Responding to a question from moderator Brian D. Griffin, a former prosecutor who helped convict Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez of first-degree murder, Burgess recalled the day she first met Douglas and Special Agent Ressler in Quantico. “They were sitting around the classroom talking about unsolved cases,” she said. Douglas and Ressler’s conversation showed that they did not have much use for psychology, she recalled. Their attitude was: “How can I go out and find someone who has an Oedipus complex?” Douglas said that psychologists’ notes from court and corrections files offered few insights to apply to future investigations. “If you go through records classified by psychologists throughout [the killers’] lives, they don’t mean anything.” He said that he and Ressler were soon impressed by Burgess’s insights from interviewing rape victims and her forensic scientist’s eye for patterns of behavior. They were struck by the applicability of Burgess’s study of heart attack victims, which profiled the characteristics of those who returned to work the fastest. “We have to reverse the engineering,” and interpret the profiling variables in a homicide, Douglas recalls saying at the time. They eventually came to look at the offender. The team began to analyze crimes for signs based on what was left behind: The criminal acts were either organized and preplanned, or disorganized, impulsive—apparently carried out by someone under the inf luence of alcohol or drugs, he said. They determined that the experts—the convicted killers whose crimes had defied understanding—ought to be interviewed. It was a game-changing idea. At the time, Douglas was traveling the country with Ressler doing training with local police departments. “Bob and I had downtime so we decided to go to the prisons. Let’s go talk to Charles Manson about his victim selection; let’s find out why they confess if someone confesses to a crime,” Douglas said.
Top to bottom: John Douglas and Ann Burgess Photograph: Lee Pellegrini
Video still from a prison interview with Ed Kemper Photograph courtesy: Ann Burgess
Douglas, Burgess, and Griffin Photograph: Lee Pellegrini
Criminal case photographs Photograph courtesy: Ann Burgess, John Douglas
6 voice | winter 2019
