(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
- Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to the Robsham
Theater here at Boston College
for what I think will be a
very interesting discussion.
My name is Brian
Griffin and for much
of my career, I was
a homicide prosecutor
here in Massachusetts
and am pleased
to say that many of the things
that we did during my
career were developed
by our two guests.
They are procedures, ways
of looking at homicide,
ways of looking at crime,
that didn't exist until they
applied their great
minds to criminals.
Without further ado, to my
right is Dr. Ann Burgess.
She is one of your professors
of psychiatric nursing
here at Connell School.
She is a pioneer in the
assessment and treatment
of rape victims.
She has spent her
entire career working
with victims, law
enforcement, and attorneys
on many cases,
developing formalized,
intellectual
approaches to crime.
She along with our other
guest, Dr. John Douglas
to her right and
others, worked together
to create a profiling
program within the FBI
and that is the subject
of the show Mindhunter.
Dr. John Douglas is a retired
special agent with the FBI.
He was an instructor at Quantico
as a criminal psychologist
in the mid to late 70s.
He began to work with serial
killers, interviewing them,
and this was a population that
was very little understood
at the time and he,
along with Dr. Burgess
and others including
Robert Ressler,
he of the third party
in the Mindhunter show,
established and formalized a
criminal profiling procedure.
They would interview
serial killers
and other individuals
who were criminals
and began to understand
and establish their motives
and the ways in
which they did crime
and were able to formalize
and develop means
of investigating those crimes.
Later, he was the director
of the criminal
profiling program.
He worked to solve
and explain more
than hundreds of cases,
probably as many as a thousand.
So first I will turn
to you, Dr. Burgess.
Did you wanna welcome
some people here tonight?
- Yes, I would.
I wanna welcome everybody.
Dean Gennaro, provost,
faculty, and students,
but most importantly I wanna
acknowledge Dean Gennaro
for hosting this.
This is a really,
really special time
and I wanna thank
her for being able
to more importantly
instill in faculty
and students the judge with
values that we all share
and also, for coasting
and for keeping the vision
of nursing really
to reach new heights
in the health care arena.
Next I'd like to
acknowledge our team
that we've been able to gather
and if you wanna
raise your hands
so people afterwards
can catch you
at the reception, this
is the original team
that we've been able
to gather together.
Alphabetically, Allen Burgess,
my husband, where is he?
- There, there he is.
(applauding)
- He was our pilot to get
into Quantico Air Base
and he also really coordinated
the 57 page data form
if you can believe it, 57 pages,
and they kept adding to it.
Marie Anne Clark.
Where's Marie Anne?
I hope she's here.
(clapping)
There she is.
She was our
editor-in-chief and boy,
did she keep us in line
and that little red
pencil would make sure
that everything we
said was very accurate.
Thank you, Marie.
And Ralph (mumbling).
There's Ralph.
(clapping)
He was our expert statistician
really at the start
of his career.
He now is internationally known
and we're very proud of him
but at the early days,
he really made sure
that we were most accurate
in our data presentation
and Carol Hartman,
is Carol here?
Ah, there's Carol.
(clapping)
Carol really was the
brains behind keeping us
with the psychodynamics
and helping us
to understand these
killers if you will,
the 36 of them, and especially
the motivational model.
And then we had some volunteers.
We had our children.
(laughing)
Sarah Gregorian and Benton.
Benton Burgess helped
too and they were our,
in the days before
we were funded,
they were our data
entry and did all kinds
of wonderful things.
(laughing)
If they wanted to have
supper that night.
(laughing)
John, would you wanna?
- Yeah, I wanted to
acknowledge Mark Olshaker
as co-author of Mindhunter.
(clapping)
Sometimes he thinks he's me.
I have to keep reminding
him he's not me
but he's an excellent
writer, Emmy award winner,
and right next to
him is his brother.
Johnathan, Dr. Johnathan
Olshaker here in Boston
so we welcome you.
(clapping)
- So I'd like to start
probably with a question
for you, Anne.
Your background was
academic and you were
working in nursing so
how did it come to be
that you ended up working
down with the FBI?
- We'll have to
back up a little bit
and say that when I first came
to Boston College as
an assistant professor,
just had finished my
dissertation research,
I had the good fortune
to meet Linda Holstrom.
Linda, is Linda here?
There's Linda.
(clapping)
And Linda invited
me to, she knew
that rape was gonna
be a big problem.
Nobody else seemed to
know it except the women
and Linda was finding
out but she invited me
to be part of the
study that she wanted
to look at what happened
with rape victims
and so we started a program
at Boston City Hospital.
It was a victim
counseling program
and every time a victim came in,
we would drive in, oftentimes
in the middle of the night,
because that's oftentimes
when victims would come in
and at the end of the project,
we did it for a year,
we saw 146 people
between the ages of three and 73
and we started writing
up our material
and one of the first articles
that we wrote for the
American Journal of Nursing
was published and at that time,
it coincided with
William Webster,
who was head of the FBI,
saying that rape investigation
had to be taught and
one of the road schools,
one of the agents,
Roy Hazelwood,
was out in Los Angeles
and met a Rita Connett
who was not only
a police officer
but a nurse, a registered nurse,
and she would go on weekends
and keep up her clinical skills
and work in the emergency room
and when Roy said, at one
of these road schools,
he just got this new assignment
of having to teach a course
in rape investigation,
he says does anyone
know anything
or anybody about that?
And Rita said she had
been reading an article
that Linda and I had published
with the simple title
of The Rape Victim
in the Emergency Ward and she
said I think that nurse
is out on the east coast.
Why don't you look her up?
And that's really what happened.
So I was invited
down to the academy
to teach on rape investigation
so I had been doing that
for a fair amount of time
when I met Bob and John.
- And Anne would
come into the unit
and speak with
primarily at the time
was Roy Hazelwood
became our expert
in interpersonal
violence but I heard Anne
was very interested
in what we had begun
and that was going into prisons,
conducting interviews
of serial murderers
but also we're doing some
assassin personalities as well
but it was done by me primarily
as a survival mode.
I came back to the FBI, I was
extremely young at the time,
I was 32 years of age kind of
like Holden Ford in the show,
although I had four
years of military,
I had seven years
as a field agent.
I was a member of the SWAT team,
sniper on the SWAT team
and I switched over
and became a hostage negotiator
but when I came back
to the FBI academy
at 32 and starts
auditing classes,
sitting in and listening
to the old timers,
I noticed that they
were being challenged,
challenged by instructors
that we had coming in
from all over the
world, challenging them
on the facts of their case
and so I was tasked
to audit these classes
and when I audited
these classes,
I was sitting in the back
saying oh my goodness,
there's no way I'm
gonna get up at 32 years
of age, even though my
background was pretty solid,
and have all these
experienced cops in class.
The only way I thought to
accelerate the training
was we had to do,
like in the show,
go out on these two
week road schools
and spend maybe a week in LAPD
and then you may switch over
and go to Boise, Idaho and
we had all this down time
so while we're in
California, Bob,
let's go in, let's go
interview Edmund Kemper.
Let's see if he'll talk.
We've got the badge,
we have the creds,
we can get in these prisons.
Let's go talk to Charles Manson.
Let's see what they'll tell us
about the crimes, the
pre-offense behavior,
the post-offense behavior,
victim selection,
why did they confess if they
confessed to the crime at all.
So it was because of
that and because Anne
had recently conducted
a heart attack study
predicting men who
had certain variables
that would get a
heart attack I saw
as a reverse engineering
type of thing.
Our illness is the offender
so we gotta backtrack,
we gotta reverse
the engineering.
What are the
variables if you look
and say at a homicide,
what's going on there
that we can interpret and how
can we interpret
these invariables?
We must go talk to the experts
and the experts are
these guys sitting around
in prison, most of them waiting
to have somebody talk to us.
That's how it started with Anne
and if it wasn't
for Anne and BC,
we never would have had
this program at all.
I was just doing it as
a method of surviving
so I'd be good in the classroom.
Never thought about having
research, conducting research.
- So how did you two meet?
How did the two
worlds come together?
- Well I remember
after you would teach
at the academy in the afternoon,
you'd go up to the board room
and they'd sit
around this big table
and they would be having
these crime scenes
and they were going
back and forth,
at least four or six of you,
and they'd be going
back on an unsolved case
trying to determine
what the age was,
what the occupation
was, where they lived,
these kinds of things and also,
I remember John saying
to me, you know,
he says how can I go
out and find somebody
that's got an Oedipus complex?
(laughing)
And he was right and he
says we've gotta find things
that investigators
can do to go out
and find these people.
- As terminology, when
you go into the records
of someone like a Charles
Manson or Edmund Kemper,
they're classified
throughout their lives
by different psychologists
and these terms,
for us investigators, really
don't mean anything to us
so we wanted to
come up with English
and terminology which Anne
and Bob, we put together
and rather news terms like
psychopathic personality,
we may say that this crime
that was perpetrated here,
whether it was a
homicide, bombing, arson,
a serial rape case,
was organized.
Not meaning organized crime
but meaning that it
was premeditated,
it was well-planned.
The subject left very, very
little evidence left behind
for law enforcement to interpret
and the other extreme
would be disorganized
meaning it was careless,
it's impulsive,
the offenders may be youthful.
May have been
under the influence
of drugs or alcohol at the time
so we started using
terms like that
and it's interesting
to see when you
watch television
today, psychologists
using these terms themselves.
- And that's where we
met I think you meant.
- So I think we have a clip
from the actual Mindhunters show
from looks like
the third episode
which sort of depicts
the first time
that you were sort of
together discussing this.
Do we have that,
can we show that?
- You know, when you
sent me your notes
from the Kemper meetings,
I was in a real rut
with my new book.
- What's your book about?
- It's about white
collar criminals
and they're not so different
to your Edmund Kemper.
- How do you think
the men you study
are similar to Edmund Kemper?
- Well first of all,
they're all psychopaths.
I study captains of industry.
IBM, MGM, Ford,
Exxon, you name it.
And sure, these men all have
wives, kids, dogs, goldfish
but not because they
stopped being psychopaths
but because they just
had different leanings.
- But you think they
have the same underlying
personality traits?
- Well Kemper shows a
total lack of remorse,
a lack of inner
emotional structure.
No ability to reflect on
the experience of others.
- You saw this in my notes?
- It would have been
clearer if you recorded
and transcribed your
interviews verbatim but yeah.
Although your project is
obviously in (mumbling) stages,
it already feels like
a clear successor
to the mask of sanity
which as you know
is quite a compliment.
- Can you repeat that, the mask?
- So you're saying
you don't think this,
us interviewing these
killers is crazy?
- Just the opposite.
I mean crazy in
the way that anyone
with a truly new
idea is crazy but no.
- Wow, okay.
That's a relief.
- That hasn't really been the
feedback we've gotten so far.
Actually, this is the only
feedback we've gotten so far.
- Well these men are just
sitting here locked up
and we're too afraid
of the morality of it
to see the far reaching
value of their insights.
- Far reaching in
law enforcement?
- Into behavioral
science, early detection,
criminology, you name it.
- Wow, yes, yes.
This is what I've been
saying the whole time.
- Oh have you?
- You obviously need to put
this on a more formal footing.
It's gonna take a lot
of time and energy
to expand it into
a larger project
with a specific questionnaire
like their family histories,
what their thoughts were
on why they did it.
When they were aroused
during the killings,
that sort of thing.
Then contrast,
compare, and publish.
- Publish?
- We can't just circulate
your findings within the FBI.
Maybe even turn it into a book.
- A book?
- Whoa, we definitely
appreciate the vote
of confidence but we
weren't even allowed
to send you those notes.
We can't publish (mumbling)
what we're doing in any way.
- [Female] Why not?
- Our department head
gave us weekends only
and an office in the basement.
(laughing)
- So John, it's fair to say
you've written quite a few books
over the years from
this subject matter
but I wanna ask you a question
a little bit more about,
that's dramatized
there but what were you
actually looking to do by
interviewing the serial killers,
by individuals who
had this background.
- We were getting so
many cases at Quantico
from students within the class,
were trying to get background
information on them
and really, the simple formula
was why plus how equals who.
When you're looking
at an unsub case
and you're analyzing
a crime scene,
we don't know who the who is.
Well let's go talk to the who's.
Let's go talk to the people
who have perpetrated the crimes
and let's go dig
into their files,
interview police prior
to the interview,
look at the correctional records
and then go into the interview
and one thing which
is totally different
than in the show 'cause everyone
has been asking
the tapes, everyone
wants to see the tapes,
the tapes, the tapes,
that the Holden Ford character
would have been my
character had done.
I only used a tape one time
because when you're dealing
in a prison type situation,
the trust, the
trust is not there.
They don't trust you
and by having the tape,
they're extremely paranoid
and I would not take notes
and the 57 page
computerized instrument
that was developed
by all of us here,
we mostly fill that out
before the interview
and we're only gonna
delve into, again,
elements of the
victim and the crime.
We'd fill out the rest of it
after we left the interview,
went back to the hotel.
- So Anne, how
accepted was this?
The formalization of a process,
the fact that you were
interviewing serial killers.
How accepted was
it within the FBI
and general criminal
prosecution?
- Well I can let John talk
a little bit about that
but I think it was impressive
that it was funded.
This was the first time that
I had ever had any funding
and so this was
really impressive.
- And your peers, John?
- Like we say, it's
better to ask forgiveness
than for permission because
when they found this out,
why, why are you doing this?
And even though
Hoover died in 1972
and this was now
in the late 1970s,
it's like again, don't
embarrass the bureau.
You're gonna make
a mistake here.
It's gonna reflect back
on the organization
and the bureau pretty much too
had always been this kind
of faceless organization.
They want you to be faceless.
Now here you're in a position
where you're gonna
be giving an opinion
rather than Jack Webb, just
the facts, ma'am type of thing.
Now you're gonna be
giving an opinion
on a case, which direction
this investigation
should be going.
So it just scared
the hell out of 'em.
- So I think I have a
clip that Dr. Burgess
mentioned here from
the fourth episode
of Mindhunter where you've
actually received your funding.
If we could just roll that.
- Dr. Carr, I'm aware
of your consulting
with Bill over the
years and your help
framing certain psychological
concepts with the BSU.
- Yes, a handful of times.
Special Agent Tench would--
- I assume that
meant you understood
how things were done
here at Quantico.
I assumed the same
for your cohorts.
You might think it is my
job to impede your progress
with my insistence on timelines
and established protocols.
- No sir, not at all.
- That is not my job.
My job is to provide guidance
and quite a bit of protection.
- I don't understand.
- Clearly.
You have stepped
outside the shade
of my umbrella and you are now
exposed to direct sunlight.
I applied for grant money
from several sources
anticipating a response
months from now.
Much to my surprise,
the Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration
was already aware of our
needs and activities.
- I see, I had no intention
of embarrassing you,
Unit Chief Shepherd,
I was at a fundraiser
for the university
and I was talking to--
- Yes, you were
talking to people
outside the FBI
about something you
were not even supposed
to be aware of.
The LEAA explained
that the application
was anticipated.
How could that be, I wondered.
It seems they know more
about what's going on
in our basement than
I was comfortable
including in the application.
- I so apologize.
- Sir, this is my fault.
- Your research has been
awarded 200,000 dollars
(laughing)
- What?
- There's more.
As I said, I applied
to more than one place
for funding.
The National
Institute of Justice
heard about the LEAA.
They are in
competition so the NIJ
has awarded you an
additional 185,000 dollars.
- You can't be serious.
- This amount of money comes
with considerable scrutiny
and I'm not talking about
bookkeeping and such
although you will
certainly be required
to keep meticulous records.
I'm talking about congress
having a real interest
in everything we do.
So much for the protection
I might have afforded you.
Congratulations, I suppose.
Have a nice day.
(upbeat music)
(muffled lyrics)
(laughing)
- I just wanna say this
is why we were able
to gather our team and our team
was able to start now
that we had funding.
It was really exciting.
- Was it as surprising
as it appears
in the show that
you got the funding?
They make it almost as if
it's a surprise to you.
- No, not at all.
In fact, as the program--
(laughing)
I know it's a Jesuit school
but we referred that then
as a rabbi.
You get something
good in the bureau,
they'll say Douglas,
he must have a rabbi
up in high places that's
looking after him.
Someone who's protecting you.
And the reason we got
this, we had somebody
really protecting us.
At first they fought
it but as soon
as they began to
see the feedback
that we're getting nationally,
we started to get,
and then the funding
that Anne was making
us do academically,
not just in the FBI law
enforcement bulletin,
she pushed us 'cause we never
would have gone in that
direction, I'm telling you,
had it not been for Anne or BC.
- So BC has put
up a case, one of,
I think it's based
on a real case,
it's referred to as
the Linda D case.
It's up on the social
media channels here at BC
and it's consisting
of a series of videos
and some background information.
Maybe we could roll
the video for the case
and then talk about
it a little bit.
(phone ringing)
(laughing)
(laughing)
- [John] I'm not gonna tell you.
- I see in that, a lot
of what would happen
in the first parts of
a murder investigation
that I would work on.
If you could sort of
let the audience know,
how do you approach some
a limited fact pattern,
such a limited amount of facts
to develop a profile?
- In fact, this
particular case was,
a lot of this stuff was
done telephonically.
We're not even going
out on the scene,
it's happening so quickly and
that's what happened here.
Then they sent us, sent me
in this case, the materials
and first thing you
do is victimology
and you see what the victimology
as you ask yourself the question
why was this victim the
victim of this violent crime
and then you also wanna know
why certain things happen.
Why was she killed
in this manner?
Generally when you start
seeing blunt force trauma
to the face, manual
strangulation,
repeated knifing,
it's generally,
we've broken this up into
crime classification manual
that this we call a personal
cause type of homicide.
Usually, and you include it,
can oftentimes, will
come to the conclusion
of this case that,
and the conclusion
is that the husband did it
but the way you get
to it in classes
and I've done
before, you get to it
in the wrong way.
Either it's maybe
it's a good guess
but you didn't go
there the right way.
The question you
have to ask yourself
is why was the victim moved?
Why was the victim moved
into this crawl space?
A slide you did not
see is that yes,
the jeans are pulled
down, there's blood
between the legs of the victim,
the bra is just pushed
up briefly here.
The reason the victim
was placed, police
was I'm talking to,
and the reason the police,
the victim was placed there,
is because the husband, I don't
care what you're telling me
about the relationship
with his separated wife,
something happened on
this particular day
and it's right before Christmas,
he's there to take the
child out to the park
but remember, he's gotta
come back from the park.
He's gotta come back
with that child.
He went back in that
house and had some kind
of an argument with his wife.
He used weapons of opportunity
to kill the wife but now,
he doesn't want his child
to see his mother there
so what he does is he
moves the victim, his wife,
outside into the crawl space
and attempts to stage
it to make it look
like a sexually motivated crime
so when the police arrive,
you have a very
distraught father.
They don't know which way to go.
They have crime in
the neighborhood there
and looking at it, it
just seemed pretty easy,
this is the way it
should be taken.
I gave some ideas on
how to do an interview
and he confessed to the crime.
- So did I get you right?
Did you say you did
that over the phone?
- Yeah, it sounds easy.
It's like doctors in here,
Dr. Johnathan Olshaker
who runs an emergency
center here.
They can look at something
and see something,
right away they know.
They can start eliminating
things right away.
Which direction
that you can go in
even by looking at photographs,
you can take it
a direction here.
It's just the problem
I see historically
and going back at
that period of time
is we were not getting the
right kinds of information.
When you say victimology,
we were not getting,
we'd always have
to go back and
say no, you're not
giving us enough here and
even on the forensics,
from the forensic pathologist,
sometimes you wouldn't get
a forensic pathologist.
Sometimes the analysis would
be yep, that boy is dead
and that's the extent
of the analysis,
that yep, that boy is dead.
That's really helpful
doctor, thanks a lot.
(laughing)
But you can do it.
After a while, with
myself it's just,
I was involved when I
retired about 5000 cases
and after a while,
you've just seen so many
so it's unique to
that department,
it was not unique to me.
But the other thing that
audience should see too,
this was a single homicide.
We don't always just
work serial homicides.
Single cases, like I
said, arson, bombings.
I've done public
corruption cases.
Fugitive assessments.
We do all different types
of cases that's applicable.
- So that gets us to one of
the most interesting characters
in the first season
of Mindhunter, my
personal favorite.
Ed Kemper.
If we could have a picture
of Mr. Kemper, there he is.
- I was a little younger then.
- Which I will say looks
very much like the actor.
He did an amazing job.
So here you are.
You analyze a crime
and you're able
to draw a motive and a
potential perpetrator
from the fundamental
facts of the scene
but what was the role
that a guy like Kemper did
to help you and
understand the philosophy
and psychology of
the criminal himself?
- One of the things and
what was being taught
at Quantico at the time,
a lot of these crimes,
there's a sexual motive
stemming from the background.
Also we were looking to see
early childhood development,
any kind of
precipitating stressors,
child abuse, any
thing like that.
Animal cruelty was
showing up a lot.
But with him, we learned he
had extremely
dysfunctional family
but the crimes
were really anger,
power, manipulation and
because this big guy
is an inadequate
nobody, he feels
like an inadequate nobody.
In fact, even
during the interview
when I was conducting
the interview,
I had to even forcefully
tell him to shut the hell up
and just answer my questions.
He'd just turn on that brain
but there are questions
that we wanna know
as investigators
to help solve cases
is how did you lure these
victims into the car?
I'll just give you an example.
He would pull up
alongside of a curb
and he was so menacing, he
was 300 pounds, six foot nine,
the actor is six foot
five, about 250, big guy
and does a tremendous job,
Cameron Britton the actor,
but Kemper said
he'd soon realize
that when the girls came
and they looked in there,
if he made it appear
that he was on his way
to go to an appointment
by looking at his watch,
looking at his watch,
they would feel relieved
okay, it's safe to
go with this guy
'cause he's got an
appointment he has to make
and they would jump
on into the car
so you pick up these
little things like that.
- So I think we have some
videos of the real Kemper
and if we could roll
the first one of those,
I think it addresses some
of his control issues.
- I altered, well, they
weren't really spontaneous,
I altered how I approached
these young ladies
from the point of capture
from the first time.
What I had wanted to
do was to secure them
and to suffocate them
with plastic bags
over their heads.
I had some completely
unrealistic perspective
that that was quick, that they
would lose consciousness rapidly
but the first young lady
that was in the backseat
that was Mary Ann Pesce,
I finally secured her.
She argued a lot.
She was dialoguing, trying
to change up control
of the situation.
She had already decided
I was in control.
I was trying to gain control.
I was convinced she
was in control of it.
For about 20 minutes
we were arguing back
and forth over what
was going to happen
and I was trying to keep it away
from what was intended
which was murder
and I decided at
that time I wasn't
going to tell anyone, I
was going to rape them.
I didn't say that at the time
but I left that wide
open as the avenue.
It was gonna be a sexual release
and that got them
very distressed
and it was obvious to me
that if I was going to
pursue what I was doing,
that the stress had to stop
so I went into unfortunately
more effective behavior
of letting them help me.
I let more of my
personality come out
and I was suicidal,
very disturbed,
grasping out at someone.
I had abducted them and I wasn't
going to let them out of the car
because I was tired of
people walking away from me
so some of that was very true
but I manipulated
that to allow them
to help me to the point of
resolving their behavior
until we got to a place
where they could be killed
and that, I have
the biggest problem
with that on my guilt basis
because obviously that
entailed unusual trust
between the captor,
the perpetrator,
and the victim of the crime.
At one point, in fact,
on the fourth victim
of the crime, Ms.
Schall, she actually
got back into the trunk
under her own power.
I had a cast on my left
arm, it was broken,
and I walked her
back to the trunk
of the car where I
told her I was going
to keep her undercover so that I
could get her to my
home where we could talk
but I didn't want the
neighbors seeing her
coming to the house
or leaving the house
and I made that sound
realistic to her
so she didn't want
to get in the trunk
but was willing to.
When she got in the
trunk, I shot her.
- So I find that very chilling.
I never was in a position
to hear that sort
of thing from a defendant.
I have to ask you, how
did you get him to talk?
- Well this particular,
you're really the first people
ever seeing this before.
This was beamed into us at
Quantico from Vacaville.
We did him and then
we did John Gacy
from Joliet Penitentiary.
So he's talking via
satellite to about a group
about as big as this right here
but during the actual interview,
when we did the
interview in person,
he wanted to talk.
What's just so amazing
to me, him, it's easy
but it's like their
accomplishment
in life is that particular crime
and it's like a
CD in their brain
and you have to kind
of turn on that CD.
Once you turn that CD on,
it's just remarkable
how they can
remember all the specifics
related to the crime.
You really couldn't shut him up.
He was extremely
bright, has 145 IQ.
That was about the combined
IQ of me and Ressler
during the, I
think Ressler's may
have been a little
higher than mine
but 145 IQ and did
psychological tests
while in prison
with other inmates,
helping psychologists.
Not all that introspective.
Sometimes you have to kind
of tell them what's going on
and what makes them tick
but not really so much with him.
- Yeah, and this was done
a good 10 or 12 years
after he had been incarcerated
which I think is remarkable
when he knows the name
of the victim, he can tell
you every single thing
that he did.
The detail is incredible
for that length of time
so you wonder how much
he's thinking about it
while he's incarcerated.
- Of how many murders
was he convicted?
- What was that?
- How many murders did he do?
- Seven.
- Wow.
- He started off
killing his grandparents
at 15 years of age.
He went away and got out.
21 years of age.
They told him don't bring
him back to his mother.
He hated his mother.
They take him back
to his mother.
His mother tells him you
never can date these women
at Vacaville, excuse
me, Santa Cruz,
where she worked as an
employee at the time
and those would be
his initial targets
and he would pick
up hundreds of 'em
until finally he started
selecting certain ones to kill.
They told the students
at the university,
go with a car if you see a
university sticker on the car.
Well his mother worked
at the university,
had a university sticker
so he used the car
and was able to get 'em.
It finally culminated
where he just had enough
of her and he ended
up killing her
with a ball peen hammer.
I think he may, we'll
be hearing that.
Decapitated her and then he
killed the neighbor as well.
A good friend of his mother's.
- So maybe if we could
roll the next tape.
I think it gets into
that a little bit.
- So I'm trying to remember this
from a long time ago
but another round
had entered and exited
that padding area
so there were three holes
in that padding area
that was head level with her.
It was off to her
right, to my left.
She was moving about in
the back quadrant there
trying to avoid the shots.
That wouldn't have happened.
I realize if I'd never
done it, it wouldn't
have happened but if,
well my original intention
was to make it very
quick and neither one
of them to be aware
of what was happening
and it was not to keep them
from stopping the crime.
It was to keep them
from suffering.
I had a real problem
depriving people
of their lives.
It wasn't the aspect
of killing them.
It was the aspect of possessing
their bodies afterwards.
So it was almost after the fact,
evicting someone
from their human body
and I'm sorry it sounds so cold
but that's about what
it analogizes to.
- So what is he
talking about there?
That motivation is bizarre.
- Right.
- Is that his psychology
that he didn't
wanna cause suffering to
the people he was killing?
He wanted to evict
them from their bodies?
- That's what he said.
- So what is it like to
listen to something like that.
I mean obviously you have
to continue the interview.
You want as much
information as possible
so what is it like to hear that
and to have to keep going?
- When you talk to somebody
like this it sounds insane
but he is not insane.
If he was insane, we
would have caught him
and identified him a lot sooner.
You listen to what he says.
You're trying to make
sense out of nonsense
and you just let him go.
Again it goes back to this
power and this control,
manipulate and dominate
'cause he totally
was destroyed and
if you talk about
whether he was born this
way or formed this way,
in his particular
case, he definitely
was formed this way.
His mother was
extremely abusive to him
and began cutting the heads
off his sister's dolls
and the legs and the
arms off the dolls.
She would lock him
down into the basement
near a furnace where'd he
fantasize that he was in hell
and he was a reminder of his dad
and his mother hated
that and told him
that she hadn't had sex in years
because of you, you bum.
I think we have that
clip is coming up.
- So yeah, if we could
roll the next clip,
I think it does
talk a little bit
about him speaking
of his background.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, but the, okay.
(laughing)
- At the time, I wanted my case
to look like random
killings, unrelated.
As you know, there was
no real understanding
of serial killing at the time
and when I told the police,
they asked me how many
people I thought I could
have killed in the
fashion that I did.
It'll be approximately
1000 individuals
who got in my car over
a three year period
that I was out there.
This being a hobby,
side hobby of mine,
was just driving around,
I loved to drive,
and picking up anybody
who wanted a ride
and then later on focusing
on more difficult cases,
people I was convinced
wouldn't wanna get in
because I'm a single
male, young adult,
two car, excuse
me, two door car.
They're not gonna wanna
get in and ride with me.
I made that a challenge,
almost like a chess game
and the more clever they got
about checking me
out ahead of time,
the more clever I got
about appearing innocuous
and in a hurry and a businessman
and the best one for
assuaging that last check
of me was just a
glance at my watch
and look slightly irritated
and oh well, I
guess I could stop
and give this person a ride.
It seemed to have a
very positive effect
even with the most
sophisticated hitchers
which included the Pesce
and Luchessa girls,
the first two victims.
- [Male] So really
you're a psychologist
in your own right
from the standpoint
of how to size up people,
how they'll respond to you.
- How about sociologist
and at a very lay level.
Psychiatrist is
looking for pathology.
I was looking for ways
to influence people.
- [Male] Okay.
- So what did you draw
from that, Dr. Burgess?
- Well I think he's telling us,
I was gonna also say
a little bit earlier
that in that other
scene, he's got a girl
in the front seat
and he's got a girl
in the backseat and she's trying
to dodge his bullets.
That's how that scene's going
and he says I'm trying to
keep her from suffering.
So you, yeah, kill her
quickly was his point
to keep her from suffering.
So you can look at
that, is that crazy
or is that genuine or what?
He still is gonna kill her so
that he can possess her body.
- So it does seem crazy to me.
(laughing)
We used to say you can
be found not guilty
if you were crazy
crazy, but just crazy,
you were still guilty.
- Yeah, oh yes.
- So I guess this gets
us to a little bit
about the show and
the dramatization
of a guy like that.
Physically he appears to
be just like the actor
and I don't know if I'll be able
to go back and watch the show
without thinking of
the real person now
because that was chilling.
If we could play maybe a
video from Mindhunter itself
where the actor's
playing Kemper.
- Physically I wasn't
impotent but emotionally I was
because of the way I
was conditioned by mom.
Like you said.
- Conditioned.
- Right.
You see, Bill, I knew a week
before she died I
was gonna kill her.
She went out to a
party, she got soused.
She came home alone.
I asked her how
her evening went.
She just looked at me.
She said for seven
years, she said I
haven't had sex with
a man because of you,
my murderous son.
So I got a claw hammer
and I beat her to death
and I cut her head off.
I humiliated her.
I said there, now
you've had sex.
If there's one thing
I know, it's this.
A mother should not
scorn her own son.
If a woman humiliates
her little boy,
he will become hostile and
violent and debased, period.
- So is the motivation
he describes in the show,
is that consistent
with his motivation
described in real life.
- Yeah, definitely.
That is him, that is him.
And even when I see
it portrayed acting,
how these kind of flash backs,
because yeah, I'm a young guy
and I have to go
back, I was married
and I had two children,
two girls by then
and it effects you
because to really,
to do it effectively,
I would say you have
to walk in the shoes of
the victim and the subject
so when you're studying a
crime, says it's a homicide,
you're trying to experience
and feel what's happening
emotionally, physically
to this victim.
What is she seeing when this guy
is looking into his face and
then you do the same thing
with the subject,
walking in his shoes,
but I'd be lying to
you if I told you
at the end of the day
that you can walk away
from this without
feeling kind of depressed
or screwed up so that's
why I think you're
starting to see it in the show,
something's beginning to
happen with Holden Ford
that will happen to
me when I nearly died
at age 38 on the Green
River murder case.
There's only so much you
can take and it builds up
and we're just being
inundated with cases
and getting calls all the time
then dealing with
the victims of crimes
'cause we're also doing
serial rape cases.
We couldn't do one rape case
unless it was a real
sadistic one we felt
would be leading to a homicide
so generally we were
looking at series of rapes
and that's where we got to
and we learned from Ann the ways
to conduct an
interview and we had
to teach police.
When you do an
interview, you look
for the verbal, the sexual,
and the physical assault.
You gotta ask questions
getting that verbal,
sexual, and physical
from the point
of contact with the victim
to the sexual assault
and then at the end,
how does he leave?
What does he say when
he leaves the victim?
Once you do that, we can then
start directing an
investigation to a rape typology
where there's about
five rape typologies
and now I think we're
adding another one,
the gang rape, the
sixth typology.
It's tough stuff.
- I can imagine.
Dr. Burgess.
- Yeah, I was just gonna
say what was important
from on what we
wrote in the book
is we broke down the
murder 'cause people
hear it's a murder.
No, you've got
before the murder,
what's going on
with him and Kemper
was a good example, telling us
what was going on in his head
so you had before the murder.
Then you had the
actual act itself
and then you have the aftermath
and that all put together,
when you had the serial aspect
played into what we called
the motivational model
of the serial, what is
it that made them over
and over have to kill.
- How long did the
interview process
of your investigations go on
before you formalized
it into a book?
- We did that fairly quickly.
The project was about two years.
I think we had the book by--
- 88, yeah.
In 1988, the sexual
homicide one.
Yeah, I think it was
about, wasn't it?
It wasn't earlier.
I think it was
around then, yeah.
- But we had articles
coming out before then
so we would chunk it down.
We color coded the
57 page data form
so that the agent could,
and it was actually put
into those categories
of the crime scene, of
the interview, so forth,
and all the demographics
and so forth
so we really had set it
up I think fairly well.
Mary Ann helped us with that
to get it all set up so it
would nicely go into the book.
- So by the time the
late 80s has happened,
you sort of
formalized the process
of analyzing these interviews
and you've categorized types
of motivations for killers.
- Well that gets into
the type of killer.
The next person we're
going to talk about
was a very different
type than Kemper
and so that was a
real observation
of how you had the lust killer
which is what
Kemper was where you
have actually, you
take aggression
and you take the sexuality
and it fuses together
into the psychologic
expression was sadism.
That's really what
Kemper was all about
that you wrote one
of the early papers
when you're at, of the
bureau on the lust killer.
- So this is the
Monte Risell case.
- Right.
- So Monte Risell's also on
the first season of Mindhunter
and so if you don't mind,
could you contrast him
with Kemper's murder?
- Right.
He was very different,
almost a 180 if you will,
he was a rape murderer.
He didn't do anything
to the body afterwards
and he had 12 rapes and murders
within a two year
period as a teenager
so he started his very
first when he was 14
and he had just moved
into this apartment
with his mother and it
was a neighbor woman,
25 year old neighbor woman,
who used to ask him to
do odd jobs and so forth
and he one night put on a mask
and called himself
the cat burglar
and he went and went up the room
to the third floor, up the
wall to the third floor,
enters her patio door
because it was left unlocked,
rapes her, course he's got
the mask on and so forth
but you can see the
fantasy that's developed
just from that.
Walks out her front door,
walks down the three stairs
to his apartment and
thinks he got away with it
but three weeks later,
he had forgotten
that fingerprints and
evidence and so forth
and they were able to get him.
He was then before
a female judge
who he later talks
about, was sentenced
to an out of state
psychiatric facility
and so he serves, I
think was like 18 months.
It wasn't a long sentence.
And then he comes back
and in the next two years,
he rapes and murders,
he rapes, never is
caught, never charged,
and then he starts murdering.
- So I think we have a video
from the first
season of Mindhunter
with Mr. Risell in it.
Well, the actor playing him.
- You think I could
get some Big Red?
- Big Red.
- Pop.
You know, like soda?
Used to have it
when I was a kid.
Always loved Big Red.
- We'll see what we can do.
- That'll depend
on the insights.
- I can't get stuff
like that in here.
- What do you say we
get down to brass tax?
- What do you wanna know?
Why I raped those
girls in Florida?
- For starters, how did
you choose your victims?
- Victims?
That doesn't sound good.
- No it doesn't.
- How many other men like
me are you talking to?
- Quite a few, Monte.
- [Monte] They all talk to you?
- It's early days.
(buzzing)
- You really think you
can get me some Big Red?
- Look at me, Monte.
Let's stay on track.
- You know what?
I don't think I'm interested.
- So.
I know and let the audience know
that Mr. Risell's
actually written to you.
Is that correct?
- Yes.
- How recently have
you heard from him?
- This summer.
- So had he seen the show?
- That's what I
had written to him
and I asked him if
he had seen the show
and he wrote back and said they
don't have Netflix in
the prison he's at.
(laughing)
- So let me understand this.
You interviewed this
person back in the 80s.
Is that right?
- John did.
- John did.
- Yeah.
- And you wrote to him to find
out if he'd watched the show?
- Yeah.
(laughing)
'Cause I was interested in
this Big Red issue which he--
- Oh, I see.
So what did he explain
to you about the show
that they got wrong?
- Well he said, well,
not only did they get it wrong.
He said, he didn't know this,
he said but the
counselors watch it
and they come back and
probably taunt the prisoners
about it but he said they
said I wasn't too smart.
That he didn't show on the show
which is interesting
because he's really
got quite a good IQ.
You can see his
letter, his handwriting
and all that, certainly
it's well constructed
and so forth but he does
talk about the Big Red issue
'cause I asked him that
and he said typically,
he wasn't the one
that was wrong.
It was the agents
that were wrong.
They had come in
and they had asked
whether you could
bring anything in
and so we'll see
whether that's true
and that's when he said
oh, I mentioned Big Red.
But Big Red isn't just soda.
Big Red is also gum
and he meant gum
and he said they and he
talks about Bob and John
coming to see him and
so he puts that in there
and then he goes on
and he also had heard,
he had written a
letter to the editor
of the Richmond
Times or whatever
and he was hoping that
they would publish,
he was telling them
what he thought
of the Netflix show.
- Is this unusual that they
remain in contact with you.
- Oh, I still get letters.
I'm working on a case right
now out of South Carolina.
This was Todd Kohlhepp.
He kept women in a container
for two months in 2016.
He killed seven people.
They rescued her
from the container.
He actually filled out
our serial murder form.
We had him just
fill out the form
but every interview you
do, you learn something
and from this guy,
he was real young
when he committed these
murders but one thing I learned
and if you're talking to women
about how do you fend
off a guy like this?
One of the victims that
he raped in the series he
didn't realize was a prostitute.
She thought by acting
as if it's pleasurable
as he's raping her in the
mud on the side of her car
that that would save her life.
He's telling me,
Risell, that even now,
this is using street
terms referring to her,
she's enjoying this, she's
enjoying this sexual assault
and even wants to make a
date with me in the future
so you have to realize
that these crimes
are crimes of anger
and crimes of power,
what you're doing by acting
as if it's pleasurable
to you to this
guy, you're really
degrading yourself
further in the eyes
and excuse the language but
the way they're thinking
is like then all
women are whores
and now it's gonna become
easy for him to kill you.
It's gonna go from
rape to a murder now
and that was one of the things,
every time you do an
interview you learn something
and that was what I got out
of the interview with him.
- The other thing I learned
from him in that example
is that he was never charged
for five of the rapes he did
before he started murdering
and he said it
was a real turn on
because he was
getting away with it
so that made it so
important to say we really
have to encourage women to
come forward and to report it.
He also said the
whole time that he
was on probation, outpatient,
seeing a psychiatrist,
he was doing the murders and
that was the other important,
he said I was putting
it over on the judges,
on the psychiatrist,
on the psychologist
and so we really wanted
to notify mental health
that they have to be, really
go after this very secret,
dangerous kind of content
that's in their heads
to find out what they're doing.
We learned a lot from just
the interviews with him.
- Did you, in the end
did you end up speaking
to psychiatric
organizations to talk
about sort of their
ability to fool you?
- We wrote this article
up for American Journal
of Psychiatry
hoping that it would
be important for them to
read the whole Risell case,
not identified as such but
of his 12 murders and rapes.
- And I know you both have
testified quite a bit in court.
Has it been the
case that the courts
and the system of
justice has sort
of attuned itself to that,
has sort of learned
over the years
that there are these
kind of people?
- In my area, there's
people out there
that are abusing this.
You can't say
here's your profile
and it matches this person
and all these characteristics.
You cannot do that.
It's another tool in a toolbox
for the investigator.
It's not a substitute
for thorough
and well planned investigation.
Getting back to whether
or not this was received,
it was not well
received because I spoke
before different psychiatrists
and psychologists.
I met one in New
Zealand where I went
and I was on a book
tour and I said why
did you bring me here?
And all of them came in
with their arms crossed
and I said what's,
if I see that,
I'm not gonna ignore it
and I said what's wrong?
What's the deal here?
We don't like what
you're writing about us.
What's that?
He says that we don't know how
to evaluate these
people unless we look
at the crime scene photographs
and look at the
preliminary police reports
and autopsies, whatever,
and I said yeah,
that's right, that's
what I believe.
What are you relying
on, self reporting?
You believe that self reporting,
you actually believe
that these people
are gonna be telling you the
truth that's sitting there?
No, they're gonna test
you and within minutes,
they're gonna know
whether or not you've
studied their case.
So actually, you
have no business
making decision regarding
probation and parole,
who you should let out.
You have no clue about
the criminal personality
unless you do that and
look at that material.
- So when you approach
these interviews
that we've seen some of tonight,
you had to have
all the background
that you could get your
hands on before you went in
because the show portrays it
that you let them talk
as much as possible
but you're telling
us that behind that,
you had all the
forensics you could know,
all the prior interviews
you could get.
- Yeah and then sometimes
I'm asking a question,
I already know the
answer, I wanna see
if this guy's telling the truth
and if he doesn't
I'll just start smile,
I'll start laughing at the guy
and then they know you got 'em
so you have to be prepared
but it is conversation
and you have to make
them feel relaxed.
This guy, it's easy, we
had Kemper dominating me
but when I interviewed
Charles Manson,
I mean he's only five
feet two, I'm six feet two
and I want that person,
and when I interviewed
Richard Speck,
again, he's about
6'3, 6'4, ugly guy,
I mean violent as
hell, screaming,
yelling prior to the interview.
I just want him to feel
like he's in control
but I'm going to
maybe say things
and do things like in the show
where he feels comfortable,
he begins to open up
to me like I did with Speck.
I totally ignored Speck
during the interview
and I spoke to his
counselor on the side
while he was in the
back swearing at me
and I used street language
to describe the homicides
and I said I don't
know what Speck
eats for breakfast
here but this guy,
it's amazing what he
did with seven women.
It sounds terrible but my
goal is to get this guy
to talk back here and he
started saying I didn't
have sex with all seven
and I said I know,
it was just the one
on the couch, right?
'Cause I know the case.
I said yeah, so
that opened it up.
He said man, you're sick.
You should be in here with me.
And we started
laughing but I learned,
you learn from them and you just
get a wealth of information
'cause you gotta come
across the personality
in other cases.
- So how does this
change, either of you
can answer this but how does
it change your world view?
How does it change the
way that you look at,
I guess I'd say regular people
like the people in our audience.
Hopefully we don't have any
serial killers here today.
- Well I'm mentally ill myself.
(laughing)
- Well from a victim standpoint,
I tried to learn as much
as we possibly could
to be able to educate victims
about scenarios, certain things,
you don't wanna tell
victims what to do,
they have to make
their own decision
but give them
enough of the cases
to get some ideas
of what is a safe,
the other important concept
that we came up with
was a risk level.
We always identify the
risk level of someone
and when you can
be in your own home
and not be at risk
but the minute you
walk outside that
door, how much risk
are you putting yourself at
and are there certain
things that you can do--
- Even the offender risk.
- And the offender risk, yeah.
- Offender risk 'cause what risk
did the offender take when
he perpetrated this crime?
Was there any kind of
low risk, moderate risk,
high risk, woman's driving
down the interstate 95,
runs out of gasoline.
She was a low risk
victim until she ran out
of gas and this driver came
along, offered her a ride.
She went with a stranger.
She increased her risk
level to be the victim
of a violent crime so you study
and that came from Anne,
the different risk levels,
victims as well as offenders.
- And where does it
lead you when you
formalize the process
of looking at a scene,
you say this victim
became a higher risk,
what do you glean from that?
- Well you also have to
look at the offender risk.
If he commits a crime at
noon on a busy street,
that's a very high
risk level for him.
So you have to
temper it with that
and it just gives
you the information
about the various
levels that they do
and what they do that
could put them in danger.
Absolutely.
- And do you formalize
this in reports
to parole boards?
Do we talk about
actual people when you?
- We talk about cases,
not with names or anything
but give the scenarios.
That's one of the way I teach.
It's case method to let people
come up with their own
interpretation too.
- So I guess I would
sort of move on
to where are we
right now in terms
of the processes of
investigating these kinds
of crimes and where
do we go from here?
What things have not been
developed in the field
that you feel are subject
to maybe more academic,
rigorous research?
- Well I'd like to ask
John to talk a little bit
about the case that was the
Mary Frances Stoner case
because that's another technique
that he used in preparing the--
- This was a case, if
you've seen the series,
where this tree limb
cutter along this highway
ended up killing Mary
Stoner, Mary Frances Stoner.
They used a different
victim's name.
We keep the subject's
name in the show.
She was only 14 years
of age, a majorette.
I got a call,
here's another case.
I'm not there.
I get a call on this,
the show makes it sound
like we're there.
I get a call of what
happened and I go
through where she got
off the school bus.
She was driven about
five, six miles away
to kind of a makeshift,
like a lover's lane area
and there they
would find her body.
It appears that she
had been redressed.
Cause of death was blunt
force trauma to the head.
I said, then he sent
me the photographs,
I said was there also indication
of manual strangulation
from the rear
and they said yes,
how do you know that?
I said because the
subject's intent
was really not to kill her.
He has this warped sense
that this young little girl
is gonna be enthralled by him,
is gonna go willingly to him.
So he rapes her and
if you can imagine
what it must have been
like for the victim
as he's raping this
child and this child's
probably begging for her mother
and to take her home.
He's lost control just like
Kemper was losing control
in that case so what he did,
he had her walk away to a tree
and when her back was turned,
he ended up trying to
manually strangle her
from the rear which you
need a tremendous amount
of strength to do that
so rendered unconscious,
got her over to the tree
and then it was a rock
and in the book Mindhunter,
I have, everyone has a rock
and so this guy passed the
polygraph then interviewed,
came into the
interview like this
and the cops just didn't know.
I said has he lawyer-ed up yet?
And they said no.
I said do a night
time interview.
I'm big on night
time interviews.
And he doesn't wanna
appear these bad guys
on the five o'clock news
but I said the thing you
gotta introduce into the
environment is the rock.
Everybody has a rock
and what I mean by that,
everybody has a
strengths and weaknesses.
You have to figure
out what they are.
When he got to decide to
pick up this 45 pound rock
and carry it over and
then drop it on her head,
the first one hits the head
and she starts bleeding.
He does it again.
The medical examiner said it
was like three or four times.
Now as he's subsequently
hitting the head,
blood is splashing on him, onto
his body, onto his clothing.
If he did it, he's gonna
respond to this rock
but don't put the
rock in front of him.
Put the rock off on
a 45 degree angle
and see what his reaction is
when he comes in that night
and he did that, he came in.
They called me up and said John,
it was amazing how
he responded to that.
His respiration increased,
he was perspiring
and not only did he confess
'cause I told them provide,
you have to provide a face
saving scenario for this.
You couldn't call
her a girl, a child.
You couldn't say that
you murdered her,
use words like murder or
rape or anything like that
so he fesses up to
that as well as a rape
out of Rome, Georgia, and
so that's what I mean.
Everyone has a rock.
You all see the Jerry Brudos,
remember Jerry Brudos,
the shoe fetish in Netflix?
Remember that case?
Remember what it was?
(laughing)
A shoe.
It was a shoe fetish.
It was a shoe fetish and he
killed a whole bunch of women
out in Oregon.
When we conducted the interview,
he blamed it all
on hypoglycemia.
But John, you wouldn't,
once I had a
hypoglycemia attack,
I could jump like right
out this window right now
and I wouldn't even
know what I'm even doing
but it was something like that.
It's the rock.
It's something that we all have.
We all have our
strengths and weaknesses.
I tell people, I don't care,
on my birthday my niece
died, on my birthday,
so I don't always feel
great about June 18th
when my birthday rolls around.
Also getting older I
don't feel great about
and if you were targeting
me for something,
you may wanna wait
until my birthday
to come and to,
'cause you'll probably
find I'm weak, I'm vulnerable
at that particular time.
I was hoping like
hell I wouldn't go
through customs or whatever
you're going through, security.
(laughing)
And say buddy, we
got another one here.
We got another.
(laughing)
- That's consistent
among many of the people
that you've interviewed,
that they have an item
or an object or a
thought or a way
of looking at it
that they themselves
maybe don't
necessarily understand,
part of their psychology.
- I've got another one, gonna
use in our next book here,
it's that I was able, this guy
killed a little brownie,
girl scout brownie,
and going door to door
collecting one dollar back then
and he got the maximum
sentence, 30 years,
and they lock me up with him
and I said I want no
furniture or anything.
I don't want any tape
recorders or anything
but keep me in
this room with him
and it takes about two
hours and I totally
ignored violent terms but
it takes about two hours
and then the long
and short of it is
is how this guy
began to tune me out
and focus in on
the crime and his,
he started perspiring.
It was freezing in this
concrete room that we were in
doing this, where I
was talking to him.
(mumbling) shaking, his
pecs, they were trembling
and he says John,
when I heard the knock
on the door and I
looked up and I saw,
he says I knew I
was gonna kill her.
I knew I was gonna kill her.
And then I started
talking about where
are you going when you get out?
He says New York.
I said man, I said I
was raised in New York.
It's tough, it's expensive.
So he does this.
He looks around, see if
the guards are looking
and he said, he says
I got money, John.
You got money?
You got what?
Making license plates
where you got money?
He says no, when my mother
died I got the money
from insurance, my
grandmother died,
I got money, and then the sell
of the house, I got money.
I have 600,000 dollars.
Where's the money?
Out of state.
Why'd you put the
money out of state?
'Cause I don't want
the victim's family
to get any of the money.
Oh, you're smart then.
You're gonna do fine.
Man, you go to New York,
you'll have plenty of money
to go to New York.
Well the next day I go
for the parole board
and I slam dunk his ass.
(laughing)
They give him on top of his 30,
gave him another
30, another 30 years
so he's one of the
guys, you ask me,
they have to notify
me if these guys
get out for some reason.
(laughing)
I'm not in his fan
club, this guy.
- So is he parole eligible
any time during your
expected lifetime?
- Yeah, I hope not.
- You also mentioned
Manson and I do know
that there's a show on
tonight I think on Fox
on Charles Manson.
What was he like?
- Yeah, Fox is on.
They're gonna show it
between eight to 10.
They interviewed me
earlier in the year.
They found these hidden tapes
inside the Manson family was,
that was done by a producer
and producer had
'em all these years
and he died and nothing
was ever done with them
so this production
company out of England
shows the inside,
like live interview,
Squeaky Fromme and Sandra
Good and Tex Watson.
These are people who
we also were part
of our, not the research there
'cause they weren't
all serial killers.
Neither was Manson
a serial killer
but you'll find that
pretty interesting
and in October sometime
there's gonna be a show
on Oxygen on Kemper
that I did sometime,
I don't have a
date yet for that.
- And are you a consultant
on the Mindhunter show,
both of you?
- John was, yes.
- Yeah, oh yeah, on that and
then different other shows too
like if anybody saw
the West Memphis Three.
Have you ever
heard of that case?
Paradise lost.
It was by HBO and I
helped Peter Jackson,
Lord of the Rings, the
director, The Hobbit
and all that, brought
me and this team in
to look at these three
teens that were convicted
of killing three
eight year old boys
and they were each serving
at the time we got involved
or up to 18 years imprisonment
and we ended up
analyzing, doing the case
and were able to free them.
They had nothing to
do with the case.
It was just shoddy police work.
- I'll give you the
summation question.
How do you think that the
work that you both did
along with the FBI and all
the people you work with,
how do you think it changed
criminal investigation?
- Oh, I think criminal
investigation has changed a lot.
A lot, of course as John says,
you've gotta get it
out to the police
so they can do it because a lot
of the cases are not
well investigated
or followed through
with but I think
that in terms of going
into court, a lot
has changed certainly from
the rape victim standpoint,
the rape shield law
has been important.
I think that from the
investigation standpoint,
I was gonna say
this type of murder
happens in every
little hamlet and town
and the Betty Jean (mumbling)
case is a good example.
Tell them what the
police chief said.
- It was Betty Jane (mumbling).
It was a case in
Netflix of this girl
who was found in a dump.
Actually was a makeshift dump
and she was brought there
after being somewhere else
that the killer
decided to move her
to this dump site
and I say that's
because he wants her to be found
and he wants her to be found
because a relationship exists
between that victim
and the killer
and at the site, he
stabbed her postmortem-ly,
cut her hair off and
hung it on a branch.
I also said there's two
people involved in this case,
not one.
There's gonna be two.
It turned out to
be three actually.
Be two because I could
tell by the position
of the body how she was carried,
it had to be two to
get in that position.
It turned out it was this
guy named Butch Salt,
so called girlfriend,
that was his girlfriend.
His brother raped
his girlfriend.
The night of the rape,
the brother's wife
was having a baby
in the hospital.
When she got out
of the hospital,
she found out about the homicide
and actually participated
in the disposal of the body.
The body was, interesting,
we thought the body
was refrigerated 'cause
there was no animal
or predation and insects damage.
It was wrapped in a
sheet under a tree
and he felt he wanted her
to be found, Butch did,
so he moved her
from that location
into this makeshift
dump but even then,
the things he did, he
did to her postmortem
and that's called
the lust murder
but the chief thought he'd never
see a case like this.
Here he takes a class from me
and he goes back and
sure enough he has one
and it's hard, it's hard
for these small departments
when they see these
kinds of cases
that they've never seen before.
- Are you both still
working in the field?
Are you both still
doing this kind of work?
- I am, you are.
- Yeah, I was involved
the OJ Simpson case
against OJ Simpson
and the civil case,
Jon Benet Ramsay case.
For the Ramsay's.
Turned out to be
for the Ramsay's.
Not knowing, going
in I wasn't sure
who was responsible
but I believe they
were railroaded,
they're innocent.
Amanda Knox case over in Italy.
We helped in that case.
She was wrongfully
convicted herself
over in Italy and had a big
influence over the conviction,
it was the tabloid media
that was over there
picked up by legitimate
media in the United States
coming out with all
this nonsensical stuff
so Mark Olshaker
and me and others,
we put out a book
for Amanda Knox
to raise money for the defense
and which we published.
So still doing cases like that.
- And you've consulted
with the defense.
We talked about it earlier,
you've consulted with
people for trying
to determine whether someone
was innocent as well.
I think we've pretty much
gone about five minutes
over time but I
think we do have time
for a couple of
questions from people
if anyone would like
to ask a question
and if not I actually
have one myself.
If you could just come to
the microphone over here.
About 10 minutes I'd say.
- Hi.
My name's Sarah.
I work as a juvenile
forensic case manager
in the juvenile courts in Boston
and a lot of the work
you guys have done
have really helped
the field in general
with identifying the
risk factors in youth
and I was wondering
if you could speak to,
'cause we all know, well
maybe we don't all know
but those of us in the
field know the majority
of kids don't become
offenders in adulthood
and so when you hear
Ed Kemper say well,
if a mother treats
a son like this,
you will get this
when statistically
there's so many abused
kids who don't do this,
if you could speak a little
bit to when you're looking
back in the histories
of these people,
how do you feel that
these ones are so distinct
from someone who might
have had a similar story
who didn't rape
and murder people?
- Well actually that's the
chapter of the first book,
on the first chapter,
Growing Up To Murder.
How did these 36
men, they're all male
and they had 112
victims that we knew of.
Probably many,
many more that they
were never charged
with so what was it
in their background
and then we tried
to say well, how much
of it is normal kinds
of things versus not.
So many of these
men were very bright
and they also had
an absent father
so by the time
they were about 12,
at a critical time and
the two we talked about,
Kemper and Risell both had
very outspoken feelings
about not being able
to go with the father
when the parents
split up, whether that
would have made any
difference, who knows?
But at any rate, they
develop this fantasy
to kill, to rape and
to murder early on,
really early on and I think
that's what's very unusual.
I think that we need
to, when we're looking
at young people that are
having some difficulty,
gotta find out what
they're thinking about
and what they're planning.
- Thank you.
- Hi.
I was curious about
what your views are
on issues of sentencing
and rehabilitation
because it seems
like in a number
of the cases you mentioned,
these repeat offenders,
even if they were at
one point locked up,
once they got
released they went out
and did the same thing
or something worse.
So what, based on your research
with the psychology
of repeat offenders,
what possibilities are
there for rehabilitation?
- So I think the question
is addressing itself to,
you have very, very dangerous
and difficult individuals,
some of who you mentioned
have been a part
of the system and then been
back out on the street.
Is there a possibility of
rehabilitating a person
who has these serious
set of (mumbling)?
- Well we looked at that.
We had a number.
I can't give you
the exact number
without going to the
book but that had
been in for a serious
crime and then let out
and they did it again.
Don't forget we were
looking at serial offenders
but there's something clearly
and it was all sexual offenders
so that's a very
specific kind of a crime.
I don't know, John,
if you wanted to--
- And we've written about this
and Dr. Stanton
(mumbling) has done,
he's written several
books on the criminal mind
and what he says and
we've written about,
you can not rehabilitate someone
who is not habilitated
to begin with
and we're talking
about violent offenders
and not everybody who's abused,
you can't make
that jump, everyone
who's abused could become
a violent anything.
However, of the people
that we've interviewed,
almost without
exception, you see that
in their background.
The other ones who may come
from this abusive background,
in some other way they survived,
through a neighbor, through
another family member.
I've also changed
a little bit too.
I do think there's a
genetic component there
with certain types of behaviors.
Not that you're born to kill
but if you throw this person,
now in this dysfunctional
kind of family,
it's gonna show up.
When I talk to
teachers, teachers
will come up to you
and tell you you're
describing people right now
that we have in classroom.
You mention the
homicidal triangle
which is fire setting,
which is animal cruelty,
which is enuresis but
the big one really
and I spoke to the Canadian
SPCA a couple of times
is animal cruelty and
for the first time
in just the last two years,
the FBI now, we never
used to keep track
of animal cruelty at all.
It was filed under other.
Now for the first time
starting a year ago,
it is filed separately,
animal cruelty,
for tracking purposes.
- So have you ever
been surprised?
Have you ever seen somebody,
probably not one of
the serial killers,
but somebody in your long career
who you've come into
contact with years later
and you felt, gee, this
is a different person.
This person seems
to be rehabilitated.
- I don't really,
they don't usually
get out of prison, the
ones that I deal with.
(laughing)
Maybe certain types of crimes.
Like these drug crimes,
addiction and stuff like that
but we're talking
about the systematic,
this violence.
I don't see it.
- Okay, go ahead.
- Thank you.
I think one of
the reasons Kemper
is so fascinating
is because he's
saying the most repulsive things
but his affect is somehow
very sympathetic and likable.
I'm curious if you believe him
when he says he feels
guilt and implied remorse
or is that another manifestation
of that need to manipulate
the people he interacts with
meaning us.
- I can't understand, can you?
- Yeah, I think an
interesting thing
about Kemper is he
has been eligible
for parole many, many times
and he does not go up,
saying he is not ready to leave.
I think that tells us something.
Of course everybody's
saying what happens
when he says he's
ready to leave.
(laughing)
- We talking about empathy?
I can't, I'm hard time hearing.
- Empathy, do you
believe he feels guilty
when he says he feels guilty?
- No, no.
And I've done interviews.
One of the worst interviews,
worst characters I interviewed
was a guy named Bittaker
and Bittaker and Nores.
They were two rapists
serving time in prison
for rape.
Their fantasy was to
get out of prison,
they were gonna rape a teenager
for every year of
a teenager's life,
from 13 to 19 years of age.
They got a vehicle, they
called it the Murder Mack,
was insulated van, that's
kind of the vehicle
of choice with these
guys, insulated van.
I brought a female agent
in with me, a profiler,
to do the interview
and it was interesting,
every time she'd ask a question,
never look at her,
always looked at me,
and then at some point
we started talking,
he started crying.
Welling up, getting emotional
but I think maybe I've
just gotten hardened,
that you're crying, you feel bad
because your life is
ruined, your life is ruined.
You gotta spend
all this time now
for the rest of your
life hopefully in prison
but you don't really give a damn
about the victim's lives
that you have taken,
that you have stolen from us
but when I'm doing
the interview,
you would never
know I feel that way
or talk that way
but that's what I
was seeing from this guy
during the interview.
Vicious.
His nickname was Pliers
Bittaker, Pliers Bittaker,
and what these two guys
did was just hellacious
and he video taped it,
excuse me, audio taped it,
the torturing of the victims.
It was terrible.
- So we have just
about run out of time.
I wanna thank everybody
for their questions.
Everybody is invited
to a reception
at the Heights Room
and there are books
that are signed
available for purchase.
Thank you very much.
Doctor.
(clapping)
- Alright.
