WINTHROPPING – I can hardly pronounce it, what does it mean? Article 3 in a 4-part series

The Natural Investigative Skills re-visited

The first time I heard of ‘Winthropping’ was in 2015, during an exchange of communications with Consultant Archaeologist Jon Sterenberg and Professor Soren Blau, (Head of Anthropology and Archaeology at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP).

I was intrigued by what Jon and Soren explained to me about ‘Winthropping’ and my reading of its apparent development by a British Army Lieutenant Winthrop in Northern Ireland as a tool to find IRA clandestine weapons caches.

I have always been interested in the hunting and tracking skills of indigenous cultures and when I first read about Winthropping I immediately thought that perhaps Lieutenant Winthrop had applied indigenous cultural and behavioural studies in developing his theories.  However, after reading David Keatley’s ‘Winthropping’^[i] (Finding the ‘here in ‘where’) I realised that there was also likely to be some contemporary applied psychology regarding understanding of the thinking of the person’s behaviour and actions you need to know, which includes a combination of imagining how they would think at the time and in the circumstances, which I’m sure ancient indigenous cultures applied without having to go to university.

I cannot begin to comprehensively explain ‘Winthropping’ in a few paragraphs, you will have to buy David Keatley’s book to acquire that.  What I can do though is to try and provide, by way of example, a few simple leads as to what it means. 

A retired homicide detective friend of mine asked me what ‘Winthropping’ is and my explanation was this, “Well, it’s about reference points. If I say to you I dumped the body over there, and point into the forest. Your answer is going to be, where? So for me to tell you where, I’m going to have to know where, which means I’m going to have to remember where, which in turn means I needed to have deposited the body in a memorable spot in the first place, which is what most people do, they internalise the question of ‘where shall I dump the body?’ and they look for a memorable spot. What you as a detective have to do is think like the suspect, get into his head and work out what would be a memorable spot for him, look for the logical reference points.”

My homicide squad mate got it once he asked me the question ‘Where’.  He realised that everyone has a reference point, even a dog when it buries a bone, it looks around for a good spot.  My homicide squad mate also realised that you cannot tell someone else where something is if you don’t have a reference point to remember the location by.

On another occasion I was in the mountains looking for the site of an old pioneering store from the 1850s.  Now this would have been nothing more than a slab hut back then.  However, it would have had horse and cattle yards and some levelling of the land about it.  It would have also been in a prime location to capture the trade of passing miners on the way to the goldfields.

After 170 years a lot changes when you look for spots in the bush that were once home-sites or even small towns. The forest reclaims the land quickly, understorey hides everything, and back then there were no concrete roads or perhaps even brick chimneys to hint human presence, even if there was it is now likely covered and hidden by a layer of topsoil or forest litter. To the unskilled eye there is nothing.

Only when you look slowly do you notice things. Perhaps an unusual contour of the land, or an odd breed of tree, or a clump of recurring bulbs, which could all signal an earlier settlement.  Or perhaps you could ‘Winthropp’ and think now if I were here in 1850, where would I build a cabin for a store?

On my day in the Mountains I stood on the edge of the high bank of what was the old river crossing and looked across the other side.  I could see what could have been a cut out contour in the opposite gentle slope above the bank and a levelled out slightly bushed flat, with a dozen or so large eucalypts and a scattering of smaller shrubs, all distinctly different than the bush around it. 

Looking closely, I could see a large fallen tree lying perpendicular to the river and set well into the flat away from any passing hikers. I had recently read ‘Keatley’s Winthropping’ and thought to myself, ‘now if I was going to stash something that is where I would put it’. Why? Because, the directions and reference point would be simple, “Cross the river at the crossing, and it’s behind the big log on the flat on the opposite bank.”

Out of curiosity I crossed the river and walked up across the flat and climbed up on the log and looked down.  My heart almost stopped, for right below me, almost hidden in the long grass was a freshly placed and locked steel trunk of supplies, obviously stashed for a soon to arrive group of bushwalkers.  It was a perfect spot and the reference points to enable the bushwalkers to find it would have been simple.

David Keatley didn’t invent ‘Winthropping’ but what he has done is interpreted it to explain, re-define and develop it in a way that enables practitioners to understand it.  He has applied a degree of geographical profiling and a much more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of human behaviour to better predict the probabilities of where a person may deposit something or someone, perhaps following a crime.  The knowledge that he provides in his book is invaluable to the deep investigative thinker.

I know there will be many investigators out there who will think that ‘Winthropping’ is a whole lot of nonsense, and I will not criticise them for their thinking as we all maybe react in different ways to different things. However, for me ‘Winthropping’ fits nicely into my brain’s operation.

As for ‘Keatley’s Winthropping’ the book – well I recommend it as good reading for everyone.  There are great chapters on forensic linguistics and mental maps as well as over twenty real crime case studies. 

In a lateral thinking sense, the use of ‘Winthropping’ goes beyond searching for missing persons, and dead bodies.  As I have shown, you can also use it to find things, which can be around the home, in the yard or out in the bush.  It is all about ‘Investigative Thinking’, which is in inclusive topic for discussion in this series and is on the theme of ‘What am I looking at?’

In the meantime, I recommend Keatley’s Winthropping as a must read for every investigator’s tool kit.

(Article written by Valentine Smith APM www.missinginaustralia.com.au 18 January 2026)

^[i] Keatley’s WINTHROPPING – by Dr David Keatley PhD ReBSA Publications Australia July 2024