The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see a side of life the average persons never exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Welcome to another episode of I Catch Killers. Today's guests had a profound effect on my career as a homicide detective. She would not know that, but I'm sure there are a lot of other homicide detectives worldwide who feel exactly.
The same way I do.
Her contributions to law enforcement, training and criminal investigations have had a broad and lasting impact, not only in her own country.
But also across the world.
She played a crucial role in the advancement of criminal profile techniques, helping law enforcement agencies identify and apprehend suspects based on behavioral patterns and psychological theories. We're talking real mind Hunter stuff here. What we're talking about is getting into the mind of killers, including notorious serial killers, by understanding what motivates them, how they think, which allows law enforcement officers to track these killers down and, in the
case of serial killers, save further victims. Today, we're going to be talking to someone who I consider an absolute legend in law enforcement, and I don't hand out those accolades lightly. Her groundbreaking work has seen her portrayed as a main character and the hugely successful Netflix series mind Hunter. Our guest today is doctor Anne Burgess, who started her career as a psychiatric nurse, obtained her PhD in nursing,
and is a professor. She helped develop the methodology that FBI agents used to interview, study, and profile serial killers. I'm not kidding when I say it's an absolute privilege to be able to sit down and speak with doctor Burgers. Would you prefer doctor Burgers or doctor Anne Burgers. What are you comfortable with?
Well, whatever you normally do I'm fine with anything.
Well, Hello, Anne, I'm Gary.
Okay, Hi Gary, delighted to be invaded and happy to be here. Gary.
Well, I'm going to embarrass you up front. I can't say how I'm excited to sit down and speak with you. Having been a homicide detective for over twenty years, I'm familiar with your work and what emanated from the FBI, and I've got to say I'm a big fan because the thing that excited me most was trying to get into the mind of killers, and you're at the forefront of understanding what goes on in that field.
We're trying to that's what we've been doing, and we're still trying to get inside the mind see if we can learn more about these serial killers.
Yeah, right from upfront to understand each killer. And we're going to delve deeply into what you've learned. But I suppose it's a science or it's an area of study that the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. Every time you think you've noiled it, I'm sure you see something else.
Absolutely, that's the way it is, and that's why we just keep going because there are just new avenues to pursue.
Tell us a little bit for our listeners, tell us a little bit about your career so they get an understanding the work that you've done. And when I say your career, we're not talking past tense. I know you've just come from lecturing a group of students before you sat down here, so you're still very, very active.
Yeah. I basically started out my career as a nurse. As a psychiatric nurse, you specialize in nursing in various fields, and so I picked psychiatric nursing and so for many years that's what I did. I would do psychotherapy. I was a what's called a clinician, but I also was an academic, and I've been at Boston College was where I first started into some research, and that was on rape victims. So I really that was because of a colleague of mind, Linda Holmstrom, who said that this was
going to be an important area for women. And this is back in the seventies, and that was true, that the Women's movement actually was the Second Movement was just starting, and she had been to some of what are called consciousness raising groups where women would gather and talk about things they had never talked about before. And of course much of it had to do with rape, had to do with incest, that kind of thing, and so she was instrumental in saying we need to do a study.
And she had tried to find rape victims and was having no l up. They're very they hide, they really do, they don't pronounce themselves. So that she I said, the only place I think we can find them is at a hospital, at an emergency room, and so I started contacting hospitals and that's where we were able to get into Boston City Hospital, which was a very good hospital, large urban hospital. It's where police would take rape victims,
and so that's where the study started. And over a year we saw one hundred and forty six people between the ages of three and seventy three, so we had a wide span the majority, of course where you'd expect late teens, early twenties, but then we had some that were children, and of course some that were elderly. So that is what started me not only an academ but
also as a research area. And from there, the FBI concurrently was being told they had to start screening their agents in rape investigation, and so they had nobody that was had any expertise in it, and why should they They were all investigators. So the another nurse who was also a detective out in Los Angeles, had been keeping up with her nursing skills. She worked at an emergency room, and she said to Roy Hazelwood, who had said he had this new assignment he was going to have to
teach rape investigation. He didn't know where he'd find anyone or anything. And she caught him after class and said, there's a new article out in the American Journal of Nursing and it's by someone out on the East Coast. Why don't you contact her? And that's what he did, and he invited me to come down to teach their agents, their special agents about rape victims. So that's how my research in the area of victims connected with the FBI,
who were having to train repe investigators. And from there is where the project on a criminal personality study started with Bob Wrestler and John Douglas, and that's how I got into the profiling. What they needed was somebody that knew methodology. They were not trained as science listeners, as researchers, and so they needed to bring in somebody that could set up a research study. So that's very basically how I got from point A to point B.
Well, I'm sure when you started out nursing, you didn't in visage that you'd be working for a large majority of your career very in depth with the FBI.
So I never never, I've got to say.
In prepping for the podcast and understanding your background and the type of things that you did, it made me reflect on my early times in homicide. I was fortunate enough to work with a partner of Paul Bradley as a young detective who had spent twenty years as a psychiatric nurse, and it was interesting just as we're both
setting out as learning the traders detectives. I always had fascinating discussions with Paul about what are we dealing with here and the type of expertise that he brought into
the field. So yeah, I do understand the benefits of it, and that shaped me in the way that I was looking at crimes, having someone just a bounce some ideas off, because I think and you would see it, with all the law enforcement offices you dealt with, we have a tendency there's some black and white thinking and to think a little bit abstract doesn't come naturally to a lot
of police officers. I would suggest, I would agree, whinding back on your studies with sexual assault victims rape victims that one thing, and correct me if I'm wrong, But I think that's when the thinking started to change that rape wasn't about the sexual act, it was about the control.
Right.
That was really one of our major papers that rape certainly happened in a sexual context, that it had more to do with dominance, power and anger. And that was one of the articles we wrote and published, and I think that really caught on. People began to understand a little bit more that it wasn't just a sexual act.
Yeah, and I think opening your mind up to what's made evating the crime just with that, I won't say subtle, because it's a significant shift in thinking, does change the way you follow an investigation.
Victimology.
That's one thing in homicide that I was fortunate enough to work under some very good mentals, and I really didn't get the importance initially that they were put in on victimology. I'd just like to talk to you about victimology because now, having been what I consider an experienced homicide detective, understand the importance of it. So victimology and the homicide investigation or yeah, of Cereal rapist, any serious crime. What can the victim tell you about the perpetrator of the crime?
Well, they tell an awful lot. And that's where I think the payoff is because up until that point, everybody just thought O rape was the same thing as sex. And until you listen to what the victim tells you about what occurs between how they get targeted if you will you want to use that word, or how they get selected, and then what they do, what they say, how they behave all of that, they're not going to tell you. The offender's not going to tell you. You have
to get it from the victim. And when you talk with enough victims, you begin to see the patterns. And that's what I think the payoff was is, so we learned about the offender from the victim, So we try to emphasize that, and I think that the profilers done at Quantico really caught on to that and they use that as the key piece of information to start with. You know, after they have a victim, why was that victim target and why was he or she usually a she?
And what type of person victimized her, so you and then where should we look for a possible suspect. And they began to see that they could use these patterns as a way to better classify who they were looking for, and I think that's what sharpened their investigative techniques. It's the victimology, the study of the victim, and that goes for any type of crime. It doesn't have to be just rape, but certainly was in our situation of because nobody had talked about the victim early on, and so
our Lindham Our work was very very important. And then the traumatic aftermath and the fear. I mean it was really based on fear. They fear that they were going to be killed, especially if the stranger not necessarily a domestic rate, but certainly a stranger rate.
During the course of my career I got to because it was homicide and serial violent crime, and got to work on quite a few serial rapists and the way that they target their victims. And quite often it was the type of victim that alludes to the fact that we had a serial rapist, whether the female that was in the ones that I investigated, they are always female victims, but they were when I say vulnerable. They were exposed in that they were walking home late at night, that
type of stranger sexual assault. So they get that thinking about why they targeting victims. Do you think it also links the crimes together too, because I know in my early days in policing, and I spent over the thirty
years in policing, we sort of operated in silos. We didn't link a fan is to give us say, quite often they'd be a ripe reported in this area, and then they'd be a ripe report in another era, and they'd be two groups of groups of detectives working in isolation and not really comparing notes right right.
And actually what has even helped advance the science even more, of course is DNA that they're finding that they always they can change their MOO. That was confusing. I know that Douglas put that a lot of emphasis on that the signature, what was the signature of the offender that he had that was psychologically based, But he could change the m O. But he couldn't change the signature because
it was it was part of him. So those were some of the things that we learned in the It had to be a serial type offense.
Could you give us an example of the type of thing break that down.
Well, there would be I'm thinking of John Simonis. He was one of the big ones cases that we had. They took years for them to find him and his m all would he put as much effort into his message of gaining access to a victim, and so that could change, but he always would have them. He had to immobilize them. He had to have people aware of what he was doing. He was an exhibitionist. He wanted the husband or the children to witness the rape. I mean it was really so psychological if you you know,
that's where one of the things is. They wanted to know, well, what did I think of that? And I said, I bet you go back in his childhood and find out that he had witnessed something in the family. And sure enough, there had been some whether it was ever confirmed, but something between the father and the sister, and he had witnessed that, and so he carried that out in his own rapes. So there's a one where he didn't change his Uh, he didn't change his signature, but he might
change you know, where he found a victim. He might have found her inside a house, or he could find him on the street. That that kind of thing.
Okay, and that that helps you link the crime, understand the type of person you're looking for and what maivates a person.
Yeah, but I will say they used their good detective work. You probably would appreciate that the profilers all were interested in the car, the type of car that the and of course the car was very important in detective work in those days. And sure enough they had pinpointed the type of car be very flashy, it'd be like a sports car because that seemed to match the personality that of the type of person that they were looking for. And sure enough it was a red trans am that
caught their attention at two separate places. And so that's how they they So even though we have.
Look, I love the good detective stories and again it makes me reflect on reflect on my career. The things that you learn I couldn't understand with these experienced detectives that I was working with initially, are just so focused on the car, and I'd be thinking, all right, we've gone over the car, and they'd be fixated with there was a red car or whatever, and they'd be fixated on it. But quite often that it leads to leads
to a successful result. And when you do unravel a serial offender, little things that come to mind that you look back at it with hindsight and if you had better better thought process and the type of work that you guys have been doing over there. One serial rapists who were working on the victims were always attacked on
the Tuesday and Thursday night. And then when we finally caught the offender, he was married, had kids, normal home life, but he was supposed to be going to evening college during the Tuesday and days and that's when he's struck. So you see patterns like that. And I remember when we had him targeted as a possible suspect and then we realized that he's got a or not an alibi, but an excuse to be out of his home on those two nights. That sort of firmed it up as
we're heading in the right direction. I also, and you mentioned DNA, and I probably want to talk about that later a little bit more detail, but I was listening to one of the many interviews that you've done and you said the benefit of DNA is not only yeah, it's advanced criminal investigation in huge ways, but it also helps eliminate suspects, and I thought, that's someone that understands that world because the DNA, it's so helpful because you can spend so much time focusing on one person and
if you can compare it to the DNA, makes a difference, doesn't it.
I think it makes huge difference. And I think that's really one of the best benefits of DNA is to exclude people a course is very helpful for them.
Yeah, too well to be excluded.
I learned or it shaped my career early in homicide. We were targeting the person you ticked the boxes of. This is a good suspect that it was a sexual assault and murder of an elderly lady. It was a horrendous crime. Someone had broken into his house. We got a suspect that ingratiated himself into the crime in that he was a witness and said he was walking his dog and his dog got off the lead and he
ran past the place, which gets us suspicious. He gave a detailed description of someone he saw coming out of the place, which he just couldn't He was describing the earring this bloke had on from across the road. Details like that the victim was a member of a church group. He went to the same church. He also also knocked on a door of another elderly lady a couple of weeks after the murder and asked for a cup of
a glass of water because he was hot. We couldn't work get how this person got access into the place. We look at his criminal history and he's got past offenses in another state for sexually assaulting a elderly lady. You can understand. To take this point of view, We've got this bloke, had him under surveillance, picked him up, got his DNA. First DNA case I worked on. First time we used DNA and the laboratory comes back because seaman was left at the scene. No, that's not your man,
and we were gobsmacked. We demanded the game go down to the laboratory to have it. Can you explain this DNA stuff to us? And we're staring at this screen not fully understanding it. But it taught me a lot that you can be headed off in the wrong direction on investigations because because of the circumstances.
Would you agree with.
That, I absolutely would agree with that, And I can think of many times when they are looking for a suspect and exactly as you say, and they get the DNA back and it excludes the person. So but it's helpful if you can get the DNA early enough so that you don't get so invested in the case because you are left of how can this be? It must be this guy.
Well, it taught me a lesson from you know, you've got to keep an open mind.
Yeah. Absolutely, criminal profiling.
There's a lot of everyone's got a view on what criminal profiling is. And you see some shows, fictional shows or whatever, and it's almost like you can describe the person to the tea and you virtually everything other than the name you provide. Can you explain to all of us what criminal profiling is all about. When someone says, I'm a criminal profiler, or have you got a criminal profile?
Could you explain what it actually is? Because I think you're one person that's earned the right to explain what it is.
And I think it depends on what one's background is, because we work. When I talk about criminal profiling, and we're talking about out what has done through investigators, not through psychologists. And I think psychologists who like to be they are going to profile through their understanding of personality
and psychiatric lingo and things like that. So I see that as very different than the investigators whose work is finding suspects, and I think that gives them a heads up to be able to understand that you're looking for someone that has committed you're looking for suspect that has committed an ex crime, rape or a murder or something, and you have to bring all of the skills. You have special skills. Investigators have special skills that other disciplines
do not have, and vice versa. So I may try to make it very clear that we're talking about behavior. It started out with In fact, even the FBI Academy called their department the Behavioral Science Department unit. They later have changed it to call it now it's more criminal investigative or support services or things. So over time they have changed and advanced. I would like to say that they had advanced using the work that they had learned from.
So what our work was in profiling was to get a large amount of data that could be analyzed to either support or not support what we had been learning. And we learned some things that weren't right, you know, we weren't doing it right, that the patterns were different, and so that's where research comes into it and the methodology that we use. That's what they needed me for
was the methodology. And because they were researchers, you know, they didn't have any courses in that, so that I think with what made a big difference in their type of fling. So answer your question, you need to know what type of profiling the person does and that's going to match to his back or her background. Well, but that's why I think you have so many different definitions of profiling.
I work very closely with a criminal psychologist, doctor Sarah Yule, throughout my police career, especially in homicide. She's a good friend of mine, and I don't think a lot of the police fully understood how you could use someone like Sarah's skills, and she was the first one that was attached to a law enforcement agency specifically to help with investigations. I like Sarah's input because she would think outside the
square from what we do as police. Where I used her to the best benefit I thought was preparing for interviews, talking about and not so the saying you tell me what question to ask this person. I'm a detective. I know what questions I want to ask, But how I might that person, whether that person would relate more to a female officer, whether that person might relate to a person in authority, that type of thing. Is that a tool that you think is worthwhile using in criminal investigation?
Absolutely? I think that more cases are sabotaged. Whatever words you want from an interview, I've seen a lot of cases just go down the drain because investigators are not really trained in that. I think they need training in that. And I've talked with I've seen cases where because I just think back to what you learned. Did you really ever learn to interview a victim when you're early on in your career or did you kind of learn it
as you went along? See, I think who would be the person you bring in is very helpful to be able in that particular area of how to get the most information. One of the big problems in criminals is they will lie and you have to think through is he telling me the truth or is he not? So that's why we want to get into their thoughts. Thoughts drive behavior, right, that's a basic premise of that's how we all work. And so how do you get to those thoughts? And that's where we put so much we
tried it through behavior. We're doing something different. Now we're trying to get them before they act in any kind of social media posts written things they've done, and we're using AI to give us new information. And it's amazing how we miss things when we just do an interview after you put it through AI for example, you know. Yeah, And that's trying to see this is before they have it's when they're personally putting down information. We looked at
twenty three called manifestos. These were all written before they were incarcerated of the murderers, and then see how they pat what their patterns are. I mean, it's a fast way, if you will, of trying to get inside their thinking, because it's their thinking that gets them off base, right, it's their thinking. Yeah, so how and so we have what we call a step way to murder and there are about six steps that they go through, so that if we can get early on, we might be able
to prevent. Everything is in the service of prevention. Can you get them when they just have a grudge, you know, or do you have and maybe they're still doing their research and they go through these rather predictable.
Stages in regards to six steps to murder.
Can you break that damn for us?
Yes, it starts, it always starts with a grudge there it's something that bothers the person that they are very upset and angry about. And then that can develop into what we call an ideology where they align themselves with a group that may or may not happen. And then they do research and that's where in the research they look around they find out other people are feeling that, and we break it down into which called in cells. Are you familiar with in cells nationalists or extremists? I
think there are three. And then they begin to plan. This is when they now have enough information and they plan a killing. So that's the I think that's a third of the fourth. Uh, they might they get a date and all these manifestos they said it's going to be whatever the data is. Now that can change and it can change for various reasons. But they will then go on and in all of the cases, of course, they did kill and that would be the last step
where they do it. And we use the the Elliott Elliott case out of where he videotapes himself in the car and it's just after he has killed his three roommates and he's now going to go he's a misogynist and he's going to go to a sorority house and he goes, he can't they won't let him into the sorority house. Luckily, well, he kills three women outside. That's
Elliott Rogers. I don't know if it's he would be what's called also an inceel, and he's one of the We kind of use him as the example of the steps to violence or the steps to murder, and pretty much we were that's our research now where we're really trying to see if we can get them early enough before they act and catch them either when they're planning it, because many most of them give and give a warning.
So that's where the interview is hard, because you have to know how they whether they're telling you the truth or not a lot of times to tell you what they think you want to hear is the problem.
Yeah, I had respect for you before. It's just gone up even higher. That you understand the importance of interviewing, because that's one thing that I think detectives we don't get the training, and it is crucial, It is absolutely crucial. And I found that the most stimulating part of my career in criminal investigation was sitting down in the interview room.
And I was fortunate enough to have people that I really respected, and I just I was like a sponge learning from them the way that they approached the interview and the thought process that went into how we're going to approach.
That level of detail.
They had before they stepped into the interview room, so they could pick up and drop things when it suited them, like contradict the person's version of events. And I love the fact that you say people lie in interviews and don't tell the truth, because I've had I've worked with some people and they come out and go, oh, but he seems like a nice man. It looks like he's telling the truth. And I haven't got any But I wanted to pull my hair out because it would just
frustrate me. Frustrate me so much. But the approach that you take in the interview room, the atmosphere you create. I don't want to refer to a fictional TV show, but I've been binging on mind Hunter in the lead up to this rewatching it. There was one part in season one and the character, I think it was the character portrayed portrayed on you and they were interviewing a suspect and it was a female involved in a murder where there was the husband and the brother in law
of something. And she would used the words splashed as in it was splashing about blood as in stabbing.
And the point that was made.
Just with that one comment that she was there when that crime occurred. She wasn't relaying it.
I tried the person was still alive. Yes, that's one of our cases, one of the early cases. I was also going to say, you have to we train, or the FBI trained for doing an interview versus doing an interrogation. There are two different.
Well that's another great point.
Yeah, yeah, and so you have to know there's techniques for each one that are very important I think for investigators to learn, and I bring in when I'm teaching it. I have a retired FBI person who's really good, really good on the difference, and he will roleplay it as and he plays the subjects to the subject and one of the agents to have to interview him or have to interrogate him.
I prepared and it was shown to me. That's something I've adopted and I've tried to pass it on because I would lecture about interviewing on courses, and I would prepare before I went into the interview room for a couple of scenarios. One is that the offender is going to put their hands up and confess, So then it's about gathering all the facts that you need to present it to court and make sure it's a done deal. Then the second, and this can change during the course
of the interview. The second thing. Okay, if the offenders denying, what type of line the questioning, how you're going to approach it. I think you need to be flexible when you step into the interview.
Room, absolutely, and you have to know your material. You're so right, you have to know because then you can catch them in a lie. That's what the agent would do. And then once you catch them in a lie, he doesn't dare to do it, he better not do it again.
Yeah, and you can drop that at the appropriate time when you point out that they've just lied. Sometimes their lies are as good as a confession if you can contradict what they've got. But anyway, you just get me excited about my police career. It makes me want to
go back in and be a homicide detective. So the early days when you and my understanding, John Douglas and the team were going out and interviewing serial killers getting a lot of information, and that was going to let against the grain or the thinking at the time that will what are you going to get we've locked them up. What are you going to get from these people? What information?
They interviewed a cross sector, not a cross section, but they interviewed quite a few serial killers that were in custody by the nature, and I would imagine that most people I know in that that field, they like to talk because they're board in jail, so it's pretty easy get if you walk in there, they're they're happy to
talk to you. The information they got when it was shown to you, I think you looked at them thought that it's amazing, but the it hadn't got the structure, the academic structure, or the way that they were extracting the information. Can you talk us through that, how you came to be working with those guys and what you brought to the table from the information they had.
Sure they needed what we got an interview, They needed a questionnaire so that we collect the data systematically, and that that's in my end counter that that doctor Wendy Kark tries to do that. It's kind of funny the way they do it. But at any rate, we had fifty seven pages. It was five sections color coded, and it had to do with the crime element itself. They
had to do with the victim. It had a section that just was on the forensics, any forensics that were found, and last one was on aspects of the crime that we were interested in, and so we take all of that. Now. What they would do, though, is they would collect all of the records that they possibly could, and that's where
there was the advantage. So it wasn't just going in and doing a cold interview, you know, it was having all the information so they knew when they could whether he was telling the truth or not because the records would have contained that. And then all of that was run data, and that's how we came up with the patterns we call patterns and motives and serial homicide. That
was big question they had. They didn't know what was the motive in these many of these killings, and we determined it had to have a sexual motive, even though
it didn't look like a sexual crime. So many of the myths were or the biases were dispelled there getting here to go in and even though the victim may be fully dressed, et cetera, et cetera, we began to realize and talking with them afterwards, to make your point about what can you learn if in talking with the is that they would have the victim dress themselves, they would rape, they'd have the victim dressed themselves, and then they killed so that it looked like it wouldn't look
like a sexual kitten. And you wouldn't think of that, right. So that was just one little example of why we were able to it. But we needed that information from them, and that was tell me about what you did and how it was, and just keep encouraging them to talk about it and in a naturalistic way. And they, as
you said, they like to talk. There would be things though that they wouldn't say, they wouldn't reveal, and I always wanted and you always knew that had to be something very personal, and that's where a lot of the trauma stuff was found. When they couldn't about that. They could boast about what they did to the victim, and they can do, but when you ask them about their
own life, childhood, growing up. Those were some of the very the very acts that they couldn't talk about, and it usually was going to be something related to some sexual act that had been done to them.
It's interesting that the sexual side of it that comes into comes into the killings. I was investigating serial killer three children that we've been battling through the courts for a very, very long time, three Indigenous children, and part of the problem was there was an argument that, well, how can you link these crimes evidence on one of the murders, and my position was that they're linked. The children were all known to each other, They're living in
the same street in a small country town. They disappeared over a five month period. Two of the bodies were recovered dumped in a bush track on the outskirts of town. The first victim's clothing that she's wearing at the time of her disappearance was dumped in the river at the
end of that dirt road. I'm thinking, yeah, yeah, a pretty common sense that this is in a very small country town, these crimes are committed by it by one person, and I would argue with legal people that would be because we're trying to push the matter through.
The courts and the one stumbling block I had there.
Was a sixteen year old girl, sixteen year old boy, and a four year old girl, and the legal minds were saying, well, you know, the victims not even the same sex, different age and all that. Sarah yure, she looked through it, and when she tells me it's so common sense, I'm sort of kicking myself. Wire didn't formulate this idea to start with. She said that it's a serial killer, but killing the end result because he was driven by sex. The person what he was looking for.
Sixteen year old girl sexually attracted to that lady, the sixteen year old boy sexually attracted to the girlfriend of the sixteen year old boy, and the four year old girl sexually attracted to the mother of the girl. So Sarah broke it down. This person was prepared to kill for their sexual gratification. And then once I started articulating that, people started to get it and understand, Okay, this is how those crimes are linked. Different ways of looking at things.
Absolutely, absolutely yeah, And we would find that, and you would when you had I would always ask when you had multiple victims, is which one did you like for something? Which one did you like sexually, which one did you like?
You know, and you would find some differences there when you had when they were all sexually murdered, is there had been one that really stood out and it was fascinating the one that and this one killer he had killed ten or eleven and I was really amazed at the one that he picked was the most sexually gratifying after he killed her. And that what's important is it can be in the act of killing. I'm trying to think if we had any that they would talk about that.
It was hard to get them to talk about it. But that's that's where some of the payoff would be in learning more about what it meant to kill, what ultimate question.
You know, getting to understand one of the killers over there, Camper.
At Temper, Yeah, yeah.
Tell us a bit about that.
It was portraying the mind Hunter series, and I've read up a little bit about him. I think it was fairly close to the type of personality was tell us about those crimes.
Well, Kemper always would kill very fast because he didn't want the victim to suffer, right, I mean, that's that's amazing that you know, figure that one out, and so he would kill and then he would do the sex. So he was a thataviliac. He'd got more out of doing things to the victim after he killed. And I would compare him to Monte Rissel, who was just the opposite. He was a rape murderer. He would rape first and
then kill, whereas Kemper was just the opposite. And that he now he had he had both domestic murders as well as stranger murders. He had remember his grandparentsparents. Yeah, his grandparents were first, and he shoots grandmother in the back and she turns him back to him to return to whatever she was doing, and then he waits for grandfather and claims, well, he knew that he would grandfather would be up to see grandmother and dead. Well, I suppose that's true, but still there is more to it
than that. And men who look at who he kills last as his mother, and he thought that there would be the end, but of course it wasn't, and he luckily did turn himself in. He's still alive, you know.
Yeah, I've watched, I've seen him actually interviewed.
I'm saying I've wanted to kill my mother since i was eight years old and I'm not proud of that. And then a month later I'm up living with my grandparents in the mountains, and ten months later I murdered them, and I knew I was paranoid at that moment. I knew anybody that came up there and give me a funny look or fishy eye or quizzical look out of blowing their brains out thinking they were coming to get me. And if had been in a city, I would have been a mass murder at age fifteen. I would have
killed until he gunned me down. I wouldn't have been able to reason my way out of it. I was scared to death and I was violent. I felt my back hit that wall. I was the rabbit that always ran, that always backed away, always burns bridges. Suddenly there weren't anymore, and my back hit that wall, and I came out screaming and kicking and shooting. When more months after I was out, I was back into the fantasy bag. I was losing a grasp on something that was too violent
to keep inside forever. As I'm sitting there with a severed head in my hand, talking to it or looking at it, and I'm about to go crazy, literally I'm about to go completely flywheel loose and just fall apart. I say, wow, this is insane, and then I told myself, no, it isn't. You're saying that, and that makes it not insane.
It's quite chilling, isn't it. But that yes, And that's the work that you're looking into and the work that you uncover in homicide investigations. What's going on in their mind?
Well, they're very bright, that's the problem, is there. Very bright. He's very articulate. I mean, he could stand up like he's giving a lecture.
And you'd be fascinated. Wouldn't you sit there?
If you stood up there and gave an election, you'd be sitting there going this is incredible.
But yes, he's not charming in a psychopathic way, but he's, as you say, more captivating. Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, the way he relays it. What was when you first started working I got the scenes with the FBI, and probably it would have been difficult for you because we're talking the seventies at this stage when you started with the FBI started working with the fbies.
Mainly in the eighties the end of the seventies.
Yes, there would have been some resistance to even a female coming in and a nurse coming in to help these fbiddes. What type of resistance did you get there?
And part of that I was kind of intrigued with that is I wasn't a threat. See, oh she's a nurse. Now you know she doesn't what does she know?
Right?
What do women know? So there was I am sure now that was never said to me, but I am sure that was part of it. Now. Bob Wrestler tried to get his projects started before a couple of years before, and he was shot down in terms of we're investigators. Leave the research. We're not research, we're not interested in that. Leave that to the social work. So he had to wait until, like I retired, and then it brought it up again, and this time he had William Webster, who
was young. He was academically inclined. He wanted to pull the qualifications of the academy up, so he was very much in favor of doing it. But he warned Bob, he said, don't do any shoe box research and got to make the feral look good. Don't do anything to embarrass us. You know that was always there, as which you can understand.
I can imagine that's interesting. You picked up that. Yeah, and you're saying you're not that you didn't hear them talk. I can assure you they would have been talking about you. It's a nurse, and they would have been a lot of a lot of comments. There was there's one crime where people started like there was that slow resistance in what could you bring to an investigation, but when it
was demonstrated. I think there was one particular case where you show that could be used as an investigative tool, Like it's one thing to gather the data and understand why these people are in jail. But the naysayers might say, well, who cares, We've locked them up, let's work on the next one. But you demonstrated the skills that you guys were compiling and the information and the understanding that it could be worked in a strategic way. Can you talk about that particular case.
I'll see, well, you under one of the special cases. I think that the Jolbert case was a very good example of that, and that was the case of young boys. Two young boys were killed within a matter of three months, and that really terrified the community. These one was the son of a military colonel, I think, and they would.
They were all in the morning, early morning, and that's where wrestlers thought, this is somebody that either is coming off work that he can he's going out and doing this and sure not that match when we finally got hot, when they finally identified it. But Russa put the profile down almost to a t. He got everything. He said, this is something. It was out in Nebraska, and he said, this is going to be someone that is military on
the air base. They had offered air base was out there, that he will be an E I think he's an E four And that was the only thing he got wrong. He was an E three, just one level, isn't that amazing? And that he would do this after he came home from work, and he would have also do some work with young people. He was the junior director of the Y of the Boy Scouts. He had murdered that day and he went to the evening night with the parature all there talking about that. I mean, you can imagine
how that played out in his mind. I mean, that was very and it was John jo Bert turned out to be who the suspect was, and they got him. Luckily, they put they used the technique of media. They put out the profile out there and said anybody that sees
anything suspicious please let us know. And by golly, there was a teacher that had watched that and she had this strange person had had come near her and she thought was acting suspicious and she uh, she took down his license plate number and called then and this is it turned out to be. She was one digit shy,
but it was easy to run through they you know. Anyway, that was the John jo Bert case, and they got him who was out looking for another victim, and they he would say he would go out all the time just looking for a victim, and if the everything was right, he would act. So that I think is where they combined their strategies of some good detective work but also led it to some of the things that we were finding.
And that was a very important case. And then they founded that that case was Bob would do that back at Quantico, and one time a detective came up to him after class and said, you know, this sounds like a case that we had that we couldn't solve of a young eleven year old boy up in Maine. And Bob said, send us the material, and by golly, they got it was they solved it with and he confessed, so he really had three and he had prior little encounters with that kind of what we call the practice.
He would ride his bicycle and like try to hit somebody, and turned out that he had three other victims. Not murder, but three other victims is practice. So that was put together. What they're going to start off doing something as a way and it escalates up and they murder.
That's interesting and it's another interesting side of understanding the crime and understanding because when you're looking back at a person's criminal history, there might be a willful obscene exposure early and then it's a low level sexual assault, just an assault but with a sexual overtone and then you're looking at that history and they're not My take on it from a detective point of view was okay, well,
it's not rocking their boat anymore. They're not getting the enjoyment from that level of crime, and it escalates, escalates and gets to the point where the crime becomes more horrific. But looking for those type of patterns, I would imagine you see those type of patterns when you're looking at the ind of the criminal minds. These serial killers like, I don't think they just there would have to be red flag leading up to them committing crimes of that nature. Would that be fair to say, that'd.
Be fair to say. Yeah, Well, Kember even said he was going to go looking and become what we would call a mass shooter if he hadn't stopped that he wanted to go and take out more people than just one. And that's very scary.
It is scary. Will look like I could hear. I know it's it's in the evening over there. I could keep you here all night, and I promised you a certain time we might might take a break here. But I just leave with the thought. I was speaking to had her on the guests on My Catch Killers, Laura Richard's crime and Analysts. Yeah, and she was talking about the names that serial killers get.
And I like Laura.
She's got a practical sense and she understands the concerns when they're stalkers. But she made the point about these serial killers, they get names, and we're like it over here in this country. We've got the backpacker killer, we've got the granny killer. They all seem to get names.
And she suggested that you should certain killers should be called the small penis killer or something like that, just not to make it, not to give them that grandiosa with it, because with yeah, you can you can imagine that would have been something Laura said.
But I understand, yeah, I understand.
That's where where she's coming from in that the profile that they get and it's the police and the police start working on this type of killer and the media
get hold of it. When we get back into part two, I want to talk about the use of the media and the work that you do and how to use the media properly, because I saw in the high profile cases over here that the media is a real strategy and a real tool, And any time I spoke in the media, I was speaking what I believe directly to the offender, and that was very strategic in the way
that you approach it. So we might delve into that and quite a few other things if if that's something, So we'll take take a short break now, okay, m hm.