The Killer Across the Table Quotes

“I familiarize myself with every detail of their crimes and loathe what they did. At the same time, I may feel tremendous empathy and sorrow for what they went through in their young lives that contributed to their adult behavior”
― John Edward Douglas, The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter

“But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Lesson learned: Everyone is a potential suspect, and don’t let looks or behavior fool you.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Within just about every serial predator, there are two warring elements: A feeling of grandiosity, specialness, and entitlement, together with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness and a sense that they have not gotten the breaks in life that they should”
― John Edward Douglas, The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter

“Predators may look and sound and often act like we do, but they don’t think like we do.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“My focus is on understanding why people commit violent and predatory acts, not to help them become better, more law-abiding citizens, but to aid in catching them, prosecuting them, and putting them away”
― John Edward Douglas, The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter

“No matter how careful their planning, for most violent and predatory criminals, since crime is essentially an irrational act in any society that prohibits it, there is often a point in which logic and reason breaks down.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“As is true with ordinary people, serial predators can mistake luck for personal ability.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Serial killers who claim revenge as a motive are usually manifesting some form of emotional displacement”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“OVER MY MANY YEARS OF OBSERVING AND INTERACTING WITH SERIAL KILLERS, I’VE found that a large percentage of them are abnormally fixated on their mothers—usually negatively, like Kemper; sometimes positively; or a confused mix of both, like McGowan.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“A typical behavioral pattern of overkill is multiple stab wounds in a tight pattern on the neck or chest, and severe damage to the face. It is a murder in which the primary goal is punishment fueled by rage.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“You can tell by how an offender manually strangles his victim if he genuinely intends to kill, and if there are any reservations, moral hesitation, or empathy.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Because let’s be honest: The fascination with “true crime” is actually fascination with what writers and philosophers call the human condition. We all want to know and understand the basis of human behavior and motivation, why we do the things we do. And with crime, we are seeing the human condition writ large and at the extremes, both for the perpetrator and for the victim. In a very real sense, the television audience was after the same thing I was: a wider and deeper understanding of the criminal mind.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“The interplay between the agent and the violent offender needed to be informal and not overtly structured. What we were looking for was not so much the facts of the case, which were already established, but the motivation, the pre- and post-offense behavior, the victim selection process, and then the big question of why, without being too assertive, directed, or leading—the opposite of what we’d try to do in a suspect interrogation.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“An interrogation, on the other hand, involves questioning a potential suspect in a crime. That individual is entitled to be informed of his or her legal rights and in no case may the information violate rules of due process. This tends to be more of a show-and-tell on the part of the interrogator in which the suspect is advised of or shown definitive forensic evidence linking him to the crime. The questions fall into the form of not if, but why and how, to get the suspect to cooperate and confess.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“An investigative interview is a meeting with one or more persons who may have information relative to a crime or the perpetrator of that crime. We try to find out as much of the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible. That person is not treated as a suspect.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“This is often the way crimes get solved- through a side door. The clue that led to New York’s “son of Sam” killings was a parking ticket David Berkowitz was issued for parking his Ford Galaxie too close to a fire hydrant near the site of his final murder”
― John Edward Douglas, The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter

“To understand the artist, you must look at the artwork…to understand the criminal, you must look at and study the crime itself.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter

“Many killers would have it that their murderous actions were not their own choice at all, that killing was a fixed, nonnegotiable action for them. Yet nothing I have seen in all my years of criminal investigation leads me to accept that premise, except in the most extreme cases of mental illness.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“As with all of the killers profiled here, nature versus nurture will always be the central tension in this debate about what could produce such monstrous and unnatural acts, but the exploration cannot end there. Inevitably the question eventually comes down to moral agency against inborn determinism. And that leads to a single word: choice.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Within just about every serial predator, there are two warring elements: a feeling of grandiosity, specialness, and entitlement, together with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness and a sense that they have not gotten the breaks in life that they should.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“When we started studying serial killers back in the 1970s and ’80s, we realized that most of them had what we referred to as a “cooling-off” period between crimes, whether that period was a few days, a few weeks, or even a few years. But then the internal pressure would build up again and they would be back to it.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Bundy was probably as close to the archetype of one species of serial killer as you could get: handsome, intelligent, charming, glib, and resourceful. And he brutally killed at least thirty young women from Washington State to Florida during the 1970s.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Normal people find it difficult to grasp the reality that predators really do think differently. We tend to want to evaluate them from the point of view of our own experience and life values, and then try to figure out what it is that “went wrong.” In other words, what is the aberrant piece that once identified and “fixed” will make them think “normally” again? Well, in many cases there is an aberrant piece that either determines or influences behavior. But by the time some individual acts on his predatory urges, it is usually so completely assimilated into his entire personality that you can’t simply take it out and replace it as you can a defective mechanical part. That is why the concept of rehabilitation is so problematic for violent offenders. Once the damage is done, it is often all but impossible to repair it.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“In his book, originally titled If I Did It, subsequently published as I Did It when the Goldman family won the rights based on their civil suit, O. J. Simpson recounts the killings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman as if O.J. had actually committed the crimes. From my perspective of forty-plus years in law enforcement and behavioral analysis, this book, written years after O.J.’s acquittal for the murders, was just another display of Mr. Simpson’s contempt for moral standards, his sense of power over and remaining anger at Nicole. In other words: the actions of a sociopathic narcissist.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“But much more often, when those of us in law enforcement see a claim of MPD, it is post-arrest. Though the suspect/defendant may never have given any indication to those around him that he has more than one personality, if the evidence against him is strong and there is no other way to explain his action, he or his attorney will put forth a multiple personality disorder defense. In other words, while his “body” may have committed the murder, it was another personality working within that body that had the motive and mens rea (literally, “guilty mind”). Legally, both the mens rea and the act are necessary components to make up a crime.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“This is probably the most common theme that has emerged in all of my confrontations with killers across the table. There is almost always an external reason the killing started. As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable. They perceive themselves as the true victims—yet another manifestation of their extreme narcissism. And if a prison psychiatrist happens to hand you the excuse—well, so much the better.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Our research suggests that the combination of hardwired neurological factors and a bad childhood and adolescence contributes most often to an antisocial personality. It is possible that without one or the other influence, the violence-prone predator never emerges, as suggested by our informal control group of law-abiding siblings like David and Mikal. But this is not a laboratory experiment where we can play it out two ways. At this point in the development of both neuropsychology and criminology, the best we can offer is theories.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table

“Virtually every serial killer will begin in what we call his primary comfort zone. It may be an area close to his home, his place of work, a park that he knows well, or any other site where he feels comfortable and confident. When we get a serial killer or rapist case, we always pay special attention to the location of the first crime in the series, because it will tell us a lot about him.”
― John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table