murder showed that the victim had been tied up. The homicide detectives figured this was merely a logistical tactic that enabled the offender to rape the victim.

But the way the victim was bound indicated to Yarbrough that the purpose was fantasy, not restraint. This helped Yarbrough connect the case to five other rape-murders in Southern California during the past decade. The homicides, however, are still unsolved.

Yarbrough also aids prosecutors and helps them devise interviewing and cross-examination strategies. While prosecutors prepared to cross-examine Charles Rathbun, who was on trial in 1996 for murdering model Linda Sobek, they contacted Yarbrough.

Rathbun, a freelance photographer, had testified that he accidentally asphyxiated the model during an argument that escalated into a fight in the back seat of a vehicle. Before Sobek’s death, he testified, they engaged in consensual sex. In his defense, he offered double-exposed photographs of a nude woman’s torso inside a sport utility vehicle. He claimed the woman was Sobek and the vehicle was a Lexus.

Prosecutor Stephen Kay, however, had prepared a trap. He knew that it was another woman, not Sobek, in the photographs. And he had proof that the vehicle in the photographs was an Oldsmobile, not a Lexus. He knew that when Rathbun’s lies were exposed, he would lose credibility in front of the jury.

After studying the case and Rathbun’s background, Yarbrough suggested that a female prosecutor, Mary-Jean Bowman, question Rathbun, instead of the more experienced Kay. Bowman, Yarbrough determined, could best trap Rathbun by exploiting his feelings of superiority and lack of respect toward women.

“I ordinarily would have done the cross-examination, but from the start John was adamant that Mary-Jean do it,” Kay recalled. “And that proved to be very insightful. If I’d been questioning him, I think he would have been suspicious of where I was going, and he might have hedged his testimony.

“But Rathbun had no idea Mary-Jean was leading him over a cliff, and he stuck stubbornly to his original story. By the time he figured out what was going on, it was too late for him to recover. Mary-Jean showed him in front of the jury to be a liar. We can thank John for that.”

Process Pioneered by FBI in 1960s

The FBI pioneered profiling during the 1960s and refined the process over the next three decades. Profilers gained rare insight into the minds of serial killers as a result of a groundbreaking FBI research project initiated during the late 1970s. Agents interviewed dozens of the country’s most notorious murderers, including Richard Speck, “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz, Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. The killers answered an extensive questionnaire, which enabled profilers to study how they committed their crimes, why, and numerous other details that were then recorded in a database.

During the 1980s, FBI profilers were so overwhelmed by requests from local police departments that the agency decided to help train a select group of law enforcement officers so they could do the profiling themselves.

In 1991, the captain of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide unit asked Yarbrough if he was interested in becoming a profiler. One of the reasons Yarbrough agreed was what he learned during the mid-1980s when he investigated the Night Stalker killings. Yarbrough, who had been a homicide detective for only a year at that time, was mystified by numerous aspects of the case and learned how wrong his hunches had been only when Richard Ramirez was arrested in the crimes.

During Yarbrough’s training, which included about three months at the FBI in Quantico, Va., he learned new ways of approaching complex cases. In the next few years he took numerous courses in which he learned the nuances of pathology, abnormal psychology, criminal interrogation, rape investigation and arson. He also met a forensic psychiatrist who has an interest in criminal behavior, and Yarbrough has consulted with him on numerous cases, including that of the South Bay molester.

Yarbrough, 55, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the son of two physicians. He attended the University of Arizona, but by his senior year was bored, so he quit school and joined the Marine Corps. Five years later, he became a sheriff’s deputy.

He has been a full-time profiler for four years, although he has consulted on cases since 1992. He is married to a sheriff’s sergeant and has two grown children.

Having a wife in law enforcement, whom he can talk to about even the most brutal cases, helps him endure a stressful, draining job. Still, the psychic demands are so great that he has “hit the wall,” he says. He has decided to retire next year, and another sheriff’s detective is training to replace him.

“Just a few weeks ago I was working on a case, and I thought: ‘How many more pictures of naked females who have been raped and murdered do I have to look at?’ I was just tired of seeing the dark side of people’s behavior. I realized then that I’d had it.”

One Detail in Suspect’s History Proves Crucial

Two years after Yarbrough compiled the South Bay molester profile, Deputy Dist. Atty. Rene Korn asked for his help on another molestation case. A 53-year-old South Los Angeles man named Billy Lee Mayshack was suspected of molesting two boys, ages 5 and 8, and Korn was preparing the case against him. She consulted with Yarbrough.

She sent him Mayshack’s entire criminal history, which included a number of prior arrests on suspicion of rape and child molestation. One previous conviction immediately intrigued Yarbrough.

Mayshack met a 20-year-old woman near the downtown bus station and offered her a ride home. He then raped her. Afterward, he did something that gave Yarbrough a jolt.

Mayshack drove the woman home.

Just like the South Bay molester drove the young girls back to their schools.

And in both cases, he used his own vehicle. These anomalies and a few other details from Mayshack’s criminal history matched Yarbrough’s South Bay molester profile exactly. He called Korn the same day and said: ‘Sit down. . . . I’ve got some news for you.”

Six weeks later, DNA results proved that Mayshack was the South Bay molester. In January, he pleaded guilty to sexually molesting six girls and was sentenced to 98 years in state prison.

“John’s profile hit the mark exactly,” Korn said. “I gave him a big packet on Mayshack to read, and a few hours later he’d put it all together. At the time, we had nothing. John made the initial link. That’s what solved the case.”