Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit

Douglas discusses in this chapter how anyone can be a victim. He begins with the murders of Joan, Michelle, and Christie Rogers by Oba Chandler in 1989. The Rogers women were found two days after their death by a fisherman in Tampa Bay. They were badly decomposed, duct-taped, and hog-tied with yellow plastic rope and regular white rope. Fifty-pound two-hole cinder blocks were tied around their neck to weigh them down. All three women were missing their swimsuit bottoms, indicating a crime of a sexual nature. Joan Rogers and her teenage daughters Michelle and Christie were on vacation in Florida from Ohio.

The only forensic evidence law enforcement officials could provide was a scribbled note with directions from the hotel to the location of their car. Local law enforcement reached out to Douglas’s unit for assistance, and they developed a profile of a white man in his mid-thirties to mid-forties with a blue-collar job. He was likely poorly educated with a history of physical and sexual assault. They predicted that he had likely left the area when the investigation died down, but he may have returned.

Jana Monroe, the agent assigned to the case, went on Unsolved Mysteries to discuss the case, which generated many leads, but none of them led to a perpetrator. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, Monroe magnified the note found in the victims’ car and put it on billboards with the hopes that the handwriting would be distinctive enough to be recognized. Three unconnected individuals contacted the police and identified the handwriting. It belonged an unlicensed aluminum-siding installer named Oba Chandler, who was in the midst of a series of civil lawsuits because the siding he installed became loose after heavy rain. He had handwritten letters to the three people who contacted the police. Chandler was arrested, tried, and found guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death.

Douglas moves on to cases where no specific target appears, such as in mass poisonings or bombings. Offenders who kill without seeking publicity appear to be primarily motivated by anger, such as the Tylenol poisonings. These individuals, according to Douglas, fit the profile of an assassin, or a white male in his late twenties to early thirties with military experience. He would be in a position that would allow him some measure of power, such as an auxiliary policeman or a security guard. He would drive a vehicle that resembled vehicles used by law enforcement. He likely had psychiatric treatment in the past, and he most likely experienced a stressor immediately before he started killing. He may have a propensity to blame society as a whole for his problems. He likely wrote to people in positions of power, such as the president or local politicians, to complain about the perceived injustices that he had experienced, and their unresponsiveness may have incensed him further. In these cases, Douglas advised heavy, targeted media attention, whether in the form of a written article or an interview with a “bleeding-heart psychiatrist” (326) who would be supportive of the offender and portray him as “a victim of society” (326). Douglas supported techniques that involved collaboration with the press, and these techniques often turn up leads, witnesses, and even suspects that would otherwise be lost or unknown.

Bombers, on the other hand, are generally white males of average or above-average intelligence. They are meticulous planners, non-athletic, non-confrontational individuals. Douglas profiles bombers based on the type of device they use or the target of the bombing. They range in motives, most commonly extortion, and according to Douglas, they tend to fall into three categories. The first category includes bombers who are power-motivated and drawn to destruction. The second category of bombers are the mission-oriented type, who are gratified by the process of design, construction, and placement of the devices they build. The last category of bombers involves what Douglas calls the “technician types” (331), bombers who experience satisfaction from the cleverness and ingenuity of their bombs.

Douglas differentiates between extortionists and abductors/kidnappers, though they are both profiteers. He views extortionists as con men. Kidnappers, on the other hand, are sociopathic, and they are willing to take a life as a means to an end. When profiling a kidnapper, Douglas contends that the profiler must understand why a certain victim was chosen. Kidnapping has links to stalking, and like abduction, stalking can often have deadly outcomes. According to Douglas, women are often the subjects of stalkers, and the relationship, real or imagined, usually begins with adoration and escalates to obsessiveness and possession. Douglas cites several famous cases of stalkers-turned-murders, such as John Hinkley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster, and Mark David Chapman, who felt such a strong connection to musician John Lennon that he murdered him, unable to cope with the disparities that existed between himself and Lennon. 

Douglas discusses the role of mental health in criminal cases. He feels strongly that psychiatric therapy and rehabilitation are effective treatments for many of the individuals discussed in the book. Most people go to therapy for self-improvement; their interest is to address what issues they may have. A convict is less interested in improvement, and more interested in convincing a parole board that he has been rehabilitated and can be released back into the community. Douglas cites Ed Kemper and Monte Rissell as examples of individuals who fooled mental health professionals. They were both in therapy at the time they were committing their crimes. Douglas contends that young mental health professionals are taught to believe that they can make a difference; their approach to individuals in the criminal justice system is too naïve and simplistic. They “start with the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality from that perspective” (344).

Insanity, Douglas points out, is not a medical or psychiatric term, but rather a legal one. One of the first attempts to define legal insanity was the M’Naghten Rule of 1843, named after a defendant named Daniel M’Naghten. He tried to kill the British prime minister at the time, but instead, he shot his private secretary. The M’Naghten Rule states that a defendant cannot be guilty if “his mental condition deprived of the ability to know the wrongfulness of his actions or understand their nature and quality” (345). A later version of the insanity defense was called the “irresistible impulse test,” which widened the scope of the M’Naghten Rule. According to the irresistible impulse test, a defendant was not guilty if he was not able to control his actions or compulsions as a result of his mental illness. The legal definition of insanity was widened further in Durham v. United States, where the Court of Appeals held that a defendant could not be found criminally responsible if his actions were the “product of mental disease or defect” (346). Unsurprisingly, Durham was not popular with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges. Another Court of Appeals case set yet another legal standard for insanity called the American Law Institute (ALI) Standard, which stated that the defendant was not criminally responsible if at the time he committed the crime, his mental disease or defect rendered him unable to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or conform his conduct to the law. According to Douglas, some form of the ALI standard has been increasing in popularity as time goes on.

To Douglas, the concept of dangerousness was more important than any legal definition of insanity, because “dangerousness is situational” (350). He illustrates this point with the second trial of Arthur Shawcross in Rochester, New York.

Shawcross had been convicted of murdering two children and was sentenced to 25 years. He was, by all accounts, a model prisoner, and he convinced a parole board of his reform and rehabilitation. He was released after 15 years and began killing again a year later. Shawcross killed and mutilated the bodies of sex workers and discarded them in wooded areas around the Genesee River gorge. After he was caught, he confessed to several of the murders. At trial, however, he raised the insanity defense with the assistance of Dr. Dorothy Lewis, who testified for the defense. On his MRI, she found a benign temporal lobe cyst that caused a form of epilepsy. Dr. Lewis also found that Shawcross suffered from severe physical and sexual abuse during his childhood and PTSD from his time in Vietnam. Under hypnosis, Shawcross also took on different personalities and was observed reenacting earlier episodes of childhood abuse. All of these experiences, according to Dr. Lewis, combined to cause a sort of fugue state each time he murdered one of his victims. He emerged from these episodes with little to no memory of what he did. The prosecution’s expert witness, Dr. Park Dietz, found no evidence of memory loss, and in fact, upon examination of the defendant, found that Shawcross recalled many specific details about the murders he committed. Dr. Dietz found no correlation between Shawcross’s behavior and neurological findings. Dr. Dietz testified that while Shawcross may have suffered abuse in the past, whatever psychological problems he had did not impact his ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. In all likelihood, Shawcross chose to kill. Shawcross was found guilty and sentenced to 250 years to life.

In cases that involved mental disease and defect, law enforcement attempted to use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, for guidance on what constituted a serious mental disorder. The DSM remains the principal authority on diagnosing mental illnesses in the United States. The pure psychological approach of the DSM provided little value to Douglas and the criminal justice community, who sought direction on the usage and application of behavioral analysis and psychology in the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution of serious criminal offenders. This lack of direction led to the development of the Crime Classification Manual, which was born from Douglas’s doctoral dissertation. Ann and Allen Burgess, along with various members of the FBI’s Investigative Support and Behavior Science Units, also contributed to this manual. The CCM classifies and organizes serious crimes by their behavioral attributes and factors in dangerousness in its evaluation of offenders.

Douglas illustrates an example of evaluating dangerousness in the case of Alphonse Amodio Jr., who wrote a series of increasingly disturbing letters threatening to kill Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and various other politicians. He showed an unhealthy interest in Hinckley’s case and mentioned this interest in his letters. He initially signed the letters as “Lonely and Depressed,” but he signed his later letters as “C.A.T.” and sent them from different locations around the country. In one of his letters, he indicated a willingness to talk to a newspaper editor after he had accomplished his assassination. The FBI and Secret Service interpreted this willingness as an opening to establish a dialogue with the writer of the letters, whom Douglas profiled as a native New Yorker in his mid-twenties to early thirties, single, white, and of average intelligence; he was probably an occasional substance user. He had likely suffered a stressor in his early to mid-twenties that taxed his emotional resources. The dialogue that came of these interactions later led to the capture of Amodio. Dr. Murray Miron, a psycholinguistics expert, conducted an analysis on the communications from Amodio, and he had made the determination that Amodio was not dangerous but merely seeking attention. Douglas, on the other hand, viewed Amodio as a threat to government officials.  

Douglas ends the book where he began: with the Green River Killer. During the summer of 1982, the bodies of several women were found in the Green River. They were all sex workers who worked along the Pacific Coast Highway near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as the Sea-Tac Strip. All of the women had been suffocated. A multijurisdictional task force was formed, led by Major Richard Kraske of the King Count Criminal Investigations Division. In September, the cases were brought to Douglas by the Seattle Field Office of the FBI. Upon reviewing the case file, Douglas profiled the offender to be a white male who was physically strong, remorseless, and inadequate. This man’s experiences with women mortified him, and as a result, he sought to punish as many women as he could.

Douglas believed that the key to catching this offender would be in the use of proactive techniques to establish contact. The police found a strong suspect who matched nearly every aspect of the profile. He was a forty-four-year-old taxi driver who spent a lot of time with sex workers and street people along the Sea-Tac Strip. He had been cooperative, injecting himself into the investigation early on, as many serial killers do. Although the police subjected him to an all-day interrogation and a polygraph test, and they conducted bumper-lock surveillance on him, they were unable to find probable cause to arrest him. By December 1983, twelve women had been found murdered and seven more reported missing. Douglas was asked to go to Seattle to provide on-site advice, but he fell ill during the trip and had a near-death experience. As of the writing of Mindhunter more a decade later, the Green River Killer remains at large, with more than fifty victims. Douglas suspects that at least three killers are guilty of the crimes, if not more.

Douglas, along with his colleague Roy Hazelwood, also profiled one of the most infamous serial killers of all time for a television program called The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper. The FBI saw the program as a good opportunity to showcase the work of the Behavioral Science Unit without compromising current cases and investigations. The Ripper murdered sex workers in Victorian London between August 31st and November 9th of 1888, escalating in brutality with each kill. Despite the best efforts of Scotland Yard, he was never caught. According to Douglas, the murders most likely stopped suddenly because the murderer was arrested for a lesser offense, but Douglas postulated that the case would likely be solvable by modern standards. A case that remained unsolved during Douglas’s time at the FBI was that of the BTK Strangler, a killer who taunted the police with notes to the print and news media.

Douglas was partly responsible for the growth of the Behavioral Science Unit, and by the mid-1980s, it was divided into two separate units and the profiling staff had increased from one to more than ten. Douglas was made unit chief of the BSU in 1990, and he changed the name of the unit to the Investigative Support Unit, so as to “get rid of the BS” (379). He instituted new policies that would allow for agents in the unit to receive increased ratings and salary in recognition of the difficult work they did.

Douglas was part of an elite group of FBI agents known for advancing the field of behavioral science within law enforcement. Many, including Robert Ressler, Roy Hazelwood, Ken Lanning, Jim Reese, and Jim Wright, are renowned in their specific fields within behavioral science. Douglas’s career at the FBI was long and storied, though not without a personal cost. His marriage of 22 years fell apart after his major illness, but he has since repaired his relationship with Pamela and his children. Douglas retired from the FBI in 1995 and continues to do consulting work to this day.