The car the police suspected might have been used in the crime had a bigger trunk than that sports car. I found a vehicle of the same make, model, and year parked outside of a shop I was in with about eleven minutes left on the meter. I walked outside and waited for the driver to show up.

“Excuse me,” I said when a young couple arrived at the car, “would you mind terribly opening the trunk of your vehicle so I can look in it and see how big it is?”

They looked at me kind of funny, so I said, “I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m working on a case. I know it sounds a little odd, but I want to know if a body would fit in your trunk.”

They just laughed-wouldn’t you?-and said, “No problem.”

They opened it up, I checked out the size of the trunk, and then said, “Thank you very much.”

Since the victim I was dealing with was a bit on the overweight side, I had to make sure that this wasn’t a trunk for anorexics only. The lady would have fit in the trunk.

On occasion, if the police found a body in a certain position, I might wonder, “Could that body be in that position in the trunk?” In that situation, it’s not going to be good enough to look in the trunk. I’m going to say, “I’m about the same size as that woman. Guess who’s going in the trunk?”

Could an alleged perpetrator climb through a given window if, for example, the window seemed kind of small? I have to find somebody the same size and try to shove him through it. I can’t just guess.

The Virginia detective who nailed the cat burglar turned serial killer dealt with this issue in one of the murders he investigated. He said, “That was a pretty small window that guy had to use to get into the house. He had to be a certain weight to slither through that one.” A 210-pound man couldn’t get through it, but a 140-pound man might.

If a weight limit isn’t definitive, I have to analyze how the weight is distributed on the body. Maybe a guy with a big butt can’t get through, but a guy with big shoulders and a small butt could wiggle through. I play devil’s advocate and try different things to prove what is true and what is not true.

It can be rather amusing as well.

“Mom is stabbing me again!” my daughter once told her friend on the other end of the phone line as I circled her with a fake butcher knife.

A YOUNG AMERICAN enlisted man stationed in Japan was found hanging naked by a belt in his closet. He was on his knees; the police determined it was an autoerotic death. The family, however, went ballistic and blamed his death on the Yakuza-the Japanese mafia. “They murdered him!”

What dealings he might have had with the mob in Japan and why they would want to do him in was quite unclear, but motivated families are like detectives, and they explained how the Yakuza hung around military bases and could have tried corrupting their son. They came up with every imaginable story that might link their son to being murdered.

And when that failed to convince, they simply rejected accidental death, outright. His mother said, “First of all, he would not put that belt around his neck because it would be so uncomfortable.”

Just because we’re profilers doesn’t mean we’ve experienced everything in the world and can instantly determine whether something is true. In a case involving a sexual predator, I needed to find out if dripping hot wax on someone’s body was simply sadistic or if there was some pleasurable erotic component to it. I always found that warm wax, like you get when candles melt, was fun to play with, warm and squishy, like a fancy Play-Doh. So I got a candle and dripped a few drops from up high onto my leg. SON OF A BITCH! Okay, the man was a sadist.

Now, what about a belt around the neck? Was it uncomfortable? If you’re hanging yourself with a belt, and you’re trying to achieve autoerotic pleasure, that strategy prevents the blood from going back to your brain. In theory, at least, you put the belt around your neck, bend your knees, and then while you masturbate, your brain is deprived of oxygen. But as soon as you have an orgasm-because it is supposedly much better when you have less oxygen to your brain, which is why you’re doing the hanging thing-you must remember to push up on your knees, stand up straight, and the pressure of the ligature ends. The blood rushes back to the brain and the masturbator is okay.

The problem comes when the masturbator doesn’t! If the fantasy isn’t good enough, it takes too damn long. That means the blood isn’t returning to the brain soon enough, there is not enough oxygen, and the person passes out. That’s when autoerotica becomes accidental hanging, and that’s when the person dies. The masturbator needs really good fantasy material. Otherwise, he’ll be dead.

Maybe, I thought, whatever fantasy he was using didn’t work for the young soldier. Sometimes, if a person involves himself in autoerotic sex too often and too many times, he finds it harder and harder to get aroused quickly enough to stay safe.

His mother said, “My son cannot stand things around his neck choking him. He would not do this.”

I wanted to find out for myself what it would feel like so I called my daughter over.

“Honey, can you come into the bathroom? Mom has to hang herself.”

“Okay,” she said, knowing she’s seen me try worse.

When using myself as a prop, I always have someone “spot” me, stand next to me in case I get myself in trouble. Say, for instance, I am testing out the usefulness of a particular belt for hanging myself in a small closet space. I don’t want to accidentally reenact the whole scene successfully and then have another profiler analyze what happened to me.

“I’m going to put this belt around my neck and bend my knees and do what the soldier did, minus the fun part,” I told my daughter. “And just in case anything goes wrong, be here and grab my body and push it back up so I don’t pass out.”

I put the belt over the towel rod, wrapped it around my neck, and bent my knees. I took it to the point I could feel a constriction and a light-headed feeling start to occur. I didn’t stand with my knees bent until I was near to passing out; I only needed to test the feeling of the belt on my neck.

“That doesn’t feel bad at all,” I said.

My daughter rolled her eyes, eager for the experiment to be over.

I did not feel like I was choking. It did make me slightly giddy. But now I knew, firsthand, that when any parent said to me, “They wouldn’t do it because they would be choking,” I could say with authority, “No, it doesn’t feel that way. You do not feel like you’re choking. Actually, it makes you kind of happy; that’s why they do it.”

I proved the police correct on that aspect of the case.

On the wall in front of this young Japanese man was a little bit of shaving cream. The Japanese police claimed he was using shaving cream to masturbate. Was this true?

His mother claimed this, too, was a lie.

In the autopsy photos, on one hand, the young man had a tiny bit of white material. It was not semen, but it was some bit of dried white stuff, in the webbed area of his right hand between his thumb and first finger. It was not seen anywhere else. If he really used shaving cream, why would it be only in that one little spot? Wouldn’t we see a white film on more of his hand?

The family thought so. “That’s right. Somebody just dabbed a bit of foam on his hand to make it look like he was doing that. He would have had it all over his hand if he were really using it.”

I used a black light, two fingers of my left hand (as the young man’s penis), and my other hand to reenact the situation. When I finished and turned on the black light, the only place that I found shaving cream was in the web of my hand. I proved that he must have been masturbating, and hearing what I did makes the cops I tell crack up laughing. I didn’t have anything else to work with. I’m sorry! What can I say?