Ann Burgess Quotes

that you had always felt to be safe before, it tended to leave a scar. ‘But you knew her sister, I believe?’ she pressed on. Diane looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And she wasn’t lying either, Hillary thought instantly. She knew this type of witness. All her life, Diane Burgess had respected the law — she’d probably been taught it by her respectable working-class parents, and then had it reinforced by her school teachers, and would no doubt have drummed the same mindset into any children she may have had. Added to that, she was a genuinely timid soul, and they tended to avoid confrontation out of habit. More than anything else, she would be uncomfortable lying, especially to someone in authority. It was far easier for someone like this to simply tell the truth. It required less effort. Hillary would have bet her first pay cheque — when she got it — that this woman was going to answer anything and everything put to her as honestly and as simply as she could hope for. ‘You used to work at Tesco didn’t you? In the town?’ ‘Oh that was years ago.’ ‘But you used to serve Anne

It didn't matter that he felt disconnected from people. What mattered was his ability to make people feel connected to him.

Bias was a shortcut to failure.

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.

To fully understand crime, I needed to fully understand the individuals involved in their crimes.

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.

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.

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.

If it weren’t for a few outliers, I could build killers by design.

BTK was borrowing habits from some of the most notorious serial killers and tailoring them to fit his own routines.

They need to share as much information as possible to play up this guy’s ego and bring in the public’s help.

You will undoubtedly notice that I am confining myself here to characterizations of men. By definition, this is sexist, but by definition, men are the problem. Both the FBI behavioral science divisions and (even more so) Ann Burgess and her associates have studied women who come from the same kinds of abusive and neglectful backgrounds as the men in our prison profiles. But for whatever complex reasons, women do not manifest their frustrations and emotional injuries in the same aggressive ways.

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.