Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit

“It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets these guys going.”

According to Douglas, the process of choosing a victim excites the offender. The perpetrator uses observation and nonverbal cues to select the most vulnerable individual in a crowd. The perpetrator typically acts as soon as a window of opportunity opens, lest the perpetrator miss the chance to leave with the victim with minimal notice and fuss.  

“But it is the ways they are different, and the clues that they leave to their individual personalities, that have led us to a new weapon in the interpretation of certain types of violent crimes, and the hunting, apprehension, and prosecution of their perpetrators.” 

At the core of Douglas’s career at the FBI is this process of developing and improving the strategy of profiling. Douglas believes crime scenes and the choice of victim reflects the individuality of the offender. From studying the clues that have been left behind, Douglas is able to build a profile of the perpetrator. This profile assists law enforcement with every step of the criminal process, from location of the subject to effective interrogation techniques and trial tactics. 

“Behavior reflects personality.” 

Douglas believes that an offender’s behavior reflects his personality, which is distinct and unique. His profiling technique hinges on this belief. From behavior, which can change and evolve, Douglas and his colleagues are able to infer personality traits, which are static.

“As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say many decades ago, ‘Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.’” 

According to Douglas, the more mundane or routine the crime, the less behavioral evidence is left behind at a crime scene. A single high-risk victim, such as a sex worker, provides much less information than a situation involving multiple victims. Fewer behavioral clues are left behind, which does not allow for a complete profile and analysis. The police have less material to use while narrowing down their suspect list.  

“Let me repeat that: we do not catch criminals.” 

Contrary to popular belief, the agents of the Investigative Support Unit of the FBI do not apprehend criminals. Douglas’s unit assists local law enforcement by providing focus and advice. After reviewing the case files and evidence, they are able to provide a profile of a type of offender that allows the police to narrow their search parameters. These profiles often include, but are not limited to, personality traits, personal history, employment history, and criminal background.  

“If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting.” 

Douglas stresses this point in various ways throughout the book: to understand an offender, a profiler must understand what the offender would consider to be his masterpiece, the crime he committed. Douglas and his colleagues study crime scenes in an attempt to understand not only what occurred and how the crime was committed, but also why it occurred to this specific victim under these particular circumstances. Only after understanding the complete picture can they arrive at the biggest question: who would commit such a crime? 

“The other consideration in making people have a particular opinion of you—such as that you’re irrational and crazy enough to do something unpredictable—is that you have to maintain that persona all the time on the job, not just when you think people are looking at you.” 

According to Gary Trapnell, a serial armed robber and airplane hijacker that Douglas interviewed, this consideration is the key to feigning psychiatric illness convincingly. When defendants plead insanity, they are often unsuccessful for several reasons, among them being a lack of consistency in terms of their mental health history. Often, defendants have no history of mental illness, but in the period of time between their arrest and trial, they claim that mental disease and defect compelled their actions. Often, no symptoms of the defect exist. 

“Much of the success of my generation of special agents unquestionably is attributable to the professionalism and generosity of police officers all over the United States.” 

This statement demonstrates the collaborative nature of the relationship between the FBI and local law enforcement; they often must work hand in hand, particularly in shared jurisdictions. Local law enforcement often has a better understanding of their communities and the common crimes associated with them. The specific knowledge and practical street training that they provide to FBI agents in local field offices undoubtedly contribute to the agents’ success and ability to perform their jobs. 

“You can’t stop us, John, no matter what you do. It’s what we are.” 

During an encounter with a subject in Detroit who had been arrested as part of a gambling sting, the subject informed Douglas that although he and others have been arrested, their arrest would not stop the crime from happening again. The impulse within that compelled them to commit the offense would compel them to repeat the actions again in the future. This statement by the subject led to an epiphany that defined Douglas’s entire career.  

“I found I was most successful when I could come up with a “signature” linking several crimes together, a factor that later became the cornerstone of our serial-murder analysis.” 

Signature is one term that Douglas coined to define the unique compulsion of a serial offender. The signature is what remains the same from offense to offense, a ritual of sorts that the offender must do to relieve his impulse. 

“Any forensic pathologist, as well as most good detectives, will tell you that the single most important piece of evidence in any murder investigation is the victim’s body, and I wanted to learn as much as I could.” 

“The three most common motives of serial rapists and murderers turn out to be domination, manipulation, and control.” 

According to Douglas, many serial offenders feel incompetent, inadequate, and shortchanged in life. Many have been previously abused, and they seek power. It is therefore unsurprising that one of the most desired jobs amongst serial offenders is one that holds power and public respect within a community—a police officer. 

“Probably the most crucial single factor in the development of a serial rapist or killer is the role of fantasy.” 

For many serial offenders, the act of fantasizing helps them cope with their feelings of incompetence or powerlessness. For example, serial killer Ed Kemper did not feel comfortable in a typical heteronormative relationship because he did not believe that any woman would want to be with him. He compensated for these feelings by fantasizing about a partner that he could wholly possess, even unto death. The death of his partners signifies his complete ownership of them.

“Seldom would the subject direct his anger at the focus of his resentment.” 

Many serial offenders focus their resentment on one specific individual, whether an abusive parent or a domineering spouse. Douglas found that they would rarely direct their feelings towards the source of their resentment; instead, they would displace their rage on a scapegoat that represented that person in some way. In this way, the offender could act on an impulse to do harm without incurring feelings of guilt or shame.

“Any police-type interrogation is a seduction; each party is trying to seduce the other into giving him what he wants.” 

Douglas found that successful interrogations require different techniques. Some offenders, like Ed Kemper, are amenable and candid as long as the facts of the case are clear; this mutual understanding of the facts means that offenders are unable to lie. Other offenders required a cruder approach; one offender, Richard Speck, needed to feel comfortable before talking. Interrogations must be tailored for the individual in question; a thorough understanding of the offender’s crimes and his personality was the key to determining the most effective tactic.  

“What we were learning was that the behavior of the victim is equally as important in analyzing the crime as the behavior of the subject.” 

In his research, Douglas found that the behavior of the victim assisted in the process of building a profile of the offender. The offender’s behavior showed the type of victim the subject targeted. Some victims were high-risk, such as someone with a transient lifestyle, while others were low-risk, like a suburban soccer mom. The victim’s behavior throughout the course of the attack also provided information. Victim behavior also provided investigators with information about the subject’s background or personality.

“But Rissell’s case demonstrates that age is a relative concept in our work.” 

Many offenders have prior criminal histories that result in lengthy prison times. According to Douglas, time in prison impacts emotional development, which can throw off the age range of a profile. This situation occurred in the case of Arthur Shawcross, a man who served a fifteen-year sentence for two prior murders before he began his second series of murders. In the case of Monte Rissell, his prior criminal history as a juvenile and his childhood appeared to have expedited his emotional development, as he profiled to be someone almost a decade older than he actually was.  

“It has turned out to be incredibly easy to fool many psychiatrists, and most of the good ones will say that the only fairly reliable predictor of violence is a past history of violence.” 

Douglas believes that psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are unaccustomed to working with forensic patients and are therefore ill-equipped to deal with their propensity for manipulation and self-preservation. Psychiatrists rely on self-reporting as a measure of improvement, and they usually work with individuals who desire self-improvement, rather than people desperate for early parole or the end of mandatory treatment. Douglas hopes that the mental health community working in forensic settings develop a greater awareness of the limitations of traditional psychiatric treatment and therapy on the prison population. 

“Yet when circumstances did not favor the success of their crime, they refrained from committing it. They were not under such a compulsion that they were compelled to act.” 

In this quote, Douglas refers to James Russel Odom and James Clayton Lawson Jr. Douglas does not believe that mental illness renders a person incapable of a crime. He stresses the difference between someone who is a psychopath versus someone who is psychotic and cannot control their actions. While both men in this case were mentally ill, they were both able to control their actions and to refrain from carrying out their plans to abduct a woman when other people could likely witness the abduction.

“What we needed to create was what I call the ‘high ass-pucker factor.’” 

The “high ass-pucker factor” is an emotionally triggering stressor that increases the pressure and anxiety in an individual. The most effective stressors are often valid concerns that render the individual incapable of thinking rationally or logically. The stressor essentially forces them to react to the stimuli at hand. Douglas often employs psychological stressors as part of his interrogation strategy. In his experience, everyone has such stressors—it is simply a matter of discovering what they are. 

“It had become clear to me that no matter how hard he tries, much of what the offender does after the crime is beyond his conscious control.” 

A core tenant of profiling indicates that certain behaviors are beyond the control of the offender, whether the behavior is a signature or a post-offense action. Douglas assumes that the memory of the offense would be on the mind of the offender, and, if the police had discovered the crime, the offender’s behaviors would respond to the stress of the investigation. An offender might subconsciously alter his behavior patterns to alleviate the stress. 

“The key to many murders of and by loved ones or family members is staging.” 

Staging is the term used to describe a situation when an offender alters the crime scene to make it appear as though something other than the crime actually occurred. Douglas theorizes that in domestic or familial homicides, offenders change the crime scene to direct attention away from themselves. Those individuals closest to the victims are usually the primary suspects, and they often do everything they can to deflect suspicion. 

“If the greater threat is not taken out first, there has to be another reason.” 

Douglas postulates that in robbery cases, an offender always neutralizes the greatest threat first, so to prevent the offender himself from getting hurt. An offender is highly unlikely to eliminate a lesser threat first, so the order of injury and/or death provides a behavioral clue. While analyzing a crime scene with multiple victims, Douglas recommends that investigators consider who might have been the greatest threat to the offender.