Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

by John E. Douglas

Behavior reflects personality.

Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that have filtered down about witches and werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. They couldn’t be just like us.

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.” In other words, the more behavior we have, the more complete the profile and analysis we can give to the local police.

Though it is often referred to as deduction, what the fictional Dupin and Holmes, and real-life Brussel and those of us who followed, were doing was actually more inductive—that is, observing particular elements of a crime and drawing larger conclusions from them.

My colleague Roy Hazelwood, who taught the basic profiling course for several years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide the analysis into three distinct questions and phases—what, why, and who: What took place? This includes everything that might be behaviorally significant about the crime. Why did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken? Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every behaviorally significant factor in the crime? And this, then, leads to: Who would have committed this crime for these reasons?

He shook his head, like I still didn’t get it. It was raining harder now. He glanced to the side, directing my attention to the car’s window. “You see those two raindrops?” He pointed. “I’ll bet you the one on the left will get to the bottom of the glass before the one on the right does. We don’t need the Super Bowl. All we need is two little raindrops. You can’t stop us, John, no matter what you do. It’s what we are.”

Eventually, I would come up with the term signature to describe this unique element and personal compulsion, which remained static. And I would use it as distinguishable from the traditional concept of modus operandi, which is fluid and can change. This became the core of what we do in the Investigative Support Unit.

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

frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman.

Thinking that she was dealing with a busy man who had other more important priorities than stopping for hitchhikers would immediately put her at ease and erase any hesitations.

the normal common-sense assumptions, verbal cues, body language, and so on that we use to size up other people and make instant judgments about them often don’t apply to sociopaths. With Ed Kemper, for instance, stopping for a pretty hitchhiker was his most important priority, and he had thought long, hard, and analytically about how best to accomplish his objective; much longer, harder, and more analytically than a young woman encountering him casually would have done from her perspective.

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

This was another characteristic we were to see over and over again. Seldom would the subject direct his anger at the focus of his resentment.

What would have happened had the dangerousness of his progression been recognized, and some productive means been tried to deal with his feelings? By the time of the first kill, it’s way too late. But at any step along the way, could the process have been short-circuited? Through the study and my work since then, I’ve become very, very pessimistic about anything remotely akin to rehabilitation for most sexually motivated killers. If anything has a hope of working, it has to come at a much earlier stage, before they get to the point at which fantasy becomes reality.

By his very nature, a serial killer or rapist is manipulative, narcissistic, and totally egocentric.

Serial killers are, by definition, “successful” killers, who learn from their experience. We’ve just got to make sure we keep learning faster than they do.

believe that like most disturbed individuals he understood the difference between right and wrong. Having these bizarre and deranged fantasies is not a crime. Making the willful choice to act upon them to the harm of others most certainly is.

When the director and cast of The Silence of the Lambs came to Quantico to prepare for filming, I brought Scott Glenn, who played Jack Crawford—the special agent some say was based on me—into my office. Glenn was a pretty liberal guy who had strong feelings on rehabilitation, redemption, and the fundamental goodness of people. I showed him some of the gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let him experience recordings made by killers while they were torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of prison. Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, “I had no idea there were people out there who could do anything like this.” An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: “The experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all time.”

I think it’s important to underscore here that when they realized they couldn’t stage a successful abduction without being resisted or at least witnessed, they left without having committed their intended crime. Both men were mentally ill, and in Lawson’s case, a pretty good argument could be made for criminal insanity. 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. So I will say it again for the record: in my opinion and based on my experience, the mere presence of a mental disorder does not let an offender off the hook. Unless he is completely delusional and does not comprehend his actions in the real world, he chooses whether or not to hurt someone else.

And the truly bonkers ones are easy to catch. Serial killers are not.

Modus operandi—MO—is learned behavior. It’s what the perpetrator does to commit the crime. It is dynamic—that is, it can change. Signature, a term I coined to distinguish it from MO, is what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself. It is static; it does not change.

The human race has a long history of hurting the ones we love or should love. In fact, during Alan Burgess’s first television interview after becoming Behavioral Science Unit chief, he stated, “We’ve had violence for generations and generations, going all the way back to Bible days when Cain shot Abel.” Fortunately, the reporters didn’t seem to catch his reinterpretation of the world’s first murder weapon.

The key to many murders of and by loved ones or family members is staging. Anyone that close to the victim has to do something to draw suspicion away from himself or herself.

The difference is, the mental-health professionals start with the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality from that perspective.

Criminal behavior, Samenow believes, is not so much a question of mental illness as character defect.

Dr. Park Dietz, who works with us frequently, has stated, “None of the serial killers that I’ve had the occasion to study or examine has been legally insane, but none has been normal, either. They’ve all been people who’ve got mental disorders. But despite their mental disorders, which have to do with their sexual interests and their character, they’ve been people who knew what they were doing, knew what they were doing was wrong, but chose to do it anyway.”

It’s important to keep in mind here that insanity is a legal concept, not a medical or psychiatric term. It doesn’t mean someone is or is not “sick.” It has to do with whether that pers...