MindHunter /// Dr. Ann Burgess

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All right, with me, I have the wonderful and very impressive, the brilliant Dr. Ann Burgess.
And I also have Stephen, is it Constantine? Yep, you got it. Boom, nailed it.
All right.

They are here to talk with us about their new book, A Killer by Design, Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. And for everyone out there that may not be aware, Dr.

Ann Burgess is the real-life woman and doctor behind the character, the female character from the hit Netflix series, Mindhunter. So welcome, both of you.

Both of you are currently working at Boston College. Do I have that right? Yes, School of Nursing, Canel School of Nursing.
And how long have you been there, Doctor?

I started here back when this actually the study was going on. Then I left to go to University of Pennsylvania and then back in 2000.
So essentially back since 2000.

One thing that I find absolutely fascinating about this new book is Mindhunter the Show really kind of shows us and highlights some of the very infant

the infancy of the behavior science unit but your book really discusses a lot of stuff that was even pre behavior science unit and or behavioral science unit and

sort of the genesis of how that all came about and a lot of the behind the scenes work as well as your transition because you were a doctor before this whole thing got started, correct? That's right.

I was. What was your expertise? Because you find yourself at the FBI in a very different way than many find themselves at the FBI, right?

Most people like aspire to be an FBI agent and they spend their whole life working toward that. They get educated.
Maybe they serve some time in the military.

They, you know, keep their nose clean, stay out of trouble, and hope one day that they can be an agent.

But for you, you're so brilliant that the FBI calls you on the phone and says, hey, we need to talk to her. Tell us a little bit about that.
Sure.

I was at Boston College, and this was back at a time when the issue of rape was just starting to be, if you will, put on a front burner.

The women's movement had been pushing for better treatment, better care for victims.

And so I, with a colleague, Linda Lytle-Holmstrom, who was in the sociology department at Boston College, actually approached me to see see if I would join her in a project on rape victims.

And she was having trouble finding rape victims, which is still a problem. They are very, they are very hidden and very silent.
But I knew that they would be coming into a hospital.

And since I had access to the major hospitals in Boston, I said, let me see if we can get access somehow. And I did.
I was able to work the project through the Boston City Hospital.

And we were called every time a rape victim came in and we went right in at the time and we followed the victim. So that was over a

one-year period. We saw 146

people

between the ages of three and 73. And that made up the basis, if you will, for the study.
And out of that study came three rather important papers.

One was the back in 1973, it was just called the rape victim in the Emergency Room, and it was published in the American Journal of Nursing, which is our major journal.

The year later, Linda and I started publishing what we call the Rape Trauma Syndrome, and that was distributed to a larger audience, a psychiatric mental health audience.

Well, at the same time, as this was, our study was going on, the

FBI was getting pressure to do something about teaching rape investigation. And so Roy Hazelwood got tasked with that.
That was his assignment.

And he happened to be out on the West Coast at the Los Angeles Police Department and was kind of bemoaning the fact that he had this new assignment. Did anybody know anything about rape, etc.

And after his, he was actually talking on hostage negotiation, which was the big issue for them at that time.

Rita Connect, a police officer, came up to him and said she had just read this article in the American Journal of Nursing. Now, Rita was also a nurse.

She was a nurse that then went on to become a police officer. But she told Roy that this article, maybe he would like to look up the authors because they were on the East Coast.
And Roy did.

Actually, I got a call. from Roy.
I was a little bit unnerving because the way they ask for you, they say this is the FBI and etc.

And I'm sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, you know, they make it sound like you've done something wrong. I know, I know, my income tax or something.

And then I thought, and then I thought, he said, well, did you write this article, the rape victim in the emergency room? And I thought, oh, my heavens, did I say something bad in that article?

And then he relaxed a bit, and that very authoritative FBI voice went away. He was more relaxed.

And he said, we'd like to invite you down to teach our agents about rape since this is a new area etc etc and that's it that's how it happened

I went down there I was interested and told him I wanted to see what they were teaching their investigators about rape because that's something that I learned from the women's groups that they and rape crisis centers that they were not very happy with the way investigations were going So that and once I was down there, they were being told by their new director, who happened to to be William Webster, that they had to start doing their own research because the FBI Academy was the education arm, if you will, of the FBI.

And so

I did do a project with Roy first, and then Roy had introduced me to Bob Ressler and to John Douglas. And once that happened, I think the rest of the book kind of goes into how we worked.

It was first called the Criminal Personality Project because we wanted to do more than one type of criminal. And we actually started out with the serial killer,

which of course is what

the book is based on. But also they were just starting

a more organized way of doing profiling. And so

that was a second objective of that. initial project.
Well, and you become so valuable to what it is that they want to do in the future, right?

Because they're bringing you in really in large part from, and again, I'm just some dumb guy here taking a guess, but it looks to me like they bring you in because you have a wealth of knowledge and understanding in regard to these rape victims and, you know, sexual assault survivors and persons that had to go through that horrible experience.

But they bring you in because they are now transitioning.

The FBI is in a bit of a transition period where rather than just identifying and catching catching and stopping crime, we want to kind of learn and research why does this stuff happen and who commits these.

But to have a good understanding of that, we also need to have a really good understanding of the victims as well. Absolutely.

And victimology, if you notice in their writings and even today, that victimology is almost the very first thing that they look for to analyze who the victim is when there's been a homicide.

And I think the other important thing is they were getting these cases in which they couldn't come up with a motive.

It wasn't, you know, like a white-collar crime or it wasn't a criminal enterprise or something like that. And so that really is where we

put a lot of effort in analyzing the data that we got from the 36 killers that we specifically studied. And that's where we understood that it was a sexual homicide.

So we added a category to the existing categories for homicide. And as you say, yes,

it was very important. I also had wanted to speak for the victim that didn't survive.

I felt that we were, Linda and I were speaking for, obviously, for victims who did survive, but there had to be something that we could say about the victim that did not.

So that was one of my particular interests. And what I love and what I'm so fascinated and impressed by your work

in direct regard to is you seem to me to be the one that's going to have to organize all of the chaos. Right?

Like, like Douglas and Hazelwood and Wrestler, they all are, they all know what they're doing.

They, you know, maybe not educated in the same ways that you are and don't share the same expertise, but they certainly have a bit of a knack for it.

And you're kind of brought in to not only help with the victimology and then understanding rape victims and just the crime of rape anyway,

but to organize what it is that they are already somewhat actively doing, right?

It's applying not just organization to it, but also how do we learn from what we're doing? And then how do we teach others what we've learned? Right.

That's exactly. But even more important was to get it written down.
They had a, their profession was more

word of mouth. They would teach, you know, about cases and so forth, but a lot wasn't written down.

And so I can remember asking them what they were, what kind of a script were they using for interviewing the serial killers? And they didn't have one. It was like, we just keep them talking.

I thought, well, they certainly do talk. I mean, that is one characteristic of serial killers.
They usually like to talk.

But they didn't have any categories, any organization.

And so, as you say, that's exactly what the project was maybe and stephen was really good at pulling all of that out from what we did with the agents and he can probably speak better to that part of um of the book yeah absolutely i would just i would just add that um one thing that's important to remember is in the late 70s early 80s when dr burger was doing her work with victims of sexual assault and sexual violence it was actually one of the uh three most common crimes in the country at the time,

but it was unknown, unresearched.

And, you know, in response, the FBI was under immense pressure to start figuring out what they could do about this, how they could respond. And that's the reason that they really sought Dr.

Burgess out and brought her in is because she was pretty much the only person out there at the time that had any expertise on the topic.

And there's so much science and psychology involved, especially when we talk about serial offenders, right? Whether it be a serial rapist or a serial killer, there's so much to learn from

them and their actions and

how they kind of become this. Because with a lot of them, and

it's probably

as much nature as nurture in most cases, but there's, you know, they rarely wake up one day and just decide to start killing people or to start sexually assaulting people.

There is something that

they are kind of created and there's a way to learn. We're never going to be able to turn the faucet completely off, right?

But there is a way to kind of learn from it, not only to help us better detect these types of crimes, but also

solve them and have some resolve. Yeah, so that was one of the points.
How can we decrease the number of victims by understanding quicker what is triggering all this?

and one thing you said is almost exactly what one of the serial killers said to me he said you know I didn't wake up in the get up in the morning and start thinking this is what I'm going to do today

but think and that's what we tried to get at so if that isn't what happened then what did happen that took you down that road for to kill so many victims So that's why we were trying to explore the mind, the thinking patterns, because thoughts drive behavior.

And that's what this was all about, is to try to find out what the thoughts were. And a lot of these creeps, they're fantasizing about this sort of stuff well in advance.

And those fantasies are changing and evolving or devolving throughout a period of time until they end up

actually,

and I hate to phrase it this way because these are horrible acts.

once they finally get up the courage to go out and try to live out one of these horrible fantasies that they've created. Yeah, that's absolutely right.
That's one thing that Dr.

Burgess and the team really found in their studies was that fantasy was a common element, and these offenders practiced, rehearsed these fantasies over and over in their heads until fantasy itself became more authentic than reality.

You know, fantasy to them was the sacred, and so they had to act that out. That was

their compulsion. That was their need.
Stephen, talk about the book a little bit.

And I mean like the behind the scenes type of stuff with the book because there's no question about it dr burgess has led a very fascinating and brilliant career so it

the the interesting level

was going to be a 10 no matter what but now you come in and we're going to we're going to piece this thing out and put together a story and and and add some storytelling to it tell us what is your role and your uh uh working relationship with dr burgess Sure, yeah, it was wonderful to work with Dr.

Burgess.

You know, she's smart, she's done amazing things, she's able to share her knowledge in really easily accessible ways, which is very helpful for writing the book.

And one of her ideas early on with this book was not just to tell the story of the individual cases, which is something that had been done before, but was to sort of fold these individual cases into the greater story of profiling itself,

how profiling got started,

how there was intense opposition to it at the beginning,

and what it took for it to become successful. So that's a story that's never really been told.
And also telling it from her perspective as one of the few women that was in the FBI at that time

and sort of that larger cultural context is really unique.

And I learned a lot from her. I think readers will learn a lot from her as well.
And it was just, you know, she's fantastic. She's really inspiring.

And I think a lot of that comes through in the book. Well, and Killer by Design is a fantastic book, but I want to give a little praise that needs to be given here.

So True Crime Garage, we've done 540 some episodes, and then off the record, we've done over 130. So we've covered a lot of cases on this show.

And now, one thing that I really strive to do is I really,

and this is my own sickness that I have, and I don't think that there's a cure for it, but I have this drive that I have to have some kind of intimate knowledge or understanding of a case and of a crime, and maybe even the perpetrator and victims themselves.

And two

tools that I keep in my toolbox here in the garage, and I, these are two of the

most useful reference materials that I've collected over the years. One is the crime classification manual.

Dr. Burgess, you are directly responsible for this.

As well as the sexual homicide patterns and motives. So I wanted to make sure

I gave you some credit where credit is due. And thank you for those wonderful reference materials.

They're educational to me,

the person that's never stepped foot inside of Quantico or any other FBI office for that matter. Very good.
Very good. Let's talk about, because Stephen kind of touched on this a little bit.

You get the call from Roy Hazelwood.

What's going through your mind? Like after you get off the phone, are you excited? Do you look at this as an opportunity or do you look at it like it's the FBI? I don't want to piss them off.

I'm at least going to take the meeting to

make them happy. And again, John Douglas told me at the time when he joined the FBI, and this was his joke, his words was that the FBI was male, Yale, or sorry, I know I'm going to get this wrong.

Male, pale, and Yale is what he said described the FBI as when he joined.

So you're a woman with this wonderful education and background and a superb expertise in something that they need to learn about. You have to feel very much like an outsider, not just...

not just being a woman, but also your background. Well, I was more curious, I think, is the word I would use.

I felt I needed to do it because I had never gone before a totally male group. You know, I had only really, up until that point,

talked to rape crisis centers, which is predominantly female, or nursing groups, because we were trying to get all of the emergency room nurses educated on the care of the rape victim.

So when that came across

my desk, I thought, well, I should do it. I want to be fair, right? Equal, males and females.
And then I said, I want to know what they actually were learning.

And I was always very curious about Quantico and all the stories I had heard. And I think

then getting there was really something interesting because you fly into Washington Airport, Dulles, well, not Dulles, we went to the other one.

And they put you in this car and you drive and drive and drive and it gets denser and denser and denser. And it was at night and there were trees all.
And I thought, where is this place

and it's about an hour's drive and finally it kind of pops up like brigadoon out of nowhere and that's it

so

you get there at night and of course you're on the next morning and that was a going to be an interesting episode because they're all sitting there they're all in their little look-alike shirts

pencils and you know looking like real students and they're sitting at these desks that have buzzers on it. And they tell me that if I want to ask a question and get an answer, I can ask it.

And people have to buzz the right answer. And you can tell how many are getting what you're saying and how many aren't.

And they're throwing all of this technology at me, which I was really impressed with because I teach. And, of course, I'm always looking for new things.

But I ended up not obviously asking them any questions because I really didn't want to know if they knew the answers. But it turned out to to be very positive.

And after the lecture and going up for there,

it's just like an academy, you know, you cafeteria walk through and meeting all the people, the others in the behavioral science unit, was really a very positive, positive experience.

And I really felt comfortable and felt like if they asked me again, I certainly would do it. So that was my first day, my first experience, if you will, down at the academy.

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What is it like?

Most of us will never experience this part. You've experienced so many things that most of us never will.

But

what is it like to turn on your TV and see somebody playing a version of you or a dramatized

create. You know, I know they took some creative liberties and things with some different directions on the show, but what is it like to be told we're making a show about a portion of your career and

we're making a character of you? Right. Well, see, I didn't even know about the show until I started getting mind hunting.

This Netflix series evidently came out and I started getting requests to do interviews. And I thought I better watch this.
And,

you know the first session of the first season you know they they do something which I think would never have happened in a hostage negotiation the guy that that threatens to do what he was going to do actually does and and and that was

I said that's not right they would you know no

neither Bob or John would ever do anything like that for hostage negotiation so I was a little

that that was kind of a

curious reaction. And then the second, nothing.
And then the third is where this Dr.

Wendy Carr comes in and I was really really interested to see how much they get right or not get right and I was very pleased to see that they got most of it right in terms of what actually happened.

That really came through when the agents came up, they wanted to talk. I was impressed with what they were doing.
We talked about a book and that whole scene where

Douglas supposedly writes on his paper book Did happen. Actually, it did happen.

What I didn't like is, I think you've already already touched on that, is the way they portrayed our backgrounds of the three of us. They couldn't have gotten them more wrong, as you could say.

That was really,

they really dressed up the personal life of each individual. And I've spoken to John Douglas a couple of times, and I know that they took a lot of liberties on his personal life.

And I've had people, you know,

it's hard to distinguish for a lot of people the difference between TV and real life. And some people were not even really aware that this is sort of a version of what really happened

and that there are real people behind some of those characters.

And I've even had people ask me because I have a decent knowledge or some knowledge of the behind-the-scenes stuff back then just because I've read so many of the books that have been available over the years.

I love Roy Hazelwood's books and wrestlers' books. And, of course, Douglas, he seems like

he's peddling a new book every year, and every one of them are fascinating. But, you know, so since I've read all the books, I've had people say, like,

you know, did Wrestler really have those troubles with his child?

And I'm like, no, I'm like, the personal life stuff is really dressed up to add

some added. which wasn't even needed.

I mean, the work that you guys were doing and the cases that you guys were working on were so exciting in their own that I don't think it was necessary to dress that stuff up. But it made for

a very exciting show. Sure.
Well, my son called me after he watched it and he said, Mother, what have you not told us?

You're like, you know everything, son. Don't worry about it.

One thing, so take me through this real quick, too, because when you first come on at the FBI, you're acting more in a role of almost like a consultant.

But at some point you become a real-life FBI agent. Is that correct? No, I never become an agent, but I'd come in as a consultant, probably as a lecturer, then consultant,

but never

had nothing to do with the FBI as a agent, no.

But you're working

in the walls of Quantico, and you are a very instrumental part in some of these meetings that they're having

when the quote-unquote mind hunters are sitting around and kicking around ideas about the crimes, the perpetrator, and the victim. Like you, you, you are every bit of a mind hunter as these

people that you worked with. I mean, you, you provided so much knowledge as far as like post

crime behavior by the perpetrator

and really added a lot of the psychology of the

victimology and things of that nature as well. Oh, right.

Those sessions were so important. And that's actually what we decided to do for this book is that luckily we had transcribed all of these profiling sessions and anything that they had done.

So it was not left to people's memory. And

that...

Looking at the crime scene, I mean, it was absolutely incredible to go to a session. They'd have all these crime scenes laying on the table.

They'd all be sitting around and they would just go back and forth and they were trying to figure out what would be an unsolved case and they would go back and forth to try to work out exactly what they could then put together in what they called the profile and send it back to the local

police department that had made the request. And that's what we were trying that and Stephen can speak much more to that because he helped in the writing it so that it made more sense.

It certainly made sense in terms of being there, but to organize it into some categories and things like that is what we tried to do and get published because we wanted to publish not only that was the promise that not only publish the book which you've mentioned as a sexual homicide, but to get some articles out to the wider audience.

We published some of the papers in American Journal of Psychiatry and any of the other kinds of journals that would go out to not only law enforcement.

Yeah, I think it's important to remember too that in the Hoover era of the FBI, it was completely closed to outsiders. You know, you were either in or you weren't.
And Dr.

Burgess joined in her role just after that. So for her to be there as, you know, sort of in a consultant position was unheard of at the time.

So she was...

you know, she quickly carved out her own niche and she was every bit as important to the beginnings of profiling and the BSU as any of the agents there.

But just for her to be there in the first place was a really big deal.

Well, and one thing that I think is absolutely fascinating, and it's kind of missed, I think, a lot, is that, you know, detectives or beat cops will say, yeah, you know, there's a very big difference between FBI and what we do.

And we don't,

you know, maybe I don't understand what the profilers do, but in all reality, beat cops and detectives have been using their own form of profiling for decades before the FBI even started really organizing the whole idea and educating.

I mean, that's part of

solving crimes and always has been, you know, coming up with ideas about the victim, ideas about the perpetrator, why they did what they did, and profiling the crime scene itself.

You guys are just taking this, you know, a hundred steps further and coming back to local law enforcement and saying, look, we've kind of organized this.

We've learned much more about it

and

reinforcing, hey, you're kind of already doing it. Now here's a way to do it better, more efficiently, and use it at the local level.
Sure.

In fact, I was always amazed at one of the first things when I started watching them do this profiling,

they were so focused on the car, if this was a car was involved, and they would spend so much time on trying to figure out what type of car it was and how they could help the local police find them.

And it got so funny that they, and they would match the car to the personality of the suspect.

And so it would get so that they would say to one of us that were there, one of these outsiders, you know, what type of car they thought that we drove.

So you're right, but they were using the tools, if you will, that they were most familiar with and most comfortable with, which, of course, were cars. And I always had to laugh at that.

But we moved them a little bit beyond the cars, that's for sure.

So the book is called A Killer by Design, Murderers, Mind Hunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind.

Tell me about

one of the murders

in the book. Just a little bit about one of the murders that

you discussed in the book.

We start off with the murdering of the little newsboy out in Nebraska and we like that to start because it was one that really caught the attention, we think, of the outside group, if you will, outside of law enforcement.

And that was where the body of a young 12-year-old boy was found and there were no clues, nothing to go on. And Bob Russer was the one that was assigned this.
You know,

each agent would get an assignment. Sometimes it was just they were rotating.
But anyway, so he came up with the, we had profiled it as best we could when the information came in.

And it was like in September, late August, and then nothing happened until November, late November, when the snow started and the two hunters had come across this young boy half covered in snow.

And that was important because

the

way that the

victim had been left they differed and so they weren't sure was this the same person the killer the suspect and as they went through the things they decided definitely it was and and worked and tried to figure out how the why the leaving of the body was different in each of the two places one being right by the side of the road and one being inside into a wooded area.

And you could begin to see the escalation of the kinds of things that happened. So I think that was important because the whole community, this was very, very upsetting to the whole community.

When the second profile, Bob changed his profile to where he was even identifying that he thought this was an airman off of Offutt Air Base, which was right there

near the town.

And he even got it to where I think the only thing he was off was, was it an airman

third class or an airman fourth class? I mean, he was that close. And when they finally,

because they had used media to tell everybody to be on the lookout for certain things, it was a very observant teacher who happened to notice a suspicious car.

got its license plate all except I think the last digit, was able to call that in. And once they were, they quickly were able to figure out the last digit.
And sure enough, they zeroed in on

this Jobert, Jean Joubert, it turned out to be, who was at Offutt Air Base. And that was

the other important thing about the case is when Bob was presenting the case at two agents

in law enforcement back at Quantico.

After one of the classes, the detective came up to him and he said, boy, the case you've just presented, Joubert, sounds so much like a case that I had up in Maine. He was from Maine.

And he went back, sent everything to Bob. They reviewed it again.
And sure enough, that had been John Jobert's first victim. And he had been a teenager at the time.
And that was after that.

It was unsolved. He joined the service.
That's why he went into the service to get away and ended up out in Nebraska.

So the congressional record was the place where this was written up, and everybody was given

kudos for the work that they had done on it.

I think, Stephen,

you

saw how

the working of the groups together was really, really important. Yeah, absolutely.
That's one of the reasons we, you know, chronologically it made sense, but also in terms of the effect that it had.

That's why we kicked off with that case. There wasn't a lot of inter-agency cooperation at the time.
People were,

you know, a little hesitant to necessarily trust or allow the FBI into their investigations.

So one thing that was really big about that case was the Joubert case, was that it did rely on these different agencies and local investigators collaborating with their materials and their insights and sharing it all with the BSU so that the BSU could come up with an incredibly accurate profile, which they did, which as

was just said, that's why it was recognized in the record of Congress. And once the word got out there that the BSU used profiling to help solve this case that you know, was going nowhere,

that was sort of a catalyst. And people realized this is a tool that we could use as well.
And so a lot of local law enforcement officials started reaching out to the BSU and asking for their help.

And that was a big push forward in the eyes of the FBI and helping legitimize the whole process.

And to kind of flush that out a little bit for the listeners here as far as the crimes go, the reason why the FBI, why Bob Russeller has to be brought in and

profiling was so important in this case, as both of you said,

there's really no leads for the local law enforcement to work off of at the time because basically you have a child abduction and unfortunately later a body found.

But we don't have witnesses to the abduction. We don't have witnesses to the body dump.
And

really, there's no breadcrumb trail until the FBI gets involved and starts telling the local detectives, you know, here's what we can, here's what we think about the likely offender here.

And, and really that starts, starts them on the right trail to apprehend a very dangerous individual who's committing one of the scariest crimes out there. Yeah, absolutely.

There were not a lot of breadcrumbs. It was up to the agents to look at the crime scenes, and that was all they had to work with,

and to, you know, take from that and sort of parse information from that as to who the most likely suspect could be. Yeah.
Why did he,

you know, why did the offender abduct at the time and date when he did?

And what does the body dump site tell us and how the body is found and the injuries to the victim and how the victim is tied or not tied?

Those are all things that wrestler and the team are going to come in and try to fill in those blanks and put meaning to those different actions that were taken by the offender. Absolutely.

And then Dr. Burgess also has all the transcripts from that case, from that profiling session, and a lot of other cases we talk about in the book.

So you really get to see how the different agents thought about the profiling process, what went into it, and what makes that whole process tick.

So it's really interesting to just look at that in its rawest and cleanest form.

Yeah, and the other thing is John Jobert, when he was arrested and getting ready for trial, gave many good interviews. He was very open about talking that most of the,

talking about those two crimes, don't forget he never admitted to or told about the earlier crime. But that was the start of finding out how we could have the agents interview the suspects,

certainly after they were convicted, to get as much information as possible.

I felt like with this killer that he was in a weird way after apprehended or and probably most of his life, it sounded to me like he's trying to understand himself or why he does what he does or why he has the fantasies that he did.

But that's a characteristic of many of them, that they don't know why.

Remember even Monty Rissell in the Mindhunter series, when they come in and

the agent said, we're here to study people

like you and why they do it. And he says, well, I hope you find out why I did it because I don't know.

And that was so classic for many of the

serial killers. They didn't know.
They know that they're off and they know that there's something wrong with them, but they don't know why they are the way that they are. Right.

One thing that I thought was so beautiful here, Doctor, was

you kind of dedicated the book in memory of three of your former colleagues.

Wonderful people that had fascinating careers and did such good work. Could you tell us about each of those former colleagues just a little bit? Sure, sure.
Happy to.

Certainly Linda Lytle Holmstrom was most influential. She really got me into this whole field of victimology, if you will.
And Linda really taught me more of the research part. She was

schooled in the Chicago.

way of doing sociology where you took very specific copious notes on everything when you're doing an interview.

So when we would go in to see a victim, each one of us would write up our own notes, type them up, and then share the copy so that we had her version, if you will, from the more sociological view, and then you had my more psychological one.

So Linda

was very, very good at writing up. We actually did three books from that data set.
We did Rape, Crisis, and Recovery Recovery just to get the Rape Crisis group notified.

And then she did, she took lead on the victim of rape, which was more the sociological part.

So she, her career was in the health field, in the feminist field. She was a pretty strict feminist.

And she was just wonderful in terms of teaching me that and getting our, certainly getting our material published in a variety of journals.

That was the other thing is we published in, I think we published 25 separate articles from that whole data set, and they went into a variety of journals.

And then Roy Hazelwood was certainly instrumental, as we've already said, to get me down to Quantico.

And I wrote

a, we wrote a textbook. Roy and I wrote a textbook for called Rape Investigation.

And we had five editions. I mean, it was a very

received book on the investigation. Roy was a very kind, very caring kind of

agent, always interested in the victim. And

so that was, and his career, of course, is

pretty much as is written up in the book. And then the third person is Bob Ressler.

And Bob was really the

he really was the one behind getting this project going.

He had started out by going in and interviewing criminals, saying that if he was going to have to teach criminal psychology, he better talk to some criminals so he'd understand them a bit.

So he was spending time doing a lot of the,

let's see, like Squeaky From. He interviewed

that whole group out in California is kind of where he started. And I think he also started with Ed Kemper.

But he had the idea.

He was also the used,

he got into profiling well before John Douglas because John Douglas was really the junior of the two partners. But Bob was mentored by Pat Mulaney and Teaton, Howard Teaton, who were the two

agents that did what we called, I guess, more informal kinds of profiling. And so Bob would sit in on those and started learning the profiling there.
Then Bob came and

joined with Douglas for his partner. They always had each, all of the ages down there have a partner on in all of the work that they do.
So those three

who were so instrumental in terms of my career,

I certainly felt it was, I certainly wanted to acknowledge the work that they had done.

Stephen, is there anything that I didn't touch on that we want to make sure that we include for the listeners?

Yeah, I think

one thing that's really interesting to note about this book is it's not an academic book.

It does touch on the profiling process and how that works, but it's definitely more about the experiences that Dr. Burgess and the agents had of going through the

BSU and developing that in the late 70s and early 80s.

And one thing that really stood out to me during the writing process was today this concept of serial killers is just sort of a cornerstone of pop culture. You see it everywhere.

It's talked about a lot.

But back then nobody had interest in them. There was very little

attention even paid to them. Their crimes were considered sort of

irrational and just dismissed as that. And so for the BSU to actually say there's something deeper here.

And if we can understand the behaviors, the psychology of this group, we can learn something that maybe we can can apply to crimes at large and do something really good and beneficial.

That was incredibly innovative. And it's just really curious and

sort of just interesting to

follow their thought processes as it developed and see the impact it made on

investigations at large. Well, and one thing that I find that I think is really wonderful is that

the book features some of

some more well-known cases, you know, talks about Ed Kemper or BTK, but also some lesser-known offenders, the ski mask rapist, the Taco Bell strangler.

But the thing that I think is wonderful right now, and really the timing of this fantastic book coming out, is I feel like the general public is starving for more Mind Hunter on Netflix. And

I'm half, well, so I just completed the

last night, Glass of Bourbon in hand, next to the fire. I read the A Female Killer chapter.
So don't tell me how it ends, Doctor.

I'm about halfway through, and I'm loving every minute of it.

It's like reading the show Mindhunter for those that want more Mindhunter. It's a must read.

Is there another book in the future, though? Because your career is so fascinating. And I know Stephen wants to to tell more of your story.

I'm hoping that this one wasn't too painful to put together and maybe that there'll be another one here at some point. Stephen, you want to answer?

There's definitely a lot of material.

You know, as an academic, Dr. Burgess did save all these transcripts, as we mentioned, but also video recordings of interviews with killers.

photos, just all sorts of really fascinating and horrific stuff to see. So there's certainly plenty of material.

We will see. Time will tell.
And I want to thank both of you. Both of you are absolutely brilliant.

I want to thank you for tolerating me for the last 45 minutes and coming on here to talk about this fantastic book, A Killer by Design, by the great Dr. Ann Burgess and Stephen Constantine.

Thank you both. Thank you.
A pleasure. Thanks.

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