John Douglas Fbi Quotes

Behavior reflects personality.

Manipulation. Domination. Control. These are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders.

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.

Don’t make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.

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.

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.

The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the successful criminals were good profilers.

[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.

There are three youthful behaviors that together make up what has come to be known as the homicidal triad: enuresis (bed-wetting) beyond an appropriate age, fire starting, and cruelty to animals and/or smaller children.

Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

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.

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.

When a murderer kills one person, he takes a lot of victims along with that individual.

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

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.

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.

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.

I've come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I've stated that I'd be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I've hunted in my career with the FBI. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn't fit into this category -- the evidence just wasn't, and isn't, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Someone acts like a maniac does not necessarily mean he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing

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

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.

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.

Manson never killed anyone himself. What was terrifying about him, though, was his ability to attract seemingly normal, middle-class followers and inspire them to do his murderous bidding without any question of conscience or pang of remorse.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To understand the artist, you must look at the artwork…to understand the criminal, you must look at and study the crime itself.

Could newspapers now be held hostage by any dangerous lunatic who wanted his opinions heard?

If a man fails at home, he fails in his life.

By his very nature, a serial killer or rapist is manipulative, narcissistic, and totally egocentric.

But I have to admit that to a certain extent, it’s the same talent that con men and criminal predators use to get by.

Roy and I independently came up with Aaron Kosminski as our likeliest candidate.

1982, while he was working ATKID as a special agent in the Atlanta Field Office, his wife tried to have him killed.

I miss my dog,” he wrote to Maria. “I don’t really miss my mother.” Dogs offer unconditional and nonjudgmental love. Mothers don’t always.

...lying to a big metal box is no big deal for a sociopath.

I wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

used around women and children. Then there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway, he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, “Fuck you, Mr. Douglas.” Rather than getting all complicated, I’d bow back, smile, and say, “Fuck you, too.

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.

The problem with offering up the top guy, in addition to encouraging other desperate little people to try the same thing, is that you lose your maneuvering room. You always want to negotiate through intermediaries, which allows you to stall for time and avoid making promises you don’t want to keep. Once you put the hostage taker in direct contact with someone he perceives as a decision maker, everyone is backed against the wall, and if you don’t give in to his demands, you risk having things head south in a hurry. The longer you keep them talking, the better.

Since we wrote Mindhunter, the prevalence of certain crimes has changed. Violent crime in general has been on a downward trend, but the number of predatory sexually oriented killers has remained relatively the same. The reason, we believe, is because this type of criminal pathology is not as responsive to societal conditions or improved policing as other criminal enterprises. In the past sixteen years we have become concerned with domestic and international terrorism, a phenomenon that was just beginning when we cited the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

I knew the way these guys operated; I'd seen it over and over again. They had a need to manipulate and dominate their prey. They wanted to be able to decide whether or not their victim should live or die, or how the victim should die. They'd keep me alive as long as my body would hold out, reviving me when I passed out or was close to death, always inflicting as much pain and suffering as possible. Some of them could go on for days like that. They wanted to show me they were in total control, that I was completely at their mercy. The more I cried out, the more I begged for relief, the more I would fuel and energize their dark fantasies. If I would plead for my life or regress or call out for my mommy or daddy, that would really get them off.

of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 classic “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” may have been history’s first behavioral profiler.

Бомбисты обычно подпадают под одну из трёх категорий. Первые — личности, стремящиеся к власти, которых привлекает разрушение как таковое. Вторые — выполняющие «особую миссию» и испытывающие возбуждение от разработки, изготовления и установки взрывных устройств. И третьи — прирожденные технари, которые получают наслаждение от гениальности создаваемого ими механизма.

More police and more courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates. This is the lesson from other countries with far lower numbers than ours.

an important consideration for anyone dealing with repeat violent offenders. Many of these guys are quite charming, highly articulate, and glib.

Profiling is like writing. You can give a computer all the rules of grammar and syntax and style, but it still can’t write the book.

Then there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway, he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, "Fuck you, Mr. Douglas." Rather than getting all complicated, I'd bow back, smile, and say, "Fuck you, too.

I think it's important to underscore here that when they realized they couldn't stage a successful abduction without being resisted or at least witnessed, they left without having committed their intended crime. Both men were mentally ill, and in Lawson's case, a pretty good argument could be made for criminal insanity. Yet when circumstances did not favor the success of the crime, they refrained from committing it. They were not under such a compulsion that they were compelled to act. So I will say it again for the record: in my opinion and based on my experience, the mere presence of a mental disorder does not let an offender off the hook. Unless he is completely delusional and does not comprehend his actions in the real world, he chooses whether or not to hurt someone else. And the truly bonkers ones are easy to catch. Serial killers are not.

As long as individual men and women have the power and agency to exercise free will and choice, evil will continue to exist, and it must be challenged and fought.

To know the offender, you have to look at the crime.

I didn’t tell this to my own children for a long time because I didn’t want them to think that crime does pay, but I learned from it that if you can sell people your ideas and keep them interested, you can often get them to go along with you.

What took place? This includes everything that might be behaviorally significant about the crime. Why did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken? Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every behaviorally significant factor in the crime? And this, then, leads to: Who would have committed this crime for these reasons?

Due to the remarkable advances in communications technologies, we find ourselves living at a time when it is far easier to radicalize and inspire hate than ever before. The internet and social media have made it much easier to spread philosophies like Franklin's than it was in his time, and he would undoubtedly be delighted to see his face appearing frequently on sites like YouTube.

With today's technology, conversations that used to be limited to basements and meeting halls, the kinds of words and places that first helped radicalize Franklin, now have tens of thousands of participants online. Corrosive ideas, hate speech, conspiracies, and even potential crimes have a home online unlike any they have ever known.

The journey to reckon with our nation's searing history of racial hatred, intolerance, and discrimination is ongoing, and there are no neutrals in that struggle. The shadow cast by Joseph Paul Franklin and his like is long and dark, so the sunlight to eradicate it must be even brighter and stronger. [p. 290]

He blamed the influence of alcohol and some of the owners of the torched properties for leaving combustible materials lying around. You can imagine what I thought of that one; it’s like a rapist excusing himself by saying his victim was asking for it.

And while most abused or neglected children develop coping skills and strategies to overcome a difficult upbringing, the ones who don’t often grow into angry, hostile, frustrated adults and become violent offenders.

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.

It would be up to FBI profilers and the investigative support unit at Quantico, Virginia, to penetrate this criminal’s mind. John Douglas pioneered behavioral profiling for the FBI. He and others developed the investigative tool from over 25 years of interviews with convicted killers, arsonists, rapists, and bombers. John Douglas: “When someone asks for a profile, what they are looking for are characteristics which include a gender, age, race, sometimes body typing, educational level, and occupational type.

One of the reasons our work is even necessary has to do with the changing nature of violent crime itself. We all know about the drug-related murders that plague most of our cities and the gun crimes that have become an everyday occurrence as well as a national disgrace. Yet it used to be between people who in some way knew each other.

I've talked about how important it is for us to be able to step into the shoes and mind of the unknown killer. Through our research and experience, we've found it is equally important—as painful and harrowing as it might be—to be able to put ourselves in the place of the victim. Only when we have a firm idea of how the particular victim would have reacted to the horrible things that were happening to her or him can we truly understand the behavior and reactions of the perpetrator.

My colleague Roy Hazelwood, who taught the basic profiling course for several years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide the analysis into three distinct questions and phases—what, why, and who: What took place? This includes everything that might be behaviorally significant about the crime. Why did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken? Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every behaviorally significant factor in the crime? And this, then, leads to: Who would have committed this crime for these reasons? This is the task we set for ourselves.

Regardless of the profession you're in, when you get out into the field, you start realizing all the big and little things they never taught you in school or training. For one, what do you do with your gun in various situations, such as while using a public men's room stall? Do you leave it on your belt down on the floor? Do you try to hang it up on the stall door? For a while I tried holding it in my lap, but that made me very nervous. It's the kind of thing each of us faces, but not the kind of thing you feel comfortable discussing with your more experienced colleagues.

Years later, when I headed up the Investigative Support Unit, I would get asked if—with all that we knew about criminal behavior and crime-scene analysis—any of us could commit the perfect murder. I always told them no, that even with all we knew, our postoffense behavior would still give us away.

It's what we are. There was something inherent, deep within the criminal's mind and psyche, that compelled him to do things in a certain way. Later, when I started research into the minds and motivations of serial murderers, then, when I began analyzing crime scenes for behavioral clues, I would look for the one element or set of elements that made the crime and the criminal stand out, that represented what he was. Eventually, I would come up with the term signature to describe this unique element and personal compulsion, which remained static. And I would use it as distinguishable from the traditional concept of modus operandi, which is fluid and can change.

There are, of course, varying perspectives on the issue of criminal responsibility. Dr. Stanton Samenow is a psychologist who collaborated with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson on a pioneering study at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., about criminal behavior. After years of firsthand research that gradually stripped away most of his preconceived notions, Samenow concluded in his penetrating and insightful book, Inside the Criminal Mind, that “criminals think differently from responsible people.” Criminal behavior, Samenow believes, is not so much a question of mental illness as character defect.

As with Thomas Vanda’s doctor, people in the helping professions often don’t want to be prejudiced by knowing the gory details of what the criminal did. But as I always tell my classes, if you want to understand Picasso, you have to study his art. If you want to understand the criminal personality, you have to study his crime.

Now, if you believe that someone like Thomas Vanda is insane, fine. I think a case can be made for that. But once we’ve carefully examined the data, I think we have to face that whatever the Thomas Vandas of the world have, it may not be curable. If we accepted that, they wouldn’t be let out so fast to keep doing what they do over and over again. Remember, this murder wasn’t his first.

As Al Brantley, a former Behavioral Science instructor who is now a member of the Investigative Support Unit, put it in one of his National Academy lectures, “The best predictor of future behavior, or future violent acting out, is a past history of violence.

twenty-five years of observation has also told me that criminals are more “made” than “born,” which means that somewhere

The internalizer is the loner, the asocial who has to put emotional and physical distance between himself and everyone else.

If you rob a bank at gunpoint, the gun is part of your M.O. True signature, on the other hand, is the aspect of the crime that emotionally fulfills the offender, and so it remains relatively the same.

M.O. changes as the offender becomes more experienced and proficient. But signature is a critical clue in coming up with the UNSUB’s personality and motive.

Just as we tell parents that their greatest weapon against child molesters is being able to instill self-esteem in their kids, I could tell this radio audience that sexual predators home in on victims in whom they sense a lack of self-esteem and self-worth—the ones they feel they can entice, mold to their own purposes, and separate from family, friends, and values.

Just as the basics of the human mind and motivation remain the same, so do the essentials of good criminal investigation.

Despite the advantages offered by advances in technology, computers, DNA, serology, and arson science—and the reevaluation of such standard tools as fingerprints and ballistic analysis—there remains no substitution for good gumshoe detective work and investigative analysis.

The bottom line is that we’re never going to take the human element out of crime solving.

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.

Stated as simply as possible: Why? + How? = Who.

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.

But women are not the predators and they are not the problem. Of course, while most of what we say about development and motive relates to men, the better women understand these processes and issues, the better they will be able to recognize these behaviors and combat them.

Regardless of the profession you’re in, when you get out into the field, you start realizing all the big and little things they never taught you in school or training.

assassin types tend to be paranoid and don’t like eye contact.

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.

most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to begin with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives.

The best predictor of future behavior, or future violent acting out, is a past history of violence.

To understand the “artist,” you must study his “art.” 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.

If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting.” John Douglas, former FBI profiler, from his book Mind Hunter

Inadequate people have to try to feel worthy, and one way to feel worthy is to find someone else unworthy or inferior. If you can’t find many people less worthy than yourself on individual merits, then you have to find them inferior by race or creed.