A Killer by Design Quotes

“After two years of incarceration, he confessed to an additional six rapes, none of which ever resulted in a formal charge due to insufficient forensic evidence and the fact that, during the 1970s, sexual violence against women was still considered a low-priority crime in the United States.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“the bigger truth was that rape was often a man’s word versus a woman’s word. And women, in the late 1970s, were viewed as unreliable, emotional, and untrustworthy, meaning that in cases like these, juries rarely took the side of victims.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“Up until then, all of our profiling work—both in the study and in active cases—had involved multiple killings by male offenders between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, most of whom were white. The killers’ methods and motives showed a range of differences, but their demographics were largely the same. In part, this was simply the reality of known serial killers at the time. But it also spoke to a general shortcoming in the overall culture of law enforcement. In the late seventies and early eighties, cases with white victims were more thoroughly investigated than cases involving minorities. It was a shameful truth.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“Control—or, rather, a lack of feeling in control—was the reason why so few women came forward to report or talk about their trauma. And it was the reason why the psychoanalytic view of sexual violence—the prevailing theory that rape happened because of the clothing women wore or because they fantasized about being raped—had gone unchallenged for decades, despite making no sense at all.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“They need to share as much information as possible to play up this guy’s ego and bring in the public’s help.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“BTK was borrowing habits from some of the most notorious serial killers and tailoring them to fit his own routines.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“To fully understand crime, I needed to fully understand the individuals involved in their crimes.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“If it weren’t for a few outliers, I could build killers by design.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“Bias was a shortcut to failure.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“It didn't matter that he felt disconnected from people. What mattered was his ability to make people feel connected to him.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind

“At its core, criminal profiling is well grounded in traditional understandings of psychology, behavior, and the mind. It just applies these understandings differently by using action to predict character rather than character to predict action.”
― Ann Burgess, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind