Twenty-Eight Fires and One Map: Finding an Arsonist’s Neighborhood

For months, someone was setting fires at occupied homes in Burnaby, British Columbia, leaving investigators with dozens of incidents but no identified suspect. With conventional investigative methods failing to produce a breakthrough, police turned to behavioral and geographic profiling to narrow the search. A map eventually pointed investigators toward a particular area, but the decisive lead came from someone in the community who recognized what investigators were describing. The case demonstrates an important lesson in criminal profiling: a profile rarely solves a crime by itself—it helps detectives decide where, and sometimes at whom, to look more closely.