In the late 1970s the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a small team of instructors in a windowless corner of its academy at Quantico, Virginia. Other agents and police officers joked that the initials of the Behavioral Science Unit stood for something cruder than science. The two men who gave the unit its reputation spent a good part of their working weeks away from the building, driving to prisons to sit across a table from men convicted of murder and ask them how it had been done, and why.
Robert Ressler, born in 1937, had joined the Bureau in 1970 after Army service and a stretch as a criminal investigation officer in Washington; he was recruited to the unit not long after it was set up in 1972. John Douglas came to the FBI in 1970 at about 25, after four years in the military, and moved to the unit in 1976. Between 1976 and 1979, by the count given in Psychology Today, the two of them and several colleagues interviewed 36 convicted offenders about motive, planning and what they did afterward. Ann Burgess, a nursing researcher who began working with the Bureau after a 1978 call from the agent Roy Hazelwood, joined the project in its early years. She has said the first interviews the agents shared with her were loosely structured and rested on no conventional research method, and that she brought one.
The interviews became the basis of a new kind of work. Profiling, as the Bureau practiced it, meant describing the likely age, habits and circumstances of an unknown offender from the pattern of the offenses, and handing that description to local police. Douglas and Ressler also gave popular culture two of its most durable figures. Douglas became the model for the head of the unit in Thomas Harris’s novels and, through them, for a character in a 1991 film. Both agents became the models for the two leads of a Netflix series. What follows sets the claims made by and for these agents beside the court records, case by case, and then follows the work onto the screen.
All That’s Interesting, a general-interest site, credits Ressler with giving the category of repeat offender its modern name, and a student-union feature at Robert Gordon University says the unit coined "serial killer" while Douglas was building it. Neither claim rests on a primary document, and the phrase had users before and after. What the record does support is the interview program itself.
Douglas’s first prison interview is described as Edmund Kemper’s. Kemper, who stood 6 feet 9 inches, killed his paternal grandparents at 15 in 1964 and passed through juvenile court and a state hospital before his release to his mother’s care. Between May 1972 and April 1973 he killed six young women and girls in Santa Cruz County and the Bay Area, then his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sara Hallett. He telephoned the Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, and had to call more than once before he was believed. A Santa Cruz County jury convicted him on November 8, 1973, of eight counts of first-degree murder, rejecting a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. He was received by the state prison system the next day.
Kemper was an ideal subject for researchers because he talked, and the record around him shows how much of what is known comes from his own mouth. A Santa Cruz newspaper reported in 1977 that he was the subject of a planned film; Margaret Cheney’s 1976 book on him, The Co-Ed Killer, was described by Kirkus Reviews as resting largely on his own confessions. On July 9, 2024, the parole board denied him parole for the 12th time since his conviction, citing among other things an April psychiatric evaluation that rated him a high risk of reoffending, and set his next hearing seven years later. He did not attend. He was then 75 and held at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
The interviews had a plain, practical effect. They gave the unit a vocabulary and a set of case histories with which to talk to detectives, and in the late 1970s that vocabulary was still new.
Two of the subjects who appear in the first season of Mindhunter were men whose cases the Bureau did not work in real time; they were research interviews.
Jerome Brudos, an electrician in Salem, Oregon, pleaded guilty on June 27, 1969, to three counts of first-degree murder, the deaths of three young women in western Oregon in 1968 and 1969. Judge Val Sloper sentenced him to three consecutive life terms, and he entered the Oregon State Penitentiary the same day. A fourth charge, concerning a fourth young woman, was left pending and never tried. Brudos appealed and sought post-conviction relief without success. He died of natural causes on March 28, 2006, aged 67, after nearly 37 years in prison, the longest-held prisoner in the state, in the words of the Associated Press headline on his death. Grunge, a pop-culture site, lists him among the men Douglas interviewed; what he said in any research interview is not on record.
Montie Rissell is serving five consecutive life sentences for murders in Alexandria, Virginia, that ALXnow, a local news site, dated between August 1976 and March 1977. ALXnow described him in 2019 as a major focus of the fourth episode of the series' first season. The Virginia Parole Board did not grant him parole on November 3, 2025, and its chair recommended a three-year deferral. Rissell is widely described as one of the men agents interviewed in the research that grew into profiling; the content of those interviews is not on record.
The first test of the new approach in an open investigation came in California. Between December 29, 1977, and January 27, 1978, six people died in three separate incidents in Sacramento. Two agents, Ressler and Russ Vorpagel, drew up a profile of the man police were seeking. As the Sacramento News & Review summarized it in 2021, the profile described a white man of 25 to 27, thin, undernourished in appearance, single, unemployed and living alone, a loner who had dropped out of high school or college, had no military service, and had a history of mental illness and drug use. It predicted that his residence would be slovenly and that he was probably suffering from paranoid psychosis.
Richard Trenton Chase was 27, unemployed, living alone in Sacramento and had spent years in and out of psychiatric care. Police arrested him on January 27, 1978. According to the Sacramento News & Review, detectives had a tip from a former classmate who recognized him from the descriptions given to the public. The profile did not produce his name. Whether it sharpened the investigation or simply described a man the tip had already identified is a question the record does not settle, but the match between the profile and the man is close enough that the Bureau still uses the case.
Chase was tried in Santa Clara County after a change of venue. On May 8, 1979, a jury convicted him of six counts of first-degree murder. His defense argued mental illness and lack of premeditation; the jury, according to the News & Review, took an hour to rule him sane and four more to recommend death. He was sentenced to death. At San Quentin he agreed to meet Ressler. In the interviews, the News & Review says, he talked about Nazis and aliens and about his own beliefs. Ressler later wrote about the interviews in his book Whoever Fights Monsters. On December 26, 1980, Chase, then 30, died by suicide in his cell. He was never executed. In 2021 the News & Review reported that the FBI still cites the case as an example of a disorganized killer, the category the Ressler and Vorpagel profile described.
The second case in which the unit’s work is said to have mattered was in Nebraska. John Joubert, a young airman stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, was convicted of three murders of boys, two in Sarpy County, Nebraska, in September and December 1983 and one in Portland, Maine, in 1982.
Burgess later wrote about the Nebraska investigation, with Steven Matthew Constantine, in the 2022 book A Killer by Design. Boston College News, reporting on the book, said the FBI team that included Burgess developed a profile of the likely offender that helped officers apprehend Joubert; that the case drew national attention and was mentioned in the Congressional Record; and that it validated profiling, which had doubters even within the Bureau. Burgess has said that using profiling to help catch an offender was the most satisfying reward of her work.
The court records tell a narrower story. They credit the arrest to a witness’s report and the police inquiry that followed. Joubert was arrested in Sarpy County in January 1984, and he pleaded guilty in 1984 to two counts of first-degree murder; two kidnapping counts and two other counts were dismissed under a plea bargain. A panel of three judges sentenced him to death that year. The Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed in 1986. A federal district court set the sentences aside in October 1994; the Eighth Circuit reversed on January 25, 1996. A Lincoln County, Maine, jury had already convicted him on October 15, 1990, of the 1982 murder, and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that conviction on February 21, 1992. He was executed in Nebraska on July 17, 1996.
None of this contradicts Burgess; a profile can matter without appearing in an opinion about a plea. It does mean the strongest claim, that the profile helped officers apprehend him, is carried by the participants' own account, while the courts name a witness and the police inquiry that followed.
The same distinction runs through the case of Larry Gene Bell. In May and June 1985, two girls were kidnapped and killed near Columbia, South Carolina. The Lexington County Sheriff’s Department asked the FBI for help, and the Behavioral Science Unit sent Douglas.
Douglas later wrote about it with Mark Olshaker in When a Killer Calls (2022). Publishers Weekly, reviewing the book, said Douglas built a profile of a white man with military service, and that it fit Bell, a 36-year-old electrician’s assistant. The magazine called the book required reading for anyone interested in the early years of the unit. A 2015 resolution of the South Carolina Senate honoring the sheriff’s department’s second-in-command, Lewis McCarty, credited him with using behavioral science to profile and identify a serial murderer who was later convicted and executed; the resolution does not name the case.
The courts describe the identification differently. Both the South Carolina Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit credit physical evidence in the case and an anonymous tip, and the Fourth Circuit notes that Bell himself had been one of the callers whose tips led to his own arrest. He was arrested in June 1985. He was convicted of kidnapping and murder in the first girl’s case in Berkeley County in 1986 and in the second case in Pickens County in 1987; he received a death sentence in each. The state Supreme Court affirmed in 1987 and 1990, and the Fourth Circuit denied federal habeas relief on December 18, 1995. Bell was executed in October 1996.
In February 2025 the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department closed a 1984 case, a woman’s death, as "Death of Offender," naming Bell as the offender. He had been questioned about it before 1985, was never charged with it, and was never tried.
The unit’s largest public test was Atlanta. The FBI’s own account says its involvement began on June 22, 1980, after a 7-year-old girl was abducted and local police asked whether the federal kidnapping law applied. It did not appear to, but the Atlanta office followed out-of-state leads, the laboratory helped, and the Behavioral Sciences Unit sent an expert to draw up a profile. After pressure from politicians, the press and Senator Sam Nunn, the Attorney General authorized a preliminary investigation on November 6, 1980, and on November 17 the Bureau opened a major case with more than two dozen agents and staff assigned full time. By then more than 50 officers were on a joint task force, and the dead numbered about 29 over 22 months.
Douglas has said that the profile argued the offender was likely to be Black, which ran against the popular belief that the Ku Klux Klan was involved; the Robert Gordon University feature gives the profile as a Black man, single, aged 25 to 29, with an interest in police work. Wayne Williams was 23 when he was arrested on June 21, 1981, a freelance television cameraman who called himself a music talent scout, the only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that he bought a police scanner and had been arrested earlier in 1981 for impersonating an officer.
Williams was tried in Fulton County for two killings of adult men, and on February 27, 1982, he was convicted of two counts of murder. Judge Clarence Cooper sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. The core of the state’s case was a comparison of fibers and hairs, by experts from the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with material from his residence and the cars his family used. The defense contested it. The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed on December 5, 1983, and the Eleventh Circuit ended his federal appeal on November 8, 2007.
Ten other deaths on the task force list were put before the jury under Georgia’s rule on similar transactions, to prove identity, though Williams was not charged with any of them. After the trial the task force announced it would close 21 more cases, with one to follow, on the strength of the conviction; the FBI’s history says the task force concluded there was enough evidence to link him to 20 more of the 29 deaths. None of these attributions has been tested in court. Williams has denied all of it. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied him parole in late 2019, with the next consideration set for November 2027.
The man convicted was 23, below the age range given for the profile, and the state’s case rested on the fiber comparison. The Robert Gordon University feature says the unit gained full recognition in 1982 by helping convict Williams. Mindhunter’s second season is set in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981.
When Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs appeared in 1988, it contained a figure that agents at Quantico recognized: the chief of the Behavioral Science Unit, Jack Crawford, who had appeared in Harris’s earlier Red Dragon (1981). Mental Floss and a This Is Horror interview page both say Douglas was the real-life counterpart. In Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film, with a screenplay by Ted Tally, Scott Glenn played the character. Mental Floss reports that Douglas gave Glenn a tour of the unit at Quantico, and CinemaBlend, citing a making-of documentary, says Jodie Foster took classes with Douglas at Quantico before filming and that he was thanked in the credits for consulting. Douglas has commented that there is no one like the film’s imprisoned psychiatrist; Mental Floss says that character was a composite and not a portrait of one man.
The film opened in 1991 and won the five top Academy Awards: best picture, director (Demme), actress (Foster), actor (Anthony Hopkins) and adapted screenplay (Tally), only the third film to take all five, after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, according to CinemaBlend. Its heroine is a trainee sent to interview a convicted offender in order to find one still at large, a plot that borrows the shape of the real interview program.
The film’s other villain, the man who keeps a captive in his cellar, was built from more than one source. Mental Floss lists three real men as his models: Ted Bundy, Ed Gein and Gary Heidnik. The film site /Film says Heidnik’s captivity of women inspired the cellar in the film, though it gives no source and notes that his arrangement lacked the elaborate fixture in the film. Chuck Peruto, a Philadelphia lawyer, told Philadelphia Magazine in 2007 that the Heidnik story "wound its way into" the film and that Heidnik can be seen in the character. 6abc, the Philadelphia station, says his crimes partly inspired the character.
The record on Heidnik is firm and separate from the film. A jury in Philadelphia convicted him on July 1, 1988, of two counts of first-degree murder, with six counts of kidnapping and other counts; the jury returned two death sentences, imposed on March 2, 1989, along with 150 to 300 years on the remaining counts. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the death sentences on March 7, 1991, though Heidnik had instructed his lawyer not to pursue the appeal, since the court reviews death sentences automatically. He was executed in 1999. Four of the six women he held survived. The link between Heidnik and the film is the attribution of writers and of a lawyer who knew the case; a statement by the filmmakers is not on record.
The agents' own books reached television in 2017. Mindhunter, based on Douglas and Olshaker’s book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, began on Netflix on October 13, 2017. David Fincher was an executive producer and director, with Charlize Theron an executive producer. Jonathan Groff played Holden Ford, modeled on Douglas; Holt McCallany played Bill Tench, modeled on Ressler; and Anna Torv played Wendy Carr, based on Burgess though, as Grunge notes, much altered, her sexuality especially. Cameron Britton played Kemper. The first season’s real-life interview subjects included Kemper, Brudos and Rissell; the second, which Netflix released on August 16, 2019, centered on the Atlanta case and included Berkowitz.
David Berkowitz had pleaded guilty on May 8, 1978, to six counts of second-degree murder in New York and was sentenced to 25 years to life for each. He first became eligible for parole in 2002 and was refused for the 12th time after an interview on May 14, 2024, when he was 70. All That’s Interesting lists him among the men Ressler interviewed. He was arrested on August 10, 1977, after neighbors' complaints about anonymous notes led police to identify his car and license number; until then the investigation had leaned on sketches drawn from unreliable witness accounts, according to Time.
The series ended without a third season. Fincher said he was exhausted, said a third season would cost more than the show’s audience would support, and the cast were released from their contracts early in 2020. A Netflix spokesperson said that if a third season happened it would be at least five years off.
Set against one another, the cases split into three kinds. Some were research interviews in which the agents learned from convicted men: Kemper, Brudos, Rissell, Berkowitz. One, Chase, was a profile that fit closely, written during an open case, and later used by the Bureau as a teaching example. Three, Joubert, Bell and Williams, were cases in which the agents or their colleagues say the profile mattered and the courts credit other things: a witness and the inquiry that followed, physical evidence and a tip, a fiber comparison. The court opinions in those cases turn on the evidence; a profile is not evidence.
That does not reduce the agents to storytellers. Ressler, who retired in 1990 and died on May 5, 2013, and Douglas, who retired in 1996, collected in the interviews a body of first-hand material of a kind the Bureau had not had, and Burgess’s insistence on method gave it discipline. But their own accounts, and the films and series that adopted them, tend to put the profile at the center of events. The records of the same cases credit ordinary people with the leads: a witness, a former classmate, an anonymous tipster. The screen, which needs a protagonist, chose the agents.
• 1937: Robert Ressler born (died May 5, 2013).
• 1964: Edmund Kemper, aged 15, kills his paternal grandparents; handled in juvenile court.
• 1970: Ressler and Douglas join the FBI.
• 1972: Behavioral Science Unit created at the FBI Academy, Quantico.
• 1973, November 8: Kemper convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder.
• 1976: Douglas joins the unit; the prison interviews run through 1979 (36 offenders).
• 1977, December 29, to 1978, January 27: six deaths in Sacramento; Ressler and Vorpagel draw up a profile.
• 1978, January 27: Richard Chase arrested in Sacramento.
• 1978, May 8: David Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder.
• 1979, May 8: Chase convicted of six counts of first-degree murder; the jury rules him sane.
• 1980, June 22: FBI involvement in Atlanta begins; November 17, major case opened.
• 1980, December 26: Chase dies by suicide at San Quentin.
• 1981, June 21: Wayne Williams arrested in Atlanta.
• 1982, February 27: Williams convicted of two counts of murder.
• 1984, January: a witness’s report leads police to John Joubert; he pleads guilty that year to two counts of first-degree murder.
• 1985, June: Larry Gene Bell arrested; convicted in 1986 and 1987.
• 1988: The Silence of the Lambs published; July 1, Gary Heidnik convicted of two counts of first-degree murder.
• 1991: Demme’s film released; five top Academy Awards.
• 1996, July 17: Joubert executed; October: Bell executed.
• 1999: Heidnik executed.
• 2006, March 28: Jerome Brudos dies, aged 67.
• 2013, May 5: Ressler dies.
• 2017, October 13: Mindhunter begins on Netflix.
• 2019, August 16: second season released.
• 2024, May 14: Berkowitz refused parole for the 12th time; July 9: Kemper denied parole.
• 2025, November 3: Virginia Parole Board does not grant Rissell parole.