David Canter

David Victor Canter is a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, who earned both his degree and doctorate in psychology from that same university and later held senior academic posts at the University of Surrey and the University of Strathclyde. In the early 1990s Canter formally named and developed investigative psychology, an evidence-based, theoretically grounded approach to analyzing criminal behavior distinct from earlier, more intuitive styles of offender profiling. He applied the approach to more than a hundred police investigations, including the mid-1980s Railway Rapist case, in which he produced one of the first systematic psychological offender profiles used in a major British criminal investigation. His book Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer, published in 1994, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award and the Anthony Award for Best True Crime, and his work has gone on to influence academic research, policing practice and architectural design.