An FBI pioneer has revealed what really motivates serial killers and the crucial questions they need to be asked to help prevent more crimes.
Dr. Ann Burgess, 87, of Massachusetts, who revolutionized criminal profiling and applied her research to several serial killer investigations, is the subject of a three-part docuseries Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer.
Ann was working as a psychiatric nurse specializing in rape victimology in the 1970s when she was recruited by the FBI to help them understand the minds of violent sex offenders and murderers so they could be caught.
The mother of four observed patterns of behavior while interviewing dozens of notorious killers and found that most of the perpetrators had suffered some form of childhood trauma.
Speaking to The Guardian, She said: ‘They had always said these boys had domineering mothers; what we discovered was that they had an absent father.
Dr Ann Burgess, 87, from Massachusetts, revealed what really motivates serial killers and the crucial questions they need to be asked to help prevent further crimes.
‘There were boys who grew up in an environment where the mother was the mother of both parents, and so, yes, they probably felt that the mother was dominant, but she had to take care of both things. Who did she have as a role model? Who did she look up to to learn about how to grow as a man?’
Ann said that at the time the FBI was entering a crime scene and trying to determine whether it was “organized or disorganized,” but wanted to change the questions they asked when studying a scene.
He wanted investigators to look for “different patterns” so they could create a profile of the perpetrator.
She said: “What was the person’s gender? What was their race? How old were they? Did they work? Did they have friends or were they married? All of those questions are necessary to build a profile.”
Ann said police interviews with suspects had been “poorly structured” so she joined forces with Robert Ressler and John Douglas and brought her knowledge of sexual offences and applied appropriate investigative methodology to the project.
Her investigation yielded results and Ann developed a probable profile of the killer of two young children, John Joseph Joubert IV, in Nebraska in 1983, who confessed to the murders and was later executed.
In his 2021 book, A Killer by Design, he wrote: “We had proven that there was value in understanding the criminal mind… being able to actually use criminal profiling on an active case to hunt down a killer was the most satisfying reward of all.”
Ann interviewed dozens of notorious killers including Edmund Kemper, the student killer, Dennis Rader BTK, Henry Wallace, the Taco Bell Strangler, and Jon Barry Simonis, the ski mask rapist.
Ann, who revolutionized criminal profiling and applied her research to several serial killer investigations, is the subject of a three-part docuseries Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer.
Ann interviewed dozens of notorious killers, including Dennis Rader, BTK, the initials standing for ‘Bind, Torture, Kill’.
Ann said that serial killers are “intelligent” and that their “cognitions are better than average,” stating that most of the time they wanted to be caught.
She revealed that Ed Kemper, who killed his paternal grandparents when he was young and then murdered eight women including his mother, actually turned himself in to police because he “got bored of outsmarting them.”
The FBI pioneer admitted that most killers were “very charming” and usually spoke openly about their crimes when told they were “good” at their crimes and asked “what worked?”
Ann grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, and made the decision to become a nurse after being inspired by three of her uncles, who were all doctors.
She attended Boston College to study nursing, where she completed a psychiatric unit that sparked her interest in human behavior.
Ann had spent “many years” studying human behavior and frequently interviewing crime victims, learning how to extract the right information from them to help identify their attackers.
The expert noted that she and her colleagues were often the first medical professionals to see victims after a crime, which put them in the best position to observe their behaviors and reactions.
Ann’s (pictured) investigation yielded results and she developed a likely profile of the killer of two young children, John Joseph Joubert IV, in Nebraska in 1983, who confessed to the murders and was later executed.
Their findings were published in a 1973 paper titled The Rape Victim in the Emergency Room, suggesting that rape had more to do with power and control than sex.
She completed her dissertation research to become an assistant professor at Boston College in 1969, which led her to meet Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, a sociologist at Boston University.
Holmstrom approached her with the idea of publishing a study on rape and sexual abuse victims, which was groundbreaking at the time since such victims were often ignored by psychologists and law enforcement.
“At the time, the attitude toward rape was that it wasn’t talked about, or if it was, there was a victim-blaming mentality,” she explained in an interview with Boston College.
Working with Boston City Hospital, the pair interviewed rape victims after they were admitted and spoke to a total of 146 survivors ranging in age from three to 73 over the course of a year.
Their findings were published in a 1973 paper titled The Rape Victim in the Emergency Room, suggesting that rape had more to do with power and control than sex.
They also highlighted how rape victims are treated by the police, health institutions and the criminal justice system.
Burgess and Holmstrom also urged that doctors be trained to recognize the signs of rape, particularly if patients do not mention any assault.
Ann attended Boston College to study nursing, where she completed a psychiatric unit that sparked her interest in human behavior.
Ann interviewed dozens of notorious killers including Edmund Kemper, the student killer, Dennis Rader BTK, Henry Wallace, the Taco Bell Strangler, and Jon Barry Simonis, the ski mask rapist.
The article caught the attention of the FBI in 1978, and then-director William Webster approached Burgess for help with rape victims and their attackers.
Webster invited Burgess to the FBI Academy to share her knowledge of rape victims and how talking to them helped track down their rapists.
The series documents Burgess’ recruitment by the FBI and how she pioneered research into sexual assault and trauma in the 1970s and 1980s.
At that time, the FBI was primarily made up of men and sexual violence against women was not taken seriously.
Burgess’s research led her to a discovery that forever changed the way criminals are pursued: by penetrating the minds of killers.
The series documents the evolution of FBI investigations within the Behavioral Sciences Unit and the fine-tuning of the methodology for catching serial killers.
This included listening to and analyzing interviews with serial killers including Ed Kemper, Ted Bundy, and the “balaclava rapist” Jon Barry Simonis.
As the nursing professor continued to hear confessions and interact with the killers, she found patterns she had “never noticed before” and how her methodology for catching murderers began to expand to cases across the United States.
Ann now sees the potential for AI to improve criminal profiling by linking new cases to existing records.
The docuseries, executive produced by Elle and Dakota Fanning, is inspired by the 2021 book A Killer by Design: Murders, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher Criminal Minds, which was co-written by Burgess and Connell School of Nursing associate director of marketing and communications Steven Constantine.
Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer will premiere on Hulu in the US on July 11 and on Disney+ in the UK at a later date.