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.

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 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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mindhunter,

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.

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?

The toughest part of life isn't death after all. It's living and dealing with our pasts.

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.

…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..

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.

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.

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

Hank

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

nothing had changed in the years apart.

She fell into another mind--Hunt’s.

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.

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.

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.

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

The only thing unique about this offender was that his rationalization was cloaked in religion. “For the truly devout, they might provide rationale for

I’m hardly a stranger to the concept of bending rules to achieve a greater good.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

She grabbed her jacket, although the weatherman had promised a return to seasonable temperatures. But given his record, she saw no reason to trust him. What other occupation got to retain their jobs when they were right only half the time?

The difference is, the mental-health professionals start with the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality from that perspective.

Etna filed an unsuccessful suit against McDonald’s, claiming that her husband’s rampage was caused by eating too many hamburgers and Chicken McNuggets—that the high levels of monosodium glutamate they contained interacted with the lead and cadmium he had built up in his system during his years as a welder.

Back in the 1950s, Edward Gein had been a recluse living in the farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin—population 642.