Mindhunter Quotes

Behavior reflects personality.

There are certain crimes that are simply too cruel, too sadistic, too hideous to be forgiven.

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.

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

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

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 rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that’s one fewer bad guy to harm us. . . . Where I do not think there is much hope. . .is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do. . .because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives them satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to rehabilitate them.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The key attribute necessary to be a good profiler is judgment—a judgment based not primarily on the analysis of facts and figures, but on instinct.

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

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.

Keyes had told investigators that there were two texts that he studied closely, both written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI: Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, and Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas, in turn the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

So what can be done about dangerousness? How can we intervene in cases of mental instability or character defect before it’s too late?

This was a crime of power and rage and anger and I don’t know any cure for those in their most extreme form.

In constructing his profile, Brussel stated, he reversed the process, trying to predict an individual from the evidence of his deeds.

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.

My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In 1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women.

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

After a child's worst day, he or she still looks completely beautiful and innocent in sleep

the violent act is the result of a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy on the part of the assassin.

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

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.

It wasn’t until more than a century after Poe’s “Rue Morgue” and a half century after Sherlock Holmes that behavioral profiling moved off the pages of literature and into real life.

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.

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.

On the other hand, I saw situations in small towns down South where the coroner was the local funeral director. His idea of a postmortem exam would be to show up at the scene, kick the body, and say, “Yep, that boy’s sure dead.

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.

As parents we may not always be able to prevent all the horrible things that I've seen happen to kids. But we can prevent some of them if we try to understand the nature of the threat and the range of personality types and motivations of the threateners. It's critical that we try.

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.

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.

I wasn’t getting anything out of Richard Speck, mass murderer of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house, when I interviewed him in prison in Joliet, Illinois, until I abandoned my official Bureau detachment and berated him for taking “eight good pieces of ass away from the rest of us.” At that point he shook his head, smiled, then turned to us and said, “You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you from me.

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.

One final note here: you’ve probably noticed that whenever I mention serial killers, I always refer to them as “he.” This isn’t just a matter of form or syntactical convenience. For reasons we only partially understand, virtually all multiple killers are male. There’s been a lot of research and speculation into it. Part of it is probably as simple as the fact that people with higher levels of testosterone (i.e., men) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (i.e., women). On a psychological level, our research seems to show that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of dealing with his rage, a woman is more likely to channel it into something that would hurt primarily herself, such as drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicide attempts. I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own. The one exception to this generality, the one place we do occasionally see women involved in multiple murders, is in a hospital or nursing home situation. A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife. It does happen with something “clean” like drugs. These often fall into the category of either “mercy homicide,” in which the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering, or the “hero homicide,” in which the death is the unintentional result of causing the victim distress so he can be revived by the offender, who is then declared a hero. And, of course, we’ve all been horrified by the cases of mothers, such as the highly publicized Susan Smith case in South Carolina, killing their own children. There is generally a particular set of motivations for this most unnatural of all crimes, which we’ll get into later on. But for the most part, the profile of the serial killer or repeat violent offender begins with “male.” Without that designation, my colleagues and I would all be happily out of a job.

The problem with psychiatry in a forensic setting is that it is based on self-reporting. If you go to a therapist as a private patient, it is presumably because you are unhappy or mentally troubled and therefore have a vested interest in telling that therapist the truth so he or she can help you. If you see a therapist as an offender, your goal is to get out of whatever institution you’ve been placed in and therefore have a vested interest in telling that therapist whatever you have to in order to accomplish your goal. A psychiatrist might hope his patient is getting better; naturally, that will make him feel more effective as a professional and better as a human being. He will want to believe what the subject is telling him and give him a shot back in normal life. But if by doing so, he’s possibly putting the lives of more potential victims at risk, then that’s a price I, for one, am not willing to have us pay.

he emerged from his bedroom several minutes later wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

point. We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps: 1. Evaluation of the criminal act itself. 2. Comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the crime scene or scenes. 3. Comprehensive analysis of the victim or victims. 4. Evaluation of preliminary police reports. 5. Evaluation of the medical examiner’s autopsy protocol. 6. Development of a profile with critical offender characteristics. 7. Investigative suggestions predicated on construction of the profile. As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand— to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place.

would go back to the body dump site. The prison interviews helped us see and understand the wide variety of motivation and behavior among serial killers and rapists. But we saw some striking common denominators as well. Most of them come from broken or dysfunctional homes. They’re generally products of some type of abuse, whether it’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or a combination. We tend to see at a very early age the formation of what we refer to as the “homicidal triangle” or “homicidal triad.” This includes enuresis—or bed-wetting—at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or other children. Very often, we found, at least two of these three traits were present, if not all three. By the time we see his first serious crime, he’s generally somewhere in his early to mid-twenties. He has low self-esteem and blames the rest of the world for his situation. He already has a bad track record, whether he’s been caught at it or not. It may be breaking and entering, it may have been rape or rape attempts. You may see a dishonorable discharge from the military, since these types tend to have a real problem with any type of authority. Throughout their lives, they believe that they’ve been victims: they’ve been manipulated, they’ve been dominated, they’ve been controlled by others. But here, in this one situation, fueled by fantasy, this inadequate, ineffectual nobody can manipulate and dominate a victim of his own; he can be in control. He can orchestrate whatever he wants to do to the victim. He can decide whether this victim should live or die, how the victim should die. It’s up to him; he’s finally calling the shots.

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.

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.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. This one’s for you, Josh.

Becca had only had to deal with technology and administration issues and had thus far been removed from danger while she was in training for the more serious assignments. As the newest, and smallest, employee at the Society, she was too young and innocent to face the grim reality, anyway.

mindhunter, a highly trained profiler who could analyze a crime scene and extrapolate the criminal’s behavior.

The Voice of Reason?” He was unable to keep the disbelief from his voice. “That’s her nickname,” Becca chimed in. “And she is. The voice of reason, that is. I’ve listened to her for months now, and she’s a genius. She really helps people.

You haven’t become anything,” she whispered. “You’re the same man I fell in love with nearly ten years

It’s not like that. You don’t understand.” Jaid and Shepherd stepped toward the man in tandem. Taking out her cuffs, she said, “What I understand is that you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder.

agent was only back because Adam had brought some pressure to bear in the right places, but there was no reason for Hedgelin to know that. The man was right about one thing—Shepherd was a good agent. Even if he and Jaid were having absolutely no luck with Lambert.

nothing had changed in the years apart.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

No child should be hurt,” she later told Linda Kohl of the St. Paul Dispatch. “Every adult is responsible for the children’s welfare. If I could assist the police in bringing that person to justice, or assist in making sure that person never touches a child again—then it was right, it was important. We are responsible for our children, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s.” I firmly believe that if Janice Rettman’s attitude was more widely held and acted upon, we’d all be living in a lot safer, more humane society.

Now, ever since Suzanne died, every distress I experience—pain, tension, frustration, anxiety, loss, whatever—all of those things I offer up for her sake. I ask God to apply their merits back to Suzanne at the time of her final agony and terror so that her pain can be lessened by that same amount.

An innocent girl died because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a monster needed to vent his rage. But on another level, it accomplished a tremendous amount. It caused us to become much better people, more caring and compassionate. It also inspired us to become active in a civic and political way—fighting for justice for crime victims and their families. It made us reach out to help others whom we might never have helped before.

Their message to other families was simple: You will never again be the same and you will never again be whole, but you can get through this, you can go on, your lives can still have real value, and you can keep your loved one’s memory alive in a happy and positive way. “Fundamentally, we share our experience with them,” says Jack. “We say, ‘We’re making it, we’re not so special. You can make it too.’ “But it’s really not so much what you say; there are no magic words. It’s simply letting your compassion show through, and they’ll know you understand. You might just put your arm around them and simply say, ‘God, I’m sorry,’ and give them a hug and look into their eyes. And don’t be afraid if tears start falling. We’ve learned so much about ourselves and about grieving since this happened to us.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once you’ve been at another’s mercy you swear to yourself it will never happen again. You’ll get stronger, smarter, and history will never repeat itself because you’ve grown and changed and you’re not the same person anymore.

…none of us get through life unscathed…We all have to find a way to live with pain without letting it define us.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Serial killers play a most dangerous game. The more we understand the way they play, the more we can stack the odds against them.

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.

…unless you’ve got a thing for women with stratospheric IQ’s and abysmal taste in men. It’d taken her a long time to recognize that she consistently chose males who didn’t see her only their own reflection in her. Once she figured that out she started to regain a measure of her self respect..

Mindhunter,