Richard Walter

Richard Walter was an American forensic psychologist for the Michigan prison system until his retirement in 2000, and a self-styled "crime scene analyst" who has been characterized as one of the creators of modern criminal profiling. 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. Career 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. As a psychologist for Michigan's prison system, he reportedly had interviewed more than 22,000 convicted felons. 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. Keppel created the Homicide Information Tracking Unit (HITS) database, to which Walter was a prolific contributor. Walter was reportedly the first to develop a matrix as a tool of investigation using pre-crime, crime and post-crime behaviors to help develop suspects.