Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

by John E. Douglas

viewers, given its often grisly subject matter and tragic endings. The answer, we believe, is that, by its very nature, true crime deals with the essentials and fundamentals of what we loftily call “the human condition.”

Serial killers get off on their power over their victims and therefore tend to envy the power they perceive police officers to possess.

Violent crime in general has been on a downward trend, but the number of predatory sexually oriented killers has remained relatively the same. The

this type of criminal pathology is not as responsive to societal conditions or improved policing as other criminal enterprises.

These are people who take up mass violence as a personal assertion or political statement to compensate for their own hopelessness, pathos, failure, and/or

or lack of purpose.

Behavior reflects personality. The best indicator of future violence is past violence. To understand the “artist,” you must study his “art.” The crime must be evaluated in its totality. There is no substitute for experience, and if you want to understand the criminal mind, you must go directly to the source and learn to decipher what he tells you. And, above all: Why + How = Who.

If you could get a galvanic skin response reading on one of them as he focuses in on his potential victim, I think you’d get the same reaction as from that lion in the wilderness.

Talked about this response in psych class

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.

question: what kind of person could have done such a thing? The type of profiling and crime-scene analysis we do at the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit attempts to answer that question.

Behavior reflects personality. It isn’t always easy, and it’s never pleasant, putting yourself in these guys’ shoes—or inside their minds. But that’s what my people and I have to do. We have to try to feel what it was like for each one.

Everything we see at a crime scene tells us something about the unknown subject—or UNSUB, in police j...

We go over the police files and crime-scene photos, autopsy protocols, trial transcripts; anything that might shed light on motives or personality.

One of the reasons our work is even necessary has to do with the changing nature of violent crime itself.

Yet it used to be that most crime, particularly most violent crime, happened between people who in some way knew each other.

They resulted from critically exaggerated manifestations of feelings we all experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit, revenge.

virtually all real serial killers are male.

Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. They couldn’t be just like us.

criminal-personality profiling, crime analysis, and prosecutorial strategy,

For another, no matter how much the criminal thinks he knows, the more he does to try to evade detection or throw us off the track, the more behavioral clues he’s going to give us to work with.

commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.”

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

What we try to do is assist local police in focusing their investigations, then suggest some proactive techniques that might help draw a criminal out.

we will try to formulate a strategy to help the prosecutor bring out the defendant’s true personality during the trial.

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

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?

Detectives and crime-scene analysts have to take a bunch of disparate and seemingly unrelated clues and make them into a coherent narrative, so storytelling ability is an important talent, particularly in homicide investigations, where the victim can’t relate his or her own story.

typical assassin personality is far more dangerous in certain crucial ways than the typical serial-killer personality.

serial killer, who will only choose a victim he thinks he can handle and then will go to elaborate lengths to avoid capture, the assassin is obsessively concerned with his “mission” and is generally willing to die to achieve it.

always say that most sexual killers and serial rapists become skilled in domination, manipulation, and control—the same skills I was trying to master in a different context.

Frankly, I’d never given a single serious thought to law enforcement. I was planning a career in industrial psychology once I finished my degree.

to begin the fourteen weeks of training that would transform me from an ordinary citizen into a special agent of the FBI.

We were told particularly to beware of women! The brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the building who had actually asked me out to dinner.

One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill.

The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if

you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, a...

We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law, fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement.

But beyond that, I wanted to know what decisions went into the planning and execution of the hit?

The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the successful criminals were good profilers.

But if you started profiling the cases—I hadn’t attached this term to the process yet—you could begin seeing patterns. And once you began seeing patterns, you could start taking proactive measures to catch the bad guys.

For example, if you started to see that a rash of bank robberies all seemed to fit together, and if you’d talked to enough perpetrators to understand what it was in each of these jobs that appealed to them, you could obviously and heavily fortify all the bank offices that met the criteria except for one. This one, of course, would be under constant police and/or FBI surveillance with plainclothes details inside.

Years later, when I headed up the Investigative Support Unit, I would get asked if—with all that we knew about criminal behavior and crime-scene analysis—any of us could commit the perfect murder.

always told them no, that even with all we knew, our postoffense behavior would still give us away.

There was something inherent, deep within the criminal’s mind and psyche, that compelled him to do things in a certain way.

In 1969, he began teaching a landmark course called Applied Criminology, which eventually (after Hoover’s death, I suspect) became known as Applied Criminal Psychology.

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 main course offered to both FBI personnel and National Academy students was Applied Criminal Psychology.

The idea was to try to give students an understanding of why violent criminals think and act as they do.

I was saying was true, I was interested in the age-old question of whether criminals are born or made.