In New Hampshire on Wednesday there was an attempted abduction of a 16 year old girl at a retail outlet. The attack happened at 4:15 pm, in broad daylight, and was thwarted because an employee at the mall overheard the victim’s screams, and investigated their source – something most bystanders and observers fail to do – which in turn ended up scaring the assailant away. The assault was immediately categorized as being “completely random”, which may have been the case, but at the same time might not have been. It is always worth taking a look at real-life incidents, so that we can better understand how predatory individuals operate. 

The first thing any predator will do is choose a location. This predator choose an outlet village, and he will have done so for a number of reasons. Most criminals will choose a location that they are familiar with, or if not a location they are exactly familiar with, one that is similar (he may have planned a similar abduction from a mall/shopping center, somewhere near to where he lived, worked or spent leisure time, and then decided to carry out his plan farther away, possibly because he wasn’t confident he could go undetected). What we don’t know is if he had visited this location previously. The fact that he choose an outlet village/mall, and made his assault in broad daylight is not so surprising when you consider the profile of his victim; a teenage girl. The predator would have correctly surmised that a mall is somewhere where teenage girls would go after school, to hang out and shop, before going home. That meant he would have had a window of between 3:00 pm and 6:00 pm, to observe and select from the greatest number of potential victims. A shopping mall between these hours, would have been an attractive location, for someone preying on teenage girls.

The assault itself happened outside the bathrooms of a food court. The food court would have been an ideal location for a predatory individual to hang around unnoticed and look for potential victims (criminals have to demonstrate “legitimacy” if they are to go undetected). Nobody is going to question why somebody is sitting at a table eating or drinking, or even simply mingling with the crowds and queues, waiting to buy food. A food court is a highly trafficked area, meaning that there is a constant flow of potential victims, and also few people who would stay in that location long enough, to notice somebody else who was spending an extraordinary length of time in that place. If this predator did order food and sit down at a table, he would have probably shown more interest in the people in the food court than he did in his food e.g. his head would have been up, looking around, rather than down, focusing on eating.

His victim selection would not have been random. For one, he would be looking for girls who fell within a certain age range. He may also have been looking for someone who was on their own. He would certainly be looking for someone who he believed would comply and not resist. Something he got partly wrong in this case, as although his victim didn’t fight back, she did scream. It may be that he erred in his selection because he felt rushed (he was nervous and emotional), and pressured to carry out the assault, only having a small window of time to commit the abduction (he claimed in court that he had to get back to his dying mother – which could be true, or simply a lie to get leniency from the judge, either of which is possible), or because he was inexperienced in this type of crime.

His victim may have given off signals of being overly polite and non-confrontational, maybe moving out of everyone else’s way as she went to the bathroom, rather than having them move out of her way, etc. She may have been looking at the ground as she walked, shuffling or striding rather than walking with a normal stride length, and her overall body motion may not have appeared “fluid” - all things that in a study done in 1984 by Grayson and Stein, were shown to put potential victims on a predator’s radar.

One of the things that every assailant needs to do before they make an attack, is to synchronize their movement with their intended victim. This predator would have had a good idea of how long it would take his victim to go to the bathroom; so after waiting a few moments, he would be able to go and position himself outside, close to the time when she would exit. He wouldn’t necessarily have to draw attention to himself by hanging around outside the bathrooms, if he timed his arrival (synchronizing his movement with that of his victim), so that he got there as his victim came out.

He may have chosen the bathrooms as the place to commit the assault, because they lacked “natural surveillance” i.e. the people in the food court would be unable to see the attack happening, and possibly because there were several routes he could escape down if discovered, or routes through which he would be easily able to exit with his victim. The location was also more than likely to have left him with only a short distance to travel to get to his car. It may be that he got to the mall early enough to park his car in a convenient spot, so that he would be able to get his victim to the car, without being seen or drawing attention to himself. He had obviously decided at some point it would be unnecessary to use a weapon in this stage of the assault, as he left his guns and knife in the car.

It is certain that his victim had a lucky escape. What is not known is the level of “conscious” and “subconscious” planning that went in to the assault. It is obvious that it was something that the predator had fantasized about, and will continue to fantasize about (something that incarceration is only going to allow him to continue doing). It may be that this was his first abduction, it may be that he has committed others that are unknown. What is likely, is that given the chance, he will attempt to do the same or similar again, having learnt from his mistakes in this attempt, and potentially improving his chances of successfully executing his assault.