Dr. Casey Jordan

It's my pleasure to be here, Debra.

Well, criminology is an interdisciplinary social science.

Here it is, in a nutshell.

We are looking for the why behind the crime.

And to answer the why, we can use sociology, psychology, politics, economics.

But what we really specialize in is the theories of why people commit crimes.

Different than criminalistics, but forensics does feed our knowledge base.

So when I do criminology, not only do I teach it and have taught it for 38 years, but I work sometimes as an investigative profiler and I gather all of the information from the actual crime scene technicians, from the detectives.

From the families, the friends, people who knew the victim.

And you put it all together and it's like, you know, arranging pieces of a puzzle until sometimes things kind of shift and click and fall into place.

And we try to not just, you know, understand who did it, but the why.

And when we understand why, Debra, perhaps we can prevent it.

It is always with an eye towards prevention.

well the fact that she was stabbed is very important because first of all everyone has knives in their home so one of the things we first look for is is this an organized or a disorganized killer did they come with the idea of murder did they bring the weapon that they used or was it a weapon of convenience something they may have found and in amanda's case she was found on her kitchen floor and of course kitchens have knives now

We have no indication that the murder weapon was left at the scene.

We don't know if there was a knife he found there or he brought the knife there.

But when you have a knife, first of all, it's a weapon of convenience because almost everybody can access a knife.

It's not a gun.

It's not like a kill kit with rope or strangulation and zip ties and things like that.

So stabbing is a very personal way of killing somebody.