Repeat a lie until it becomes true. This is one of the maxims on which Joseph Goebbels based his Nazi propaganda machine during Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany. The idea is simple, the constant repetition of false facts makes them credible to the listener, a strategy with which the protagonist of this story literally built his life.
Paul Harrison, known as Britain's “mind hunter”, became famous for his books, lectures and interviews in which he bombastically detailed his interactions with some of the world's most fearsome and famous criminals, such as Ted Bundy or the Yorkshire Ripper, who regarded him as a teller capable of hiding any kind of emotion and of going deep into his brain.
These incursions into the criminal mind earned Harrison becoming a renowned profiler of serial killers, publishing 33 books, and serving in notorious jobs as an FBI agent, undercover football hooligan or security adviser to the English Ministry of Defence and the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
In the long list of scrolls that was his resume, they appeared as a protégé of another famous criminal profiler, Robert Ressler, and even got Martina Cole, a renowned British author of criminal literature, to write him the endorsement of his latest book, “Mind Games”, published in 2018, a brief review that read: “Profiles at their finest. Paul Harrison is the master of the real crime genre.”
But there was only one problem with Harrison, nothing in him was real, and the house of cards on which he had based his success would prove to be so fragile that his collapse directly ostracized him.
Interviews with murderers.
One of the most famous interviews of the self-proclaimed best criminal profiler in the United Kingdom, he had with Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the “Yorkshire Ripper”.
Sutcliffe was the author of a series of horrific murders and violent attacks on women between the late 1960s and early 1980s. In total, he killed thirteen women and severely assaulted seven others.
His modus operandi consisted of an arsenal of very different improvised instruments. He attacked with hammers, knives or metal saws. The screwdrivers, his favorite lethal weapon, used them as daggers, in such a frantic way that in one of the autopsies investigators found up to 52 stab wounds in the victim.
His nickname “Ripper” was earned by fixing it with cutting off the bellies of his victims, outside with a knife or a sharp screwdriver, and leaving their organs scattered on the corpses.
Sutcliffe died in prison on November 13, 2020, but a year earlier he took with him his latest victim: the Paul Harrison charade.
During his career as a lecturer and author of true crime books, Harrison had used the name Sutcliffe almost as a business card.
“Why are you so cold and ruthless?” , said Harrison that the Ripper had asked him during his interview. “You seem completely indifferent to me. You scare me,” he said.
A rather reckless statement coming from someone known for attacking dozens of people in violent frenzy, so reckless that it caught the attention of journalist Robin Perrie who in early 2019 attended a talk by Harrison at Tyne Theatre in Newcastle (England) where he repeated his story: Sutcliffe had been afraid of know him.
Incredulous, with that and with other equally surprising statements: such as the conviction of Ted Bundy, perhaps the most infamous serial killer in the United States, that Harrison was capable of “getting into his mind”; or his alleged talk with Reggie Kray, the slightly older and more stable member of the Kray Twins, leaders of the London mafia between 1950 and 1967, where he told him he was “his favorite crime writer and someone unique: a policeman he really respected”; Perrie began to investigate.
The journalist contacted Sutcliffe, held in the HMP Frankland High Security Prison, and discovered with surprise that the “Yorkshire Ripper” knew Harrison, but because the lie about their interview together even reached confinement.
“Paul Harrison is an absolute charlatan. A swindler. He never corresponded with me, nor did he ever visit me. He needs to be exposed for the liar he is,” Sutchluffe wrote in a handwritten note to journalist Robin Perrie who in July 2019 published an article in The Sun exposing Harrison's charade.
After these first statements, other people close to the murderers at the expense of whom Harrison had forged his fame came out to deny the alleged “mind hunter”.
One of them was Freddie Foreman, former henchman of Reggie Kray, who by 2019 was 87 years old. He told the Sun journalist that Harrison had never interviewed his former boss in the mafia, who died in October 2000 at the age of 66.
“Paul Harrison was definitely not there in his last days, as he says. Reggie would never have entertained the police,” Foreman stated sharply.
The consequences of this exhibition were not long in coming, and the house of cards of the famous profiler collapsed with astonishing speed.
His latest book, “Mind Hunter”, published in 2018, which includes parts of his alleged interview with Ted Bundy, and describes how he met Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal” by being responsible for 17 deaths; it was withdrawn from sale by Urbane Publications, which issued a statement apologizing for amplifying the work of a liar.
“Like everyone who worked with Paul Harrison, the attendees of his talks and the readers of his books, we are very concerned about these revelations and are currently seeking clarification before deciding what action to take. However, we will withdraw from sale Mind Games with immediate effect and endeavour to remove all stocks and details of all relevant retail channels,” the publisher said at the time.
And it was no wonder, the book told biographical details of the author that also turned out to be false, such as his alleged 20 years of experience serving as an FBI profiler.
According to Harrison, the US Feds invited him at the age of 23 to join the Behavioral Sciences Unit, an elite FBI body in Quantico, Virginia, from where he had access during the 80s and 90s to Bundy, Dahmer, Manson, and a number of other dangerous criminals.
According to the author's own accounts, in his professional life he interviewed and profiled more than 70 serial killers.
However, Perrie revealed the testimony of one of his wives who claimed that Harrison had first traveled to the United States in 1999, for an exhibition of the Loch Ness Monster, following his fondness for conspiracies and the paranormal.
Vice reporter Francisco Garcia confirmed this lie in a recent article published about the phony profiler.
Garcia claims to have exchanged emails with retired FBI agent Mark Safarik in December 2021 asking him about Harrison's alleged years in the Behavioral Science Unit. Safarik spent his last 12 years of career in that unit and said he had never heard of Harrison, until in 2019 journalists started asking questions about him.
Neither Safarik nor anyone in the FBI knew of a Paul Harrison, let alone as a member of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, which was formed in 1974 with the aim of investigating cases of rape and serial homicide. From there came famous agents such as John Douglas and Robert Ressler (the latter, Harrison's supposed mentor), who were among the first references in criminal psychology and criminal profiling.
They interviewed dozens of serial killers to try to better understand the violent minds of the perpetrators and to draw a psychological profile of the killers, something that by then was a novel approach.
The idea behind profiling is that by analyzing the details of a murder it is possible to infer key facts about its perpetrator, such as age, social class, employment history, or race.
Although the premise has its appeal, especially to motivate all kinds of series and films inspired by this profession (such as Zodiac, The Silence of the Innocents, or Little Secrets) in reality although it is frequently used, its true impact on the resolution of a crime is not clear.
“In the mid-1990s, the British Interior Ministry analyzed one hundred eighty-four crimes, to see how many times the profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That's only 2.7 percent,” writes Canadian journalist and sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, for example, in a 2007 article.
In any case, Harrison was not only a profiler, he was a 'He' profiler and his supposed vast experience made him a frequent guest at conferences on criminology, where he charged up to $19,000 a night.
Why he lied the way he did and how he managed to go so long without being discovered, even though his lies were easily verifiable, as demonstrated in the 2019 exhibition, are questions that could only be answered by Harrison himself, who has disappeared from the map since the reflectors evidenced his deception.
The last thing known about him was a message, since then deleted, on his Facebook profile, in which he apologizes for a farce that got out of his hands.
“This monster is no longer mine, nor is it what I wanted it to be. I saw it as a tool to give voice to victims, everywhere, but because I am weak and vulnerable and completely useless in decision-making, promoters introduced me to sensationalist events that often sent misleading propaganda. Something I had to fulfill. I've decided to end it for now. No more shows or interaction on social media... It seems that I let everyone down, I'm sorry about that,” he wrote.
Soon he deleted all his public profiles and no one knows anything certain about his whereabouts.
Posterity left some of his books, which were not removed from sale, such as “Dancing with the Devil: The Bible John Murders”, from 2013, where he raises the idea that a police officer could have been the real killer of the Zodiac: or “Hunting Evil” of 2008, written together with the famous criminologist David Wilson, who has date has sold 19,000 copies, being its most successful publication.
Ironically, these books, considered for many years as references in the genre “True Crime”, should today be taken as fiction stories.
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