‘They couldn’t stop themselves’: what do we really know about serial killers?

Dr Ann Burgess looked out at an audience of 40 FBI members – all of them men – and started talking about rape. “The one question they would always say to me: ‘Were you raped?’” Burgess recalls in the new documentary Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer . “They thought rape was just sex: women secretly wanted it or they were out there and asked for it.”

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The three-part series, executive produced by Dakota and Elle Fanning , traces the life and career of Burgess, a pioneer in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit who helped develop the agency’s modern playbook for profiling serial killers.

The film explores how Burgess and the fledging unit identified, tracked down and interviewed dozens of notorious killers including Edmund Kemper (“The Co-Ed Killer”), Dennis Rader (“BTK”), Henry Wallace (“The Taco Bell Strangler”) and Jon Barry Simonis (“The Ski-Mask Rapist”). It also shows how she shattered a glass ceiling in the male-dominated FBI while raising children who little guessed the grisly subject of her day job.

Wearing a dark jacket against a backdrop of busy shelves in her office at Boston College , the bespectacled Burgess, now 87, says via Zoom: “They didn’t know what I was doing I think that’s what I learned [from the series]. They were all caught up in my husband’s work.

“He was building computers – that was the cool thing. They didn’t talk about what I was doing and I didn’t tell them either so in a way it was kept from them. They were a little shocked when they found out what I was doing – they were well in high school or college by that time.”

Burgess’s own mother was a school teacher and her father a salesperson in Newton, near Boston in Massachusetts. She initially pursued a career in nursing and had no interest in crime until the early 1970s when the Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom , a pioneering researcher in rape counselling and trauma, approached her for a new project.

Burgess says: “She knew that sexual assault was going to be a big issue for women. She had been attending a lot of these consciousness raising groups. What I didn’t know at the time was she was having difficulty finding victims and she wanted to talk to some victims. That’s where I came in.

“I said, well, they probably come into hospitals, so let’s check the local Boston hospitals. I was interested in victims first. Being a nurse, you care for people who have gone through [something] or have problems with their health. Getting into the other side of crime from the offender standpoint came a little later.”

In 1972 Burgess and Holmstrom co-founded one of the first hospital-based crisis counselling programmes at Boston City Hospital . It was a patriarchal era in which victims of sexual assault struggled to gain respect or make themselves heard. “At the time, even at Boston City Hospital, the doctors that examined the victims were all men. The police were all men. The courts was all men. The victim rarely got to see a female except for nursing.”

Burgess and Holmstrom interviewed 146 rape victims, ranging in age from three to 73, and published a paper that was among the first to contend that rape was more about power and control than sex. It was a pivot away from the prevailing blame-the-victim mentality and caught the attention of the FBI. In 1978 Burgess was invited to the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia, to give lectures and teach the agents about victimology and violent sex crimes.

The FBI was still a boys’ club where guns were popular, as she discovered on her first morning there. “I was right next to the firing range and it was very active. They loved getting out there at six in the morning to shoot their guns.”

Burgess had to explain the nature and consequences of rape to a room full of men. “It was unnerving, quite frankly. They were special agents, a very bright group. I knew that I had to do something to get their attention so I decided to use case method because I knew that that’s how they taught.

“I would put a case up and I’d call on them: what would you say? You’ve just been called in. This woman came in. What is your first question? I’d try to get them engaged and that worked because they couldn’t sit there and say, I don’t know what I’d say. They had to come up with something.”

The agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler were conducting a side project interviewing 36 serial killers. They were intrigued by the possibility that Burgess’s methods could be used to understand their motives. As a consultant on the new task force, she brought a proper research methodology to the way interviews were conducted.

“Some of the first ones were the assassins – the Squeaky Fromme, the Charles Manson – and so I said, ‘What are you asking them?’ They said, ‘I’m just getting them to talk.’ I said, ‘Well, you got to do more than just getting them to talk.’ They thought they were doing a lot – just whatever the person wanted to talk about. I said, ‘How do you even know they’re telling you the truth?’”

Burgess helped produce a 57-page interview guide which included information on the victim. “They wanted to do a serial killer study first so that meant the victim couldn’t speak to you – it’s not like a rape case. What could they learn from victimology?

“At that time, they were going into a crime scene and they’d say it’s either organised or disorganised. We had to move from there into: why did the person pick this victim? Was it out of the blue – they grabbed somebody – or was it confidence where they had some interaction, they had talked with the person?

“What I was looking for was different patterns, so they could go to a scene and begin to say from a profiling standpoint what did they think was going on. What was the gender of the person? What was the race of the person? What was the age? Did he work? Did he have any friends or was he married? All of those kinds of questions are what you need for a profile.”

The work produced results. Burgess and her team developed a likely profile of the killer of two young boys in Nebraska in 1983. It helped police catch John Joseph Joubert IV, who confessed to the murders and was later executed. Burgess wrote in her 2021 memoir A Killer by Design : “We’d proven that there was value in understanding the criminal mind … to be able to actually use criminal profiling in an active case to hunt down a killer was the most satisfying reward of all.”

What makes serial killers tick? What patterns has Burgess observed? “What we essentially found is it started young with some kind of experience. We were very interested in childhood issues. They had always said that these guys had domineering mothers; what we found out is they had an absent father.

“You would have these young boys growing up where the mother is both parents and so, yes, it probably seemed to them that the mother was domineering but she had to handle both things. Who did he have as a model? Who did he look to learn about growing up as a male?”

Serial killers are not stupid. “They’re very bright, which was important. That meant they use their their heads; their cognitions were better than average. They did a lot of thinking. They did a lot of what we eventually called fantasy.

“In fact that was the word I think that Ed Kemper used – he talked about having these fantasies and they were different from other kids growing up who might have had fantasies to be a great baseball star. They were into death and rape and those kinds of things. That was the pattern that was real important. So nowadays you can almost say, what started it all when you talk with an offender.”

Kemper, who killed his paternal grandparents as a young man and later murdered eight women, including his mother, eventually gave himself up to police after apparently getting bored with outsmarting them. Burgess says of such offenders: “We should have said, what made you so good? How did you get away with it?

“Something I often ask is: you were very good in your criminal work and so what was it that worked? What they would say is how often a police officer or somebody would miss – they should have got him, he should have been stopped sooner. The other important thing is that they couldn’t stop themselves.”

She has interviewed about half a dozen convicted killers who have admitted they committed the crime. She says: “I remember one wouldn’t even answer – all monosyllables, yes, no. He was very restricted cognitively so that was hard to do. Then many of them were very charming – they were your Ed Kempers that were out to impress you and to charm you. But then I had some with just the opposite reaction. One whose personality was very unpleasant.”

Directed by Abby Fuller , Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer features the case of Lyle Menendez , then 21, and his 18-year-old brother Erik who in 1989 admitted they had fatally shot their father and mother in their Beverly Hills home. The brothers said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual molestation of Erik.

In 1993 Burgess was an expert defence witness in the first trial of the Menendez brothers and Erik for about 50 hours, finding that allegations of sexual abuse by their father were valid and an “originating cause” of the killings. The trial resulted in a hung jury, but the brothers were later convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. Jurors rejected a death sentence in favour of life without parole.

Burgess recalls: “I got called on the case because it was going to go to trial and it was going to be not did they do it but why did they do it? My immediate thought was: what could be going on in the family that possessed these kids to kill their parents who were providing for them? It went down gender lines: the women felt that abuse had been one of the main problems and the men didn’t.”

FBI colleagues had pressured Burgess not to testify, arguing that the bureau should always be on the side of prosecutors. “I said, no, that’s not science. A jury deserves whatever we have for science. They tried to say that I was just on the side of victims and I said I’m on the side of science.”

Eventually Burgess moved back to Boston College and, at 87, she remains indefatigable, continuing to teach a full course load, conduct a study on murdered and missing Indigenous women and work on numerous cases. She sees the potential of artificial intelligence to enhance criminal profiling by linking new cases to existing records.

“We now have a database where we have a lot of cases and, as we get one in, we can compare it to this database to see if they match up. The ability to use a computer as a way to match is going to be a lot easier than the old-fashioned way of just reading over all of the cases.”

Burgess speaks with an air of consummate professional detachment, though delving deep into so many warped minds inevitably has an effect on her. “You can’t listen to what they did not to be affected by it and to see how far somebody could go to,” she reflects. “The escalation was the scary thing. It would soon get to a point where it wasn’t giving them enough of a pleasure that they got out of killing, and so then they’d go up to another level.”

She also comes with a warning: “Our society has advanced to where social media is now taking over and they can meet up with others and it’s very serious. To try to get them to stop is going to be very hard. They’ve moved from just having one type of person they want to kill – what we call the target – to where they now want to take out a lot of people. So you’re into the mass shooting .”

• Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer is out on Hulu in the US on 11 July and on Disney+ in the UK at a later date