David Keatley

• PhD
• Professor at Murdoch University

This book will be available in 2018, and will cover a comprehensive guide to conducting Behaviour Sequence Analysis in applied fields. The book is being made accessible and understandable to a range of readers, including academics and applied forensic/crime agencies. More information and updates will be posted in the coming months.

The aim of the current research was to provide a novel method for mapping the developmental sequences of serial killers’ life histories. An in-depth biographical account of serial killers’ lives, from birth through to conviction, was gained and analyzed using Behavior Sequence Analysis. The analyses highlight similarities in behavioral events acros...

When a Detective arrives at a crime scene, or investigates multiple cases, they are often tasked with understanding whether the crimes are linked. Knowing whether the same suspect(s) was involved across multiple crimes is a key part of the investigation. To date, there are numerous methods for crime linkage; however, very few take temporal sequence...

Solving serious crimes such as sexual assault, rape, and murder takes a considerable amount of investigation time. Despite efforts, many crimes may be unsolved, and go ‘cold’. These cases are typically extensive and reviewing the material can be prohibitively time-consuming. The current manuscript proposes the combination of two methods, or ‘tools’...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline a variety of related methods for helping with criminal (cold) case investigations. Despite the best efforts of police investigations, many cases around the world run out of leads and go cold. While many police departments around the world have developed specialist groups and task forces, academics hav...

The utilisation of emergency calls to stage false and misleading narratives can assist offenders in concealing their criminal activity. The majority of emergency call analyses focus on detecting deception; however, investigating the complex temporal ordering of verbal indicators with a measure of proximity may offer new inductive investigative insi...

Drink spiking in social settings is one of the most pervasive forms of drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA). There are no current data in Australia on the rates of drink spiking or their associated assaults. There is also little known about the prevalence of different substances involved and how the current substance use trends compare to sexual...

Purpose Intellectual property (IP) theft is an increasing threat that can lead to large financial losses and reputational harm. These attacks are typically noticed only after the IP is stolen, which is usually too late. This paper aims to investigate the psychological profile and the socio-technical events that statistically predict the likelihood...

Little is known about the prevalence of incapacitating substances present in drug facilitated sexual assaults (DFSA). Presented here is a literature review conducted to provide background information, such as symptoms, exacerbations, and drug interactions, on drugs typically implicated in DFSA, namely gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), gamma-butyrolacton...

Purpose Emergency service dispatchers perform a vital role in assisting callers by helping them through the emergency they are in and ensuring the delivery of first responders. If an emergency caller prematurely hangs up a call, before the arrival of first responders, it can impact a dispatcher’s ability to provide them with assistance. This paper...

Police investigations are complex processes, often accumulating large amounts of interviews. Mapping temporal pathways within and across individuals’ statements is time-consuming and often difficult to interpret after multiple interviews. The current paper provides a novel use of a well-supported timeline method: aoristic analysis. By applying aori...

No-body homicide cases are typically difficult to investigate, owing to the lack of forensics and leads. Researchers in the fields of forensics, criminology, and psychology have attempted to provide assistance to these investigations through their respective disciplines. The focus of the current case study review is on a combined approach to assist...

Correctly identifying when an individual is lying based on their nonverbal communication has been a central aim of researchers and practitioners. Traditionally, research has focused on individual ‘tells’ or indicators of deception. More recently, researchers have focused on clusters and sequences of nonverbal gestures; however, these methods can le...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to compare violent and non-violent extremists in terms of their age when they first perpetrate an extremist act, and to understand how this relates to other factors underlying extremist behaviours. While the end goal of many extremists may be functionally similar, the pathways into extremism vary, and the litera...

Missing persons cases are complex investigations that lack physical evidence. Without a body, crime scene forensics is not possible, and verbal statements are often the only available evidence. Forensic linguistics can be useful to police when seeking information from individuals during investigative interviewing – aiding police to prioritise or re...

Cold case review of large-scale homicide and sexual assault cases requires extensive human resources to pore over often thousands of pages of documentation to find an unexploited opportunity. Many law enforcement agencies have dedicated cold case units, housing investigators and sometimes forensic or criminology expertise, however they are rarely e...

Purpose Understanding when an individual is being deceptive is an important part of police and criminal investigations. While investigators have developed multiple methods, the research literature has yet to fully explore some of the newer applied techniques. This study aims to investigate statement analysis, a recent approach in forensic linguisti...

Purpose Behaviours occur across complex, dynamic timelines. Research methods to analyse these complex timelines have repeatedly used behaviour sequence analysis (BSA) as a primary method. Traditional BSA outputs, however, are limited in that they do not show how prevalent a behaviour sequence is throughout a sample or group. Until now, how many peo...

IP theft insiders continue to pose threats to organizations, which can lead to large financial losses and reputational harm. This paper examines IP insider threat in a novel way by combining the methods of Grounded Theory and Behavior Sequence Analysis. Novel socio-technical variables identified in our study included IP theft via photographs rather...

Staging an emergency call is a form of detection avoidance that can obscure evidence and mislead police investigations. For example, having killed a person, a caller may stage an emergency call to cover it up as an accident, or a person having killed a victim may dispose of the body and call emergency services to claim they are missing. Similarly,...

Missing persons cases are some of the hardest investigations to solve. The lack of forensic evidence impedes an investigation and critical time can be lost attempting to find the person or body. Recently, researchers have attempted to develop new approaches to help police in these types of investigations. The current paper continues research into W...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the complexity of missing persons cases and highlight the linguistic differences that arise in this type of crime. Missing persons cases are typically very complex investigations. Without a body, crime scene forensics is not possible, and police are often left only with witness and suspect statements....

Violence in serial homicide is a complex and dynamic part of an offender’s behavior. This chapter explores how aggressive and violent behavior is a part of serial homicide and the escalation of aggression to violence. The organized/disorganized dichotomy of serial killers and reactive and proactive aggression is used to help explain different types...

Purpose When investigating missing persons cases, witness and suspect statements are often the only available evidence to investigators. As such, forensic linguistics can be useful to police when seeking information from individuals during investigative interviews. The presumption of innocence must be maintained in an investigation, and therefore t...

Criminal cases go cold when investigative leads or forensic testing does not lead to a successful arrest. In these cases, investigators are often keen to use novel methods to derive fresh ideas or insights. Recently, academics from a range of fields, including Psychology, Criminology, and Forensic Sciences have developed a range of new methods and...

Objective: The current study aims to improve understanding of events leading to lapses of dietary restraint, and to identify pathways to perseverance or abandonment of weight loss efforts in response to lapses. In addition, Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA) was also evaluated as an analytical tool in dietary behaviour. Design: A sample of 176 ad...

The aim of the current study was to compare and contrast non-cannibalistic and cannibalistic serial killers. Using case study data, the present study assessed common patterns among the life histories of cannibalistic serial killers compared to those of a control sample of serial killers that did not commit cannibalism. These include but are not lim...

In recent years, students in police academies and higher education institutions around the world have worked together to analyse cold cases including long-term missing persons cases in collaboration with investigators and prosecutors. In 2020, three European organisations, the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP), AMBER Alert Europe an...

Involuntary Celibates (INCELs) are an increasing concern in academia and policing. Owing to the rise of internet sub-groups, understanding the developmental processes of INCELs is necessary to assist with investigations. The current research used a temporal method, Crime Script Analysis, to map the life histories of INCELs. Results indicated overla...

Background It is suggested that goals are hierarchically organised, with goals at the highest level representing fundamental values and motivations. These abstract goals are said to have a series of sub-goals which represent a means of reaching higher-level goals. While a number of studies have explored goals in the context of psychosis, little is...

The Forensic Institute of the Republic of North Macedonia data set of 1,982 offender fingerprint identifications contributing to a conviction for crimes against property, was evaluated and analysed using contingency table statistical analysis techniques, chi-square test, fisher’s exact test and post hoc analysis. The data set was based on the foren...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) relates not only to physical forms of abuse, but also psychological, emotional, economic, and financial controlling behaviors. IPV is a dynamic, complex phenomenon that occurs over a relatively long period of time. While several measures of IPV exist, a method that can track the progression and escalation of such beh...

Research into homicides typically focuses on adults offenders, as they represent the majority of cases. There are, however, a number of cases involving individuals under the age of 18 committing murder. To understand homicides, researchers have been increasingly using temporal methods. The current research investigates the life histories of adolesc...

Understanding cooling-off periods is an important step towards conceptualising life course events of serial killers, between their murders. Analysing the behaviours of serial killers between each homicide may give insight into when or if they will kill again, as well as informing definition criteria of what constitutes a serial killer as opposed to...

Extremists and the behaviors performed by extremists are a growing concern. There is a growing body of research showing the differences between violent and nonviolent extremists in terms of developmental pathways and actions. The current research used a temporal approach, crime script analysis, to map the pathways of violent and nonviolent extremis...

The majority of geographical profiling research focuses on the relationship between offender and location, which works particularly well when a burial site is known. In real-world investigations, however, burial or dump sites are often not known. The aim of the current paper is to outline a relatively under-used method of geographic profiling: Wint...

Many factors affect the solvability of homicides, including body disposal location and time between death and recovery. The aim of this exploratory study was to probe a number of spatiotemporal variables for trends across a subset of solved homicide case data from 54 North American serial killers, active between 1920 and 2016 (125 solved cases) to...

Crime is a complex phenomenon. To understand the commission of crime researchers must map both the temporal and the spatial processes involved. The current research combines a temporal method of analysis, Behaviour Sequence Analysis, with geospatial mapping, to outline a new method of integrating temporal and spatial movements of criminals. To show...

Purpose While behaviour sequence analysis (BSA) is popular, it is not without limitations, namely, the level of detail required and time taken to run analyses; therefore, this paper aims to outline a novel method, using 30 serial homicide cases as a worked example. Design/methodology/approach Temporal analysis methods are becoming increasingly pop...

Every year, more children and youths are sent to Secure Children’s Homes while moving through the criminal justice system. Aggressive and violent incidents in these settings are common, and staff are often required to intervene and restrain violent individuals. The research literature has many examples of aggression and violence questionnaires and...

The IJCV provides a forum for scientific exchange and public dissemination of up-to-date scientific knowledge on conflict and violence. The IJCV is independent, peer reviewed, open access, and included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) as well as other relevant databases (e.g., SCOPUS, EBSCO, ProQuest, DNB). The topics on which we concen...

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, research has enveloped numerous areas within the psychological sciences as a means to increase the ability to spot potential threats. While airports took to heightened security protocols, many academics looked deeper into ways of detecting deception within international airport settings. Various verbal and nonverba...

Some sexually motivated serial killers target victims on the basis of appearance. Therefore, multiple victims of a single serial killer are likely to have some facial features and geometries that are similar. The current research was undertaken to propose a technique, termed face similarity linkage, to evaluate whether victims of a serial killer ha...

Law enforcement officers in the USA have one of the highest lethal force rates in the world. A shortcoming of previous research on the use of force is that officer-subject encounters are observed as static events, and not a complex escalation of behaviours. Behaviour sequence analysis can identify common pathways that show chains of behaviours occu...

There are strict laws relating to alcohol intake and driving; however, while most people are aware of these laws, drink driving still occurs. The current research provides an in-depth account of individuals’ awareness and attitudes towards current drink driving limits and laws in England. Individuals (N = 83) were interviewed, and their responses r...

Denault, V., Plusquellec, P., Jupe, L. M., St-Yves, M., Dunbar, N. E., Hartwig, M., … van Koppen, P. J. (2020). L’analyse de la communication non verbale: Les dangers de la pseudoscience en contextes de sécurité et de justice [The analysis of nonverbal communication: The dangers of pseudoscience in security and justice contexts]. Revue internationa...

The aim of the current research was to provide a new method for mapping the developmental sequences of serial killers’ life histories. The role of early childhood abuse, leading to types of serial murder and behaviours involved in the murders, was analysed using Behaviour Sequence Analysis. A large database (n = 233) of male serial killers with kno...

For security and justice professionals (e.g., police officers, lawyers, judges), the thousands of peer-reviewed articles on nonverbal communication represent important sources of knowledge. However, despite the scope of the scientific work carried out on this subject, professionals can turn to programs, methods, and approaches that fail to reflect...

Para los profesionales de la seguridad y la justicia (policías, abogados, jueces), los miles de artículos revisados por pares sobre comunicación no verbal representan fuentes importantes de conocimiento. Sin embargo, a pesar del alcance del trabajo científico realizado sobre este tema, los profesionales pueden recurrir a programas, métodos y enfoqu...

Purpose Cold case review teams and the processes that they adopt in their endeavour to solve historic crimes are varied and largely underreported. Of the limited literature surrounding the topic of cold case reviews, the focus is on clearance rates and the selection of cases for review. While multiple reports and reviews have been undertaken and re...

Presented here is an exploratory study that compared four kinds of extremists (violent lone, nonviolent lone, violent group member, and nonviolent group member). Thematic analysis of 40 case studies identified five key themes and a number of subthemes that comprised a range of underlying variables. Comparisons of the four groups showed that in many...

Gambling is a worldwide issue that requires continued, extensive investigation. Most people have gambled at some point in their lives, and many do so without incurring problems. However, a number of individuals do experience gambling-related harm, and understanding the pathways or life histories these individuals have experienced may elucidate how...

Expedition teams operating in Polar environments are exposed to a range of environmental, psychological and social challenges. How a person responds to these demands has implications for their physical and psychological health. In the present study, we examined relations between the daily events encountered, coping strategies used and markers of ph...

In 2014 an intense debate over the state of terrorism literature was published. Sageman [2014. The stagnation in terrorism research. Terrorism and Political Violence, 26(4), 565–580. doi:10.1080/09546553.2014.895649] claimed that the field had stagnated, mainly due to lack of data sharing between government departments that have access to valuable...

Opening Quotation: “A sentence without the right sequence is nonsense. In the same way, an episode of behaviour without the right sequence is nonsense.” (Clarke, 2018)

Issues Addressed Although cannabis use is still illegal in most places around the world, it remains a widely used drug. The recreational use of cannabis has been linked to multiple mental wellbeing issues, including psychosis, depression, and anxiety. The objective of this study was to investigate the temporal dynamics of cannabis use in relation t...

Stalking is a complex issue involving multiple behaviors and interactions between the stalker and their target. Research has typically involved grouping risk behaviors related to stalking; however, the research question in the current research was to what extent a temporal method would allow investigators to map the dynamics of stalking. Behavior S...

Objectives: The likelihood that serial murderers are responsible for most unresolved homicides and missing persons was examined by investigating the accounting of the phenomenon in the context of a declining prevalence. Methods: A mixed methods approach was used, consisting of a review of a sample of unresolved homicides, a comparative analysis of...

The current research provides perspective regarding the true prevalence of serial murderers in modern society and addresses the conflict between the evidenced decline in serial homicide and the viewpoint that the phenomenon is increasing. The likelihood that serial murderers are responsible for most unresolved homicides and missing persons is exami...

Mapping the antecedents of school shootings is an important step towards understanding and predicting when the tragedies occur. This study uses Crime Script Analysis (CSA) to map the variety of behaviours and precursors in sequence. An in-depth analysis of 16 school shooters in United States of America was used to build a crime script. The results...

Symposium at the Measuring Behaviour 2018 conference Studying behaviour outside of the laboratory is often difficult as information may be incomplete, idiosyncratic, fragmented, partly qualitative, and rapidly changing. Developing methods to detect and analyse the non-random, syntactic structure of behaviour allows researchers to understand and pre...

Objectives: This preliminary study examined whether implicit doping attitude, explicit doping attitude, or both, predicted athletes’ vigilance towards unintentional doping. Design: A cross-sectional correlational design. Methods: Australian athletes (N = 143; Mage = 18.13, SD = 4.63) completed measures of implicit doping attitude (brief single-cate...

A workshop on how to use BSA in research from crime and forensics to health and social psychology.

The causes of false confessions are an important issue in legal studies and forensics. Recent advances in DNA testing have increased the number of proven false confessions; however, there are likely many cases without scientific evidence to refute the guilty verdict. The current research provides a novel approach to understand the structure and pro...

Background To inform clinical treatment and preventative efforts, there is an important need to understand the pathways to late-life gambling disorder. Aims This study assesses the association between age-related physical health, social networks, and problem gambling in adults aged over 65 years and assesses the mediating role of affective disorde...

A paper has just been published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence - which documents the methods (BSA) in the presentation i gave here.

Psychological research into perceptions of sexual attacks, rape myths and scripts usually involves questionnaires or qualitative reports. A new method for investigating the perceived dynamic sequence of behaviours between victim and attacker could help to outline common perceptions. The current study uses a Behaviour Sequence Analysis approach to i...

The ability to correctly interpret nonverbal communication (NVC) is an important ability in everyday interactions, which may use NVC techniques to identify the concealment of information. In the present study, a novel approach was used to understand NVC. Behaviour sequence analysis identified specific sequences of behaviours that indicate psycholog...

The ability to correctly interpret nonverbal communication (NVC) is an important ability in everyday interactions, which may use NVC techniques to identify the concealment of information. In the present study, a novel approach was used to understand NVC. Behaviour sequence analysis identified specific sequences of behaviours that indicate psycholog...

Using Behaviour Sequence Analysis to understand participants' perceptions of behaviours that occur in female and male rape cases