The exercise I am ( not very successfully ) referring to here is an actual thing, it was developed in the 1980's by a man called Stuart Kind, in the matter of the Yorkshire serial killer, .. ( this was before GPS and all that, but the maths and theory relate) ... called GeoProfiling.... it was originally used to pinpoint the location of the murderer, his starting point, so to speak. Where he left home from to go out and murder..
But it is also used to reckon up where crimes are perpetrated, where bodies are likely to be left, etc... .. this below is a small outline of the process...
As summarized in Rossmo (1999), key results of these studies include: Most crimes occur in relatively close proximity to the offender’s home, crime trips follow a distance-decay function, with the number of crime occurrences decreasing with distance from the offender’s home, juvenile offenders exhibit less mobility than adult offenders and patterns in crime trip distances vary by crime type.”
'At a theoretical level, these studies are based on a growing body of research that illustrates that people use simple cognitive judgements and experience to make precise conclusions (Gigerenzer & Selton (2001)). In a nutshell geographical profiling allows investigators to identify suspects by drawing a comparison between where they actually live and the forecasted location of the offenders abode. Limited research into the potential fallibility of such systems has nonetheless produced encouraging evidence, suggesting that the police search parameters can be reduced by a staggering ninety percent (Canter et al. 2000)."
( what this means, roughly, is, .. the killer followed a subconcious path to where he disposed of the body. In a state of elevated, probably not over high, but elevated stress, the subconscious makes the decisions, and the fall back is to go where he has been before. In other words, not forging a new path on this occasion. )
