Mindhunter

Pocket Books

From Chapter 1: Inside the Mind of a Killer

Behavior reflects personality.

One of the reasons our work is even necessary has to do with the changing nature

of violent crime itself. We all know about the drug-related murders that plague

most of our cities and the gun crimes that have become an everyday occurrence as

well as a national disgrace. Yet it used to be that most crime, particularly most

violent crime, happened between people who in some way knew each other.

We're not seeing that as much any longer. As recently as the 1960s, the solution

rate to homicide in this country was well over 90 percent. We're not seeing that

any longer, either. Now, despite impressive advances in science and technology,

despite the advent of the computer age, despite many more police officers with

far better and more sophisticated training and resources, the murder rate has

been going up and the solution rate has been going down. More and more crimes are

being committed by and against "strangers," and in many cases we have no motive

to work with, at least no obvious or "logical" motive.

Traditionally, most murders and violent crimes were relatively easy for law

enforcement officials to comprehend. They resulted from critically exaggerated

manifestations of feelings we all experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit,

revenge. Once this emotional problem was taken care of, the crime or crime spree

would end. Someone would be dead, but that was that and the police generally knew

who and what they were looking for.

But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years-- the serial

offender, who often doesn't stop until he is caught or killed, who learns by

experience and who tends to get better and better at what he does, constantly

perfecting his scenario from one crime to the next. I say "surfaced" because, to

some degree, he was probably with us all along, going back long before 1880s

London and Jack the Ripper, generally considered the first modem serial killer.

And I say "he" because, for reasons we'll get into a little later, virtually all

real serial killers are male.

Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The

stories and legends that have filtered down about witches and werewolves and

vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the

small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the

perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures.

They

couldn't be just like us.

Serial killers and rapists also tend to be the most bewildering, personally

disturbing, and most difficult to catch of all violent criminals. This is, in

part, because they tend to be motivated by far more complex factors than the

basic ones I've just enumerated. This, in turn, makes their patterns more

confusing and distances them from such other normal feelings as compassion,

guilt, or remorse.

Sometimes, the only way to catch them is to learn how to think like they do.

Lest anyone think I will be giving away any closely guarded investigative secrets

that could provide a "how-to', to would-be offenders, let me reassure you on that

point right now. What I will be relating is how we developed the behavioral

approach to criminal-personality profiling, crime

analysis, and prosecutorial strategy, but I couldn't make this a how-to course

even if I wanted to. For one thing, it takes as much as two years for us to train

the already experienced, highly accomplished agents selected to come into my

unit. For another, no matter how much the criminal thinks he knows, the more he

does to try to evade detection or throw us off the track, the more behavioral

clues he's going to give us to work with.

As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say many decades ago, "Singularity

is almost invariably

a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is

to bring it home." In other words, the more behavior we have, the more complete

the profile and analysis we can give to the local police. The better the profile

the local police have to work with, the more they can slice down the potential

suspect population and concentrate on finding the real guy.

Which brings me to the other disclaimer about our work. In the Investigative

Support Unit, which is part of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of

Violent Crime at Quantico, we don't catch criminals. Let me repeat that: we do

not catch criminals. Local police catch criminals, and considering the incredible

pressures they're under, most of them do a pretty damn good job of it. What we

try to do is assist local police in focusing their investigations, then suggest

some proactive techniques that might help draw a criminal out. Once they catch

him-- and again, I emphasize they, not we-- we will try to

formulate a strategy to help the prosecutor bring out the defendant's true

personality during the trial.

We're able to do this because of our research and our specialized experience.

While a local midwestern police department faced with a serial-murder

investigation might be seeing these horrors for the first time, my unit has

probably handled hundreds, if not thousands, of similar crimes. I always tell my

agents, "If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting."

We've looked at many "paintings" over the years and talked extensively to the

most "accomplished" "artists."

We began methodically developing the work of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit,

and what later came to be the Investigative Support Unit, in the late 1970s and

early 1980s. And though most of the books that dramatize and glorify what we do,

such as Tom Harris's memorable The Silence of the Lambs are somewhat

fanciful and prone to dramatic license, our antecedents actually do go back to

crime fiction more than crime fact. C. August Dupin, the amateur detective hero

of Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 classic "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," may have been

history's first behavioral profiler. This story may also represent the first use

of a proactive technique by the profiler to flush out an unknown subject and

vindicate an innocent man imprisoned for the killings.

Like the men and women in my unit a hundred and fifty years later, Poe understood

the value of profiling when forensic evidence alone isn't enough to solve a

particularly brutal and seemingly motiveless crime. "Deprived of ordinary

resources," he wrote, "the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his

opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not infrequently sees thus, at a

glance, the sole methods by which he may seduce into error or hurry into

miscalculation."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Mindhunter by John Douglas Copyright © 1995 by John Douglas. Excerpted by permission.
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