A Mind-Mapping Technique to Find the Missing
Expert proposes unique tool for finding missing people and hidden graves.
Posted April 28, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Tom Luther went to prison for a sexual assault . He told another inmate that “the next girl won’t live. They’ll never find her body.” He was released in 1993, and soon crossed paths in Central City, CO, with twenty-year-old Cher Elder. She vanished. Luther was arrested for another attack. He was interrogated about Cher. He wouldn’t talk. A tip gave investigators information about the area where she was buried under some rocks. When they went there, they figured that Luther would most likely have carried a heavy body downhill. But they found nothing. They reconsidered their approach. Luther had said he’d make the location difficult. “They’ll never find her body.” He'd acted not on what was likely but was unlikely . They returned and checked uphill. She was there. Factoring in the killer’s psychology gave investigators the answer.
Dr. David Keatley would say that to find missing people associated with a known offender, you should start with the way the offender thinks. Keatley is the Chair of Crime Science at Murdoch University in Australia. He also directs several consultancy groups and is a full member of the famed Vidocq Society. His book, Keatley’s Winthropping: Finding the ‘Here’ in ‘Where’ adapts a counter-terrorism tool into an approach for locating the missing, whether it’s a person, a cache of trophies, or a body.
Winthropping was developed during the 1970s in Northern Ireland. Winthrop, a Royal Engineer officer, devised it as a way to predict the locations of weapons caches. The idea is to envision the way those who hid the items thought about the location. Thus, you must learn as much as possible about them. Which aspects of the area stood out to them when they sought a hiding place and what meaning did they accord these landmarks? Tom Luther knew that that the rocky terrain where he took Cher Elder’s body would be challenging, and he added an additional hurdle by carrying the body uphill. He marked the grave with a pile of rocks that blended so well with the landscape they could be overlooked. But he’d know. So did his partner.
Winthropping is similar to geographical profiling, which examines how people's movements, decision, and behavior are shaped by their environment. However, Keatley is quick to say that it’s not the same. He’s not a profiler, but he thinks the methods are complementary.
It starts with a mindset that the search is manageable. When someone goes missing, saying they “could be anywhere” makes the task seem daunting. “In many cases, the victim is found somewhere that is both predictable and intuitive,” Keatley states. Certain parameters can focus the search, which he draws from cognitive psychology.
Winthropping incorporates such notions as Rational Choice Theory (how criminals weigh risk and payoff), Routine Activity Theory (helps to identify a suitable location), Salience (items in the identified area that stand out), affordances (meaning afforded to items in the environment ), and “ satisficing ” (decisions that satisfy a need to achieve a goal). We must view the offenders' worlds through their perspective. A killer who dumps a body on the road, for example, may prefer a long, straight road where he can see in either direction if someone is coming. “Keatley’s Winthropping is focused on the mindset, motivations, and machinations of the person you are trying to track,” Keatley writes. Victimology is important, too, but the killer’s perspective is key.
Keatley provides numerous cases in which bodies were moved, dumped, and hidden by a suspect, who subsequently revealed knowledge of the clandestine grave, e.g., Gary Ridgway, Ted Bundy, Scott Peterson, and Chris Watts. Typically, they used landmarks they’d remember, like a rock or a unique cluster of trees, to mark where they'd left a body. Each case example, whether an offender or a missing person, demonstrates how the method works.
A beneficial addition is the notion of linguistic leaks, i.e., the way killers might inadvertently seed their narratives or interview responses with clues. Chris Watts, who placed his two young daughters into storage tanks at the oil field where he worked, said to the press that on the day his family went missing, he’d expected his daughters to come through the door “barrel rushing me.” Keatley believes this "innocent" remark was revealing. “When he thinks about his kids…I cannot help but see ‘barrel’ as a leak… The linguistic association between oil, tanks, and barrels I think permeated into his mind and then leaked out of his mouth.” Watts subsequently confessed.
Another killer, who’d kept his abducted victim in a torture chamber in a hole in the ground, responded defensively to police questions with, “I just didn’t want to try to get myself into a f*cking hole .” He’d also placed his victim in a shallow grave—a hole. “Clearly, holes in the ground were weighing heavily on his mind.” Another man with a missing wife stood on a spot in the yard and said, “I left her here.” That sounds like he meant the last place he saw her, but it was also the location of her grave.
A limitation to the method, which Keatley points out, is envisioning through the mind of someone with a condition such antisocial personality disorder ( psychopathy ), or the mind of someone much older or younger, or of a different gender or nationality. These all present challenges and a reminder to calculate with care.
Keatley’s Winthropping is more complex than criminal or geographic profiling, relying on multiple psychological elements, but this skill gets easier with practice. Like any interpretive tool, it’s just one aspect of the investigative process. Still, it’s a worthwhile addition. When investigators seeking Cher Elder replaced their own logic with Tom Luther’s intent, they succeeded with a search that would otherwise have failed.
Keatley, D. (2024). Keatley’s Winthropping: Finding the ‘Here’ in ‘Where’ . Australia: ReBSA Publications.
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Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D., is a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University and the author of 69 books.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.