Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit

During Douglas’s time in the Midwest, the FBI Academy in Quantico had evolved into a self-sufficient facility. The hostage negotiation course that brought Douglas back to Virginia was taught by the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU); there, he met profiling legends such as Howard Teten, Patrick Mullany, Dick Ault, and Robert Ressler. The BSU, under Jack Pfaff, applied psychology to criminology to aid in the apprehension and prosecution of perpetrators. At the time, most of law enforcement dismissed behavioral science as it applied to criminology, believing it to be “worthless bullshit” (80). The study of behavior was not encouraged at the Bureau under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. Douglas was recommended to Pfaff by the other instructors, and he was invited for an interview and offered a position at the FBI National Academy program, which he readily accepted. Douglas returned to Milwaukee and remained in the Reactive Crimes Unit and the SWAT team. At the same time, however, he was also traveling around the state, educating business executives and bank employees on how to deal with kidnapping, extortion, and robberies. Douglas used his remaining time in Milwaukee to obtain and study the case file for the grave-robbing serial killer Edward Gein, whose gruesome crimes served as an inspiration for the novels Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.

Douglas started his new temporary position as a counselor for the FBI National Academy program at Quantico at the end of September 1976. The FBI National Academy program is an eleven-week professional course of study for senior law enforcement officials from across the United States and around the world. Program attendees train together with FBI agents. As a counselor, Douglas was expected to be “everything from instructor to social director to therapist to den mother” (89). This role served as an observation period for the BSU to determine whether or not Douglas would be a good fit for the various components and environments that a job at the BSU would demand. Douglas also audited classes, and by the end of the session, he received job offers from both the BSU and the Education Unit. He chose the position with the BSU despite an offer of more money for graduate school from the Education Unit, as the BSU appeared more interesting. Douglas replaced Patrick Mullany, who moved on to the inspection staff at FBI headquarters, and he was transferred to Quantico in June 1977. 

At the time that Douglas joined the BSU, nine special agents were assigned to the unit. They were all primarily involved in teaching courses to FBI personnel and to National Academy students. Dick Ault and Bob Ressler helped familiarize Douglas with the BSU courses, and Douglas began travelling with Ressler and teaching “road schools” (96). Road schools were shortened, intensive versions of the FBI courses taught by Quantico instructors to local law enforcement and police academies across the nation. For Douglas, road schools usually meant leaving home on Sunday and teaching a particular department for an entire week.

Given Douglas’s relative youth and inexperience, he felt uncomfortable teaching to experienced detectives and police officers. To mitigate this discomfort, he would engage with the class by requesting and encouraging participation from the cops who actually worked on the cases that were being discussed and dissected. During road school in Sacramento, Douglas came up with the idea of interviewing the perpetrators in the cases that they were teaching. He rationalized that many of them were still alive and in prison for the rest of their lives. Douglas believed that their point of view could explain their motives, if they were willing to talk.

The first interviewee was the Co-ed Killer, Ed Kemper, who was housed at the California State Medical Facility. Kemper grew up in a dysfunctional household; his parents fought constantly and later separated. As a youth, Kemper displayed disturbing behavior, such as cruelty to animals, which became part of what the FBI would label the “homicidal triad” (105). He also wet the bed and started fires, the other two components of the homicidal triad, and played death ritual games with his siblings. He was sent to live with his paternal grandparents on an isolated farm in the Sierras after both of his parents rejected him. He killed both of his grandparents when he was 14 years old and was consequently committed to the Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane. He was released into his mother’s custody in 1969, when he turned twenty-one, against the recommendations of the hospital psychiatrists. Kemper was a large man; at the time of his release, he was six foot nine inches tall and weighed about three hundred pounds. He held odd jobs in Santa Cruz, California for two years until he found employment with the State Highway Department. Kemper had a habit of picking up young female hitchhikers, and in May of 1972, he murdered Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He brought their bodies to his home, took Polaroid photos of them, dissected them, and later disposed of the bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains. In the year that followed, Kemper would murder Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, Rosalind Thorpe, and Alice Liu with the same ruse: he would pick them up, shoot them, commit necrophilia, dissect and dismember the bodies, and discard the remains. At the time when the young women of Santa Cruz were warned against hitchhiking, Kemper appeared to be part of the university community. His mother worked for the University of California at Santa Cruz at the time, so he had a university sticker on his car. Kemper’s last murders were his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend, Sally Hallett. He turned himself him to the Santa Cruz Police Department and confessed to all the killings.

Douglas and Ressler reviewed Kemper’s entire file before speaking with him, and Kemper proved to be a willing interviewee. Kemper was extremely intelligent, friendly, and insightful, and the Kemper interviews contributed greatly to Douglas’s understanding of the backgrounds and minds of violent serial offenders. Douglas and Ressler conducted more interviews around the country but found that few perpetrators had Kemper’s insight. Many of these criminals provided self-serving statements or rehashed old information; however, new information was not necessary. Their behavior during the interviews provided Ressler and Douglas with a window into their minds.

Charles Manson was one such individual who revealed more than he realized during his interview. Like Kemper, he had a difficult childhood with an emotionally abusive mother figure. Manson was in and out of prison for most of his young adult life. While he was out on parole in 1967, he moved to San Francisco and amassed a following of disenchanted teens and young adults that he called his “Family.” Fueled by illicit substances and sex, Manson preached about the coming apocalypse and race war, events he called the “Helter Skelter.” Under his leadership, he and his Family would survive. On August 9, 1969, four Manson Family members broke into the home of producer and director Roman Polanski and brutally butchered five people: Sharon Tate (who was almost nine months pregnant), Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent. Two days later, six of the Manson Family struck again, killing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson and several members of the Family were apprehended and tried a few months later; they were sentenced to death, a sentence which was later reduced to life imprisonment after a change in California’s capital punishment laws.

Manson’s role in the murders is still unclear, but what cannot be disputed is Manson’s hold on those who did commit the murders. Douglas and Ressler listened to hours of “cheap philosophizing and ramblings, but as we pressed him for specifics and tried to cut through the bullshit, an image began to emerge” (114). Manson did not plan to become a cult leader; rather, he wanted to be a rich and famous band member. He used his ability to read people to find vulnerable young individuals to manipulate and control. Using food, sex, drugs, and sleep deprivation, Manson controlled their minds and bodies, and he made them believe that “[e]verything was black-and-white and only Charlie knew the truth” (115). Douglas believes that Manson did not plan to murder anyone; in actuality, he lost control of his followers. Following the interviews with Manson, Douglas theorized that “while he made his followers into what he needed, they, in turn, made him into what they needed and forced him to fulfill it” (116).

After about a dozen interviews with inmates, Ressler and Douglas noticed patterns emerge, and they sought to organize these findings into something useable. They collaborated with Dr. Ann Burgess, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and were able to obtain a grant from the National Institute of Justice to continue their interviews and extrapolate their findings. With Dr. Burgess’s involvement, their interview techniques became more methodical.

The study of violent criminal offenders was called the Criminal Personality Research Project. Among the offenders they interviewed were William Heirens, a Chicago teenager dubbed the “Lipstick Killer,” who murdered two women and a girl in a series of burglaries gone wrong. Heirens, who had been imprisoned since 1946, was a model prisoner throughout his entire time in prison. He recanted his confession, alleging that he was railroaded into confessing. He said as much to the FBI interviewers, and he was so convincing that Douglas reviewed his case file upon his return to Quantico to make sure that Heirens was not wrongfully convicted.

Douglas and Ressler also interviewed Richard Speck, who murdered eight nursing students in Chicago. Douglas categorized him as a mass murderer, or a person who kills more than two people in the same instant offense. Speck objected to being interviewed by the FBI for the study, and he spoke only when Douglas took a “high school boys in a locker room” (125) tone in his interrogation. Douglas learned that any “police-type interrogation is a seduction; each party is trying to seduce the other into giving him what he wants” (124); he adjusted his interview tactics according to each individual perpetrator. 

They also interviewed Jerry Brudos, a shoe fetishist who killed at least four women. Brudos had a fascination with women’s shoes and underwear, and he would break into people’s homes at night to steal them. He murdered his first victim in 1968, a nineteen-year-old woman named Linda Slawson, who was selling encyclopedias and had mistakenly gone to the wrong address. He bludgeoned and strangled her and used her corpse as a mannequin for the clothes that he had stolen. He went on to kill three more times, and he was caught when various college girls he approached for dates identified him to the police. When Douglas asked him about the crimes he committed, Brudos claimed that he had acted while experiencing hypoglycemic blackouts, so he could not remember anything he may have done; however, at the time of his arrest, he confessed to police and specified locations and graphic details of his crimes. In Brudos’s case, Douglas saw a paraphilia that escalated dramatically and refined over time.

In their interview with Monte Rissell, a young man responsible for the rape and murders of five women, Douglas and Ressler saw that Rissell committed the murders after a stressor, or a triggering incident. For Rissell, the stressor was the Dear John letter that he received from his high school girlfriend. He drove to the college that she attended and spotted the young woman with a new boyfriend. Instead of confronting his old girlfriend, he accosted another woman that he saw in the parking lot of his apartment complex, raped her at gunpoint, and killed her. Rissell is an example of what Douglas calls an anger-excitation rapist, or a rapist who becomes enraged if the victim resists. His first victim happened to be a sex worker, and her attempts to defuse the situation and placate him inadvertently enraged him; he felt like “this bitch is trying to control things” (135). From this situation, Douglas learned that the behavior of the victim is just as important as the behavior of the subject in the analysis of a crime.

The FBI researchers also discovered that “age is a relative concept” (136). In Rissell’s case, FBI profilers would have estimated his age to be older than it was at the time of the murders. Arthur Shawcross was 45 years old when he was arrested for his second series of murders, but the FBI had profiled him to be in his late twenties or so, based on his already established comfort level for homicide. However, Shawcross was actually incarcerated for 15 years for two previous murders, which merely delayed his homicidal tendencies and allowed him to refine his murderous fantasies until he was paroled.

David Berkowitz, New York’s “.44-Caliber Killer” and “Son of Sam” who killed six people and wounded more, also exhibited one of the elements of the homicidal triad: arson. Berkowitz also revealed that he hunted nightly, and when he could not find a victim, he would review the scenes of his old crimes to “relive the thrill, continue acting out the fantasy, do it again and again” (140). Other violent offenders also revisited the scenes of their crimes time and time again. Berkowitz was caught when he parked his car too close to a fire hydrant the night of the final murder; the police were able to follow up on the ticket he was issued.

By 1983, Ressler and Douglas conducted interviews of thirty-six offenders, and with the assistance of Dr. Burgess, they had compiled and organized the information and data in a way that allowed them to extrapolate meaning and draw conclusions. In 1988, they published a book called Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, in which they detailed their findings and expanded their conclusions. Douglas maintains that this study was by no means conclusive and that serial killers will continue to evolve and adapt from their experiences.