The technique employs a variety of methods, including distance to crime research, demographical analysis, environmental psychology, landscape analysis, geographical information systems, point pattern analysis, crime site residual analysis, and psychological criminal profiling. Moreover, GPA seems to be a particular effective method for the needs of police investigators attempting to solve complex serial crimes. The technique examines the spatial data connected to a series of crime sites and in this study, more specifically, victims' body dump sites and point of fatal encounter sites. While the quantitative methods, at first at least, aim at general patterns of crimes in the aggregate, the qualitative method used here aims at reconnecting the known facets of the crimes to the actual landscape. In this phase, geo-forensic analysis attempts to reconstruct the course of travel of the killer and the victim from before the crime until well after it.
Every reasonable effort is made to lay down a complete trail for each person in the crime.
Even some success in predication is often worthwhile, since it creates an awareness of tendencies within a system, without necessarily specifying either the parameters of those tendencies or underlying causes. Rather the method provides an additional avenue of scientific investigation that, with the many other forensic specialties, may provide some help for the investigation of a serial killing. The actual search for the killer remains completely in the orbit of the sworn. The geo-forensic techniques seem to provide an additional perspective that may assist police during the investigation of a serial murder in which bodies of victims are scattered over a large geographical area. The method seems also to be able to indicate that a sequence of murders belong in one serial, even when the police deny such an interpretation.