Mind Hunter Quotes

“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.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Behavior reflects personality.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Manipulation. Domination. Control. These are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“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.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“[Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Don’t make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“As with everything else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the successful criminals were good profilers.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how much you know, how experienced you are, how many suspect interrogations you’ve handled successfully. It doesn’t matter if you understand the technique. Each of us can be gotten to — if you can just figure out where and how we’re vulnerable.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they're children, it's not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can't say over the dinner table, 'I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it." That's why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate in some way to each other's work.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“When a murderer kills one person, he takes a lot of victims along with that individual.”
― John Edward Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“If you’re asking the schools to be the answer, you’re also asking a lot. If you take a kid from a bad background and expect the overburdened teachers to turn him around in seven hours a day, it might or might not happen. What about the other seventeen hours in a day? People often ask us if, through our research and experience, we can now predict which children are likely to become dangerous in later life. Roy Hazelwood’s answer is, “Sure. But so can any good elementary school teacher.” And if we can get them treatment early enough and intensively enough, it might make a difference. A significant role-model adult during the formative years can make a world of difference. Bill Tafoya, the special agent who served as our “futurist” at Quantico, advocated a minimum of a ten-year commitment of money and resources on the magnitude of what we sent into the Persian Gulf. He calls for a wide-scale reinstatement of Project Head Start, one of the most effective long-term, anticrime programs in history. He doesn’t think more police are the answer, but he would bring in “an army of social workers” to provide assistance for battered women, homeless families with children, to find good foster homes. And he would back it all up with tax incentive programs. I’m not sure this is the total answer, but it would certainly be an important start. Because the sad fact is, the shrinks can battle all they want, and my people and I can use psychology and behavioral science to help catch the criminals, but by the time we get to use our stuff, the severe damage has already been done.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“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.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“By studying as many crimes as we could, and through talking to the experts—the perpetrators themselves—we have learned to interpret those clues in much the same way a doctor evaluates various symptoms to diagnose a particular disease or condition. And just as a doctor can begin forming a diagnosis after recognizing several aspects of a disease presentation he or she has seen before, we can make various conclusions when we see patterns start to emerge.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“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.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“We would later realize that this childhood trait of cruelty to small animals was the keystone of what came to be known as the “homicidal triad,” also including enuresis, or bed-wetting, beyond the normally appropriate age and fire-starting.”
― John Edward Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“So what I truly believe is that along with more money and police and prisons, what we most need more of is love. This is not being simplistic; it’s at the very heart of the issue.”
― John Edward Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“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.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“But what my colleagues and I have found and have tried desperately to get across to others in the business of correction and forensic psychology is that dangerousness is situational. If you can keep someone in a well-ordered environment where he doesn’t have choices to make, he may be fine. But put him back in the environment in which he did badly before, his behavior can quickly change.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“from the Adairsville PD. What you’ve got to do is imply that you understand the subject, understand what was going through his mind and the stresses he was under. No matter how disgusting it feels to you, you’re going to have to project the blame onto the victim. Imply that she seduced him. Ask if she led him on, if she turned on him, if she threatened him with blackmail. Give him a face-saving scenario. Give him a way of explaining his actions. The other thing I knew from all the cases I’d seen is that in blunt-force-trauma or knife homicides, it’s difficult for the attacker to avoid getting at least traces of the victim’s blood on him. It’s common enough that you can use it. When he starts to waffle, even slightly, I said, look him straight in the eye and tell him the most disturbing part of the whole case is the known fact that he got Mary’s blood on him. “We know you got blood on you, Gene; on your hands, on your clothing. The question for us isn’t ‘Did you do it?’ We know you did. The question is ‘Why?’ We think we know why and we understand. All you have to do is tell us if we’re right.” And that was exactly how it went down. They bring Devier in. He looks instantly at the rock, starts perspiring and breathing heavily. His body language is completely different from the previous interviews: tentative, defensive. The interrogators project blame and responsibility onto the girl, and when he looks as if he’s going with it, they bring up the blood. This really upsets him. You can often tell you’ve got the right guy if he shuts up and starts listening intently as you speak.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Traditionally, most murders and violent crimes were relatively easy for law enforcement officials to comprehend. They resulted from critically exaggerated manifestations of feelings we all experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit, revenge. Once this emotional problem was taken care of, the crime or crime spree would end. Someone would be dead, but that was that and the police generally knew who and what they were looking for.

But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years—the serial offender, who often doesn't stop until he is caught or killed, who learns by experience and who tends to get better and better at what he does, constantly perfecting his scenario from one crime to the next. I say "surfaced" because, to some degree, he was probably with us all along, going back long before 1880s London and Jack the Ripper, generally considered the first modern serial killer. And I say "he" because, for reasons we'll get into a little later, virtually all real serial killers are male.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Put yourself in the position of the hunter. That's what I have to do. Think of one of those nature films: a lion on the Serengeti plain in Africa. He sees this huge herd of antelope at a watering hole. But somehow—we can see it in his eyes—the lion locks on a single one out of those thousands of animals. He's trained himself to sense weakness, vulnerability, something different in one antelope out of the herd that makes it the most likely victim.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“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 lack of purpose. Again, that inner despair may be in constant conflict with a sense of personal grandiosity and unfulfilled entitlement, but these individuals are all, without exception, inadequate nobodies who want to be somebodies and find meaning in their lives. They may have personal courage—choosing to die for a cause, however misguided, is not a casual decision—but they have also found that violence is their only proof of power.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Even though their crimes were completely different, the one thing the maladjusted genius Ted Kaczynski and the sadistic but banal underachiever Dennis Rader shared was a monumental sense of ego. Neither one of them could bear to let his brilliance go unrecognized by the public, and that was their downfall in both cases.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“True-crime narratives represent the human condition writ large: ordinary people operating at the terrifying extremes of those instincts and emotions. In this vein, every mystery we relate, every case we report, every outcome we track, becomes its own morality play, complete with heroes, villains, and victims.”
― John E. Douglas, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“This is a reality none of us can ever escape. We don’t catch them all, and sincethe ones we do catch have already killed or raped or tortured or bombed orburned or maimed, none of them is ever caught soon enough. It’s true today, justas it was more than a hundred years ago when Jack the Ripper became the firstserial killer to haunt the public imagination.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“And yet often when I was out in the park or the woods, say, with my own little girls, I'd seen something and think to myself, That's just like the such-and-such scene, where we found the eight-year-old. As fearful as I was for their safety, seeing the things I saw, I also found it difficult to get emotionally involved in the minor, but important, scrapes and hurts of childhood. When I would come home and Pam would tell me that one of the girl had fallen off her bike and needed stitches, I'd flash to the autopsy of some child her age and think of all the stitches it had taken the medical examiner to close her wounds for burial.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they're children, it's not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can't say over the dinner table, 'I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it.' That's why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate in some way to each other's work.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Dennis Rader quoted Harvey Glatman as saying, 'It was all about the rope.' What exactly does that mean? The rope symbolized total control. The ultimate fantasy would be to keep these victims alive and dominated indefinitely, although both men knew that wasn't possible.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit