by Judy raKowsKy
Professor Ann Wolbert Burgess was on the dais, and Robsham Theater was packed on a late afternoon in September. But this crowd wasn’t there for one of Burgess’s typically oversubscribed forensics classes. Students, faculty, administrators, and law enforcement officials had turned out to witness a reunion, of sorts, between two of the minds behind Mindhunter. The hit Netflix crime drama features fictional representations of Burgess and retired FBI Special Agent John E. Douglas, her longtime colleague, co-author, and a criminal investigator with whom she helped develop the theory and techniques of criminal profiling. Known for years among fellow expert crime-solvers for their work revolutionizing the way law enforcement and health professionals understand deeply disturbed criminal minds, Burgess and Douglas have gained unexpected notoriety as the bases of fictional characters Wendy Carr and Holden Ford in Mindhunter. The show, which has been renewed for a second season, drew a large viewership and significant fan base in its first year. (Indeed, interest in attending the Connell School’s The Minds Behind Mindhunter program was so high that it live-streamed the event on the Boston College Facebook page.) The criminal profiling approach to serial killers developed by Douglas and Special Agent Robert Ressler (grizzled, chain-smoking agent Bill Tench in the show), originated in the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI. It was depicted first in the novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988), the source of the 1991 Academy Award-winning movie. But Netf lix’s Mindhunter sticks close to real life, drawing heavily from a 1995 true-crime book by Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (Pocket Books). Neither the books nor Mindhunter acknowledged the role of Burgess’s foundational research in the 1970s, when she and
Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom conducted a study based on 146 interviews with rape victims ranging in age from 3 to 73, and published their findings in the American Journal of Nursing. The study caught the attention of FBI brass, who were under pressure to improve police rape investigations amid a wave of unsolved sexual assaults and homicides. Criminal motivation was largely a mystery and the field of forensics comparatively primitive when then-FBI Director William Webster issued a mandate to provide police and agents with training in investigating rapes and interviewing rape victims, Burgess said. At a time when rape victims were not coming forward and convictions were elusive, the FBI hired Burgess as a lecturer at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where she helped advance the FBI’s understanding of violent sexual crimes through her pioneering research on rape trauma syndrome. Webster told the investigators he wasn’t looking for “shoebox research,” Burgess recalled. He didn’t want notes collecting dust without links or follow-up. Burgess would become the principal investigator on the Criminal Personality Project, helping to move criminal profiling out of the shoebox and into a database.
John Douglas, Ann Burgess, and Brian Griffin discuss a clip from Netflix’s Mindhunter Photograph: Lee Pellegrini
boston college william f. connell school of nursing
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