Richard Walter was an American forensic psychologist for the Michigan prison system until his retirement in 2000,[1] and a self-styled "crime scene analyst" who has been characterized as one of the creators of modern criminal profiling.
[2][3][4] A New York piece in April 2023 argued that Walter had inflated his credentials and work history and has been accused of perjuring himself as an expert witness in a murder trial.
[1] Walter developed a number of psychological classifications for violent crime, and was a co-founder of the Vidocq Society, an organization of forensic professionals dedicated to solving cold cases.
[citation needed] He and Robert D. Keppel, then the chief investigator for the Attorney General's Office in the State of Washington, wrote Profiling Killers: A Revised Classification Model for Understanding Sexual Murder.
[5] The Vidocq Society and its three co-founders, including Walter, were the subject of a 2010 book by Michael Capuzzo[6] entitled The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases.
[citation needed] A rare case where a conviction was garnered in the absence of a body, it is chronicled in the book Trail of Blood by Wanda Evans and in the television series Medical Detectives.
According to New York, Walter testified that "Drake had committed a particular type of 'lust murder' because he was driven by 'piquerism,' an obscure sadistic impulse to derive sexual pleasure from penetrating people with bullets, knives, and teeth.
[citation needed] In the course of writing his book on the Vidocq Society, The Murder Room, author Michael Capuzzo investigated the allegations and claimed they were groundless.