Hearts of Darkness Quotes

“The point I’m trying to make—the one that kept being reinforced with me time and again by the violence I witnessed—is twofold. First, the victims of violence are not just data points in some national tally of crime. Those data points are flesh and blood; they’re men, women, and children. They had lives that were violently extinguished, and they cry out for our attention. Second, the first responders who deal with so many of these gory events—cops, SWAT teams, firefighters, EMTs, and the like—are not just data points, either. They’re flesh-and-blood humans, too. They feel up close and personal the horror that most of us only feel secondhand, watching the after-footage on our TV or computer screens. And like any human being, they have to process those moments and rearrange their lives around them so they can go on.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“Our answers were rarely found in confessional sessions in a jailhouse interrogation room despite how hard serial killers like Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper tried to play their interviewers. Our answers were far more likely to be found at the morgue, or on a coroner’s examining table, or in those grisly crime photos that were my office décor for half a decade. And, yes, there is a price to be paid for that knowledge.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“The devil, or whatever force was behind that disembodied knife in her mind, has never made anyone do anything. The devil just applauds when it happens.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“To the extent it’s humanly possible, we had to control our own emotions. It’s impossible at some level not to feel revulsion at the sight of an obviously tortured and battered body, and very challenging not to feel hatred for whoever committed this and sympathy for the victim. But emotions almost invariably cloud reasoning. In a sense, we had to stand outside of our own humanity while we were doing our job.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“The best answer I could come up with was the simplest one. Yes, these kids had been dealt a bad hand. Role models like Orlando Montoya were few. Their schools were almost uniformly lacking. Violence was often endemic in their neighborhoods. All that played a role, but above it all was the power to belonging. Gang membership entails certain obligations: Only kids willing to be badasses need apply. But gangs also gave them the definition and meaning they hungered for, and prison by those terms was less a punishment than a badge of honor.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“After a while I began to think that the kids who were off hustling during the school day instead of nodding off half comprehendingly in class were the resourceful ones—the ones better training themselves for their world as it is, not the world as we want it to be for them.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI