Abstract
Homicides are complex, dynamic crimes spanning periods of time. To fully understand homicides, investigators must understand not only what occurred but also when behaviours and events occurred. Understanding the sequence of homicides offers new insights into profiling and victimology. The current chapter outlines a new method for temporal analyses, Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA), which has already been applied to several homicide types (including murder, serial homicide, and terrorism). Drawing from the author's extensive work with police departments around the world as well as several recent publications from authors in the field, readers will gain an understanding of how to run their own BSA for research and investigative purposes. This is an exciting new area of research, and readers are encouraged to take the methods outlined in this chapter and begin applying them to their own case files and research projects. Additional methods based on the BSA approach are also outlined. Waypoint sequencing (Keatley and Clarke, 2021) provides a streamlined approach to sequence analysis, which was designed for live, real-time cases in which faster results are preferable. Behavioural fingerprinting is a new method for crime linkage, an important area of investigations and criminology, offering a new approach to linking crimes based on their sequential fingerprint.