Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Nurse Behind the FBI’s Mindhunters (with Dr. Ann Burgess)

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

In 1978, Ann Wolbert Burgess was a psychiatric nurse, researcher, and professor at Boston College’s Connell School of Nursing. She and her colleague, Lynda Holmstrom, had recently published their findings on the emotional and psychological effects of sexual assault on survivors. That fall, her work was interrupted by a phone call. The FBI wanted to speak with her. They needed her help. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One time he was with Kemper, and he pressed the button for the guard to come to let him out of a locked room. And the guard didn't come. And Kemper said, you know, in one minute I could snap your head off. And then I would own this prison. If you're tuning into this show, you're probably familiar with the concept of criminal profiling. You see it all the time on TV and in movies. A sea of hardened detectives gather in a dimly, lit room filled with crime scene photos and case files. Maybe there's a corkboard at the front with

maps and names connected by a maze of string. The investigators are there to analyze the evidence for patterns and clues to get inside the head of the offender and identify any possible personality traits or behavioral characteristics that could help them home in on a suspect to catch the culprit before they strike again. The FBI developed most of the research and methods for profiling serial crimes in the late 70s, early 80s. At the time, the process was led by a controversial and underfunded department called the Behavioral Science Unit.

Their work has since become internationally recognized and is still used to catch killers today in all 50 states. But what most people might not know, is, it wouldn't have been possible without the help of an FBI outsider, someone who was used to having her career questioned in professional circles. It was always, you're just a nurse. You're not a psychiatrist. You're not a psychologist. You're just a nurse. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure. to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. And if you're

listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today we're discussing the FBI's early research into the minds and methods of serial killers with one of its pioneers, Anne Burgess. She's the inspiration for the character Wendy Carr in Netflix's Mind Hunter and the subject of Hulu's new docu series, Mastermind. to think like a killer. At 87 years old, she still teaches, researches, and in her spare time, works to solve cold cases. We're thrilled she could join us.

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Anne Burgess is a psychiatric nurse and professor at Boston College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She hears a knock on her door. I'm in my office working. I have a research associate, Anna Lasslow, and Anna just stands in the the doorway and saying, you've got a phone call. And I said, well, take it. I'm up to my ears and something here. And she just stood there. I said, then, what's the matter? She said, it's the FBI. And all I could think of, I don't know why, is I didn't do something on my taxes. For some reason, I connected FBI with, well, maybe I didn't pay my tax or something. She said,

I think you better take it. All right. So I pick up for. the phone and I get this special agent Roy Hazelwood and he goes through this very clippant. This is a special agent, Roy Hazelwood and R.U.M. Birch. All of a sudden he's asking, now he's asking you for identification. I thought, well, what are you doing here? And then he says, did you write this article? And American Journal of Nursing, oh my gosh, what do we say in that? That, you know, now the FBI is after me for something. So his whole voice changed at that point. And he said, I just wanted to know if you would come give us a lecture on rape.

I understand you're doing this rape study. And I stopped and I thought, I don't know if I want to go down. And, you know, I've been talking to nurses and rape crisis centers pretty much all females, really. They've got to be all males. What do I want to talk to them about? And I thought for a moment. And then I thought, well, why not? And so I said to him, I want to hear what you're teaching them down there about rape.

The FBI had noticed a spike in violent sexual crimes in the late 70s, something their agents had very little firsthand experience with. They wanted to better understand this problem that didn't seem to be going away. And Anne was one of the few experts in the country. In 1973, she co-authored a paper in the American Journal of Nursing called The Rape Victim in the Emergency Ward. It was the product of work she'd done with her colleague, sociologist Linda Holmstrom. Together, they interviewed 146 survivors of sexual assault, ranging in age from 3 to 73. They created a method for cataloging information and arranging it into data sets. They then analyzed and interpreted everything.

They followed up the study with a second paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled rape trauma syndrome. Their research was revolutionary. Few, if any, professionals in medicine or law had ever taken the time to speak to survivors about the psychological impact their assault had on them. Then we will take the offender sign and we start matching how similar or dissimilar are they. And people were quite surprised because the typical myth in those days, it was the victim. She was provocative. She wore the roaring clothing. What was she doing out of that? hour of night, you know, that kind of talk. And once we started putting the offender in, you could see where he had targeted her. She was vulnerable. He had watched her. We brought so much

in about how much a victim is kept under surveillance. And that was really part of his whole pre-offence behavior. He could get as much out of that as the actual act itself. And for a long time, it was sexual. Everybody thought, oh, well, sexual assault is sexual. It happens in the sexual atmosphere. That's true. But the motive could be power, dominance, control, a lot of other kinds of things that he felt very inadequate about, and that's the only way he could show himself.

Power and control became a recurring theme in their research. On one side, a motive fueling the crimes. And on the other hand, a reason why survivors often stayed silent afterward, they felt a loss of control. When Anne had first proposed researching the psychological effects of rape, she was told by her peers that it was a bad idea, that it would hurt her career and ruin her chances at tenure. But she carried on anyway.

Until she found herself sitting on a plane bound for Quantico, the FBI's Academy for New Recruits in Virginia. First of all, you have to fly into Washington, D.C., and then they put you in a car in your drive. And you drive, and you drive more and more trees. You're like in the woods. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, like kind of brigadoon, pops Quantico. And it's very impressive.

And you walk in, because you're not an agent, you have to get a badge, big badge, visitor. And then as you're walking down the corridor, they have this big screen, wanted. And it's got all these pictures of 10 most wanted. And that's right as you come in. They had no serial killers at the time. That was not a priority. These were bank robbers probably and others.

Despite a few smirks from the student body, Anne proves the importance of her work, earns the attention of new recruits, and becomes a regular lecturer at Quantico. With the exception of a handful of clerks and administrative assistance, she's usually the only woman in the building. When she's finished teaching most days, she hangs around and talks with others who work there,

agents who teach their own classes. Eventually, the FBI undergoes a change in leadership. William Webster was appointed to the new director, and this is where it's so important. You had somebody now at the head of the whole FBI, that was very visionary. And he said, well, we're an academy, and we should be doing research. So all of a sudden, these agents had to scurry around to find a research topic.

And Roy Hazelwood wanted to study auto-erotic fatalities. I didn't even know what that was. I said something to do with cars or something, you know. And so he said, would you help on that? Roy's office is a converted mop closet. He belongs to a small team of agents interested in criminal psychology. They're called the Behavioral Science Unit, BSU for short. They work in the basement of Quantico, what members call the bomb shelter.

That's where they put these FBI agents way down. You had to go two floors down and no windows. It was literally a bomb shelter for Congress or for Congress. or some group that if they were attacked in D.C., they would take them down there. Around the FBI, the BSU's work has been met with a great deal of skepticism. Field work is the priority for most agents, hands-on investigations, not research. But Anne has a different perspective. She agrees to help Roy with his work, and her experience in academia proves invaluable.

She helps design a data assessment survey and analytics. 157 different cases. Their work leads to a book and multiple articles published in journals. Eventually, Roy introduces Anne to two other members of the BSU who are working on their own project, special agents John Douglas and Robert or Bob wrestler. Bob's been teaching criminology at the academy, but he's only recently begun speaking with convicted killers as part of his research. John and Bob call the project the Criminal Personality Study. He was interviewing like Squeaky Fromm. He was interviewing Charles Manson, people like that,

which I didn't think were too interested. Anyway, I said, why don't you do some real criminals? Anyway, so he started with that. The research evolves to focus on serial killers who incorporate sexual violence in their crimes. Offenders widely considered to have no motives, no patterns. They're thought to be violent human anomalies and little else. As Anne learns, the project isn't exactly by the books.

All John and Bob have to do is flash their badge to gain access to high security prisons. And over time, the interviews pile up. They have so much information on their hands, but they don't know what to do with it. And that was something William Webster said. This is no shoebox research. Don't do it and then put it on a shelf. It's got to be applied. John and Bob give Anne their interview tapes to listen to.

She hits play, takes notes, and rewinds again and again, re-listening to conversations with the most notorious killers of the time. John Wayne Gacy, Monty Rissel, Richard Speck, Ted Bundy, all the names that you can think are out there, Ed Kemper. Anne describes the experience as eavesdropping on the rawest fringes of humanity, both fascinating and haunting. It becomes clear to her, John and Bob are onto something. The problem is the interviews have, as she describes in her book, A Killer by Design, zero footing in any conveying. conventional school of research, no uniformity, no signs of planning, no mind toward actual analysis. In short, they have no idea what they're doing.

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Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-99 or visit Zepbounds.lily.com. In the early 70s, the United States experiences a sharp increase in serial murders. It's one of the reasons the FBI's behavioral science unit has been interviewing convicted serial killers in prison, they want to better understand what drives them. The agents in charge quickly learn they need help structuring their research and turn to Ann Burgess. But trust isn't immediate. You have to prove yourself. They're always testing. Test, test, test. They're very suspicious.

I mean, that's their work. You know, people don't necessarily tell the truth. How do you find out what's really going on? So you would pass tests after test. The main test in the serial killer study was, could you look at the crime scenes? They were terribly disturbing, and not everybody could do that. I know I had taken a few psychologists down there that couldn't look at them. But nursing, we do that. We see terrible things, not necessarily from murder, but certainly from disease and illness and things like that, accident.

Anne passes the test thrown her way. She helps develop a methodology for the criminal. personality study and opens the scope of questioning to include killer's upbringings and histories of violence. She creates a standard set of questions for John and Bob to ask during their interviews. It was 57 pages and it was color-coded. That was very important so they would know what questions went with the victim, what questions went with the crime scene. There were five areas. A lot of this work was Ogradas in the beginning. I would just go down and lecture, and during the lecture, I'd stay there and we'd talk. So nothing was formalized

until we got a Department of Justice grant. It was like $60,000. Now, that's not a lot of money when you're doing research. But it gave me a small amount of money. We divided it up, and I could have a little team in Boston. And so my team of about eight, we would get all of the information from Quantico, and they would code that in. In those days, we did have computers. and crunch it down. And then we had the task of interpreting it. They have three main points they want to learn. Why the subjects killed, how they thought about their violence, and how their violence evolved.

But Anne also makes sure the BSU collects information about the victims. In fact, within her team, she has a group dedicated to interpreting victim data. Victimology is what she's most interested in. They cross-reference the killer's answers with evidence collected from crime scenes to see how the two match up. They understand it would be naive to take a killer's word at face value. The completed study ultimately includes 36 solved cases with sexually violent offenders. Patterns emerge from their research, and, as William Webster instructed, those patterns become the basis for how the research gets applied.

The idea that a crime scene could reveal information about the person who left it behind wasn't new. Criminal profiling was first put into practice in the 60s when the FBI hired a psychiatrist named James Brussels to help them solve the Mad Bomber case in New York City. After reviewing the evidence, James told investigators that the culprit was most likely an unmarried, foreign-born, middle-aged man who lived with and was obsessed with his mother. He added that when caught, the suspect would be wearing a buttoned-up double-breasted suit, which turned out to be true. It all did. Despite its apparent success, profiling was met with considerable doubt.

Many thought James Brussels got lucky, and they had reason to believe as much. he couldn't really explain how his process worked because he relied almost exclusively on intuition and deductive reasoning. So in the early 70s, the FBI tasked the BSU with further developing profiling as an investigative strategy, more rooted in science. That's why Anne's work becomes so important. Her team's quantifiable data is the backbone for the BSU's new profiling strategy,

and there's a lot riding on its success. At the time, many members of the FBI still question profiling's viability. And more importantly, there are lives at stake. Hundreds of cases in the United States could use their help. An important one comes across their desk in the early 80s. The VSU helps create a profile for a serial criminal the media calls the Ski Mask Rapist. He enters unlocked homes, usually between the hours of 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. He then robs the house,

toys with his victim, and assaults them, usually while making their partner watch. He's suspected of committing dozens of rapes in multiple states, and his violence seems to be escalating. Anne is brought in to speak with victims, gather information, and help the BSU create a profile. They determine the offender is most likely a white man in his late 20, or early 30s, a vindictive offender who's witnessed abuse in his childhood and is becoming more and more disconnected from reality. They believe he's never been married, is in good physical shape,

highly educated, and keeps a manicured appearance. He probably played sports, served in the military, and considers himself an alpha male, which they say will probably manifest in the type of car he drives. They suspect it's flashy, high-end. It's this last point that ultimately helps close the case. A police officer in Louisiana notices a lipstick red transam loitering in a neighborhood. One of the houses is later attacked, and the ID on the car leads to an arrest. The rest of the profile turns out to be accurate as well, almost to a T. The ski mask rapist's name is a guy. The ski mask rapist's name is John Barry Simonis, a former high school quarterback and army vet. Simonis said he witnessed his father abuse his sister as a child. He confesses to 81 assaults, but investigators connect him to more

than 130. Given his willingness to brag about his crimes, agents Bob Ressler and John Douglas interview him to further their research with Anne. A few years later, two paperboys are found dead in Sarpie County, Nebraska, weeks apart from each other. Their bodies have both been dumped along roadside, bound and stripped until mostly naked. Both are young, small and blonde, but there's a clear escalation in violence from the first to the second. The BSU creates a profile that helps police narrow down their suspect list. It ultimately leads to the arrest of a maintenance worker and youth scoutmaster named

John Jobert, who's everything their profile described, a blue-collar worker in his late teens or early 20s with average intelligence. Small in stature, sexually immature, a loner but involved in activities that gave him access to young boys in a role of authority, something that could allow him to leverage the boy's trust. Later, authorities connect Jobert to a third murder in Portland, Maine. And after years in prison, he admits in an interview that his most violent impulses were only getting worse, just as the profile predicted. The Jobert case is followed by more high-profile successes. Newspapers begin featuring the BSU in their spreads. After years of hard work, the team is finally recognized. But as that's happening, their office becomes flooded with requests from police

departments around the country with numbers doubling every year. It's more than they can handle. But for Anne, there's one that stands out as maybe having the biggest impact on her. It begins in 1985 with the abduction of a seven-year-old girl named Melissa Ackerman. Melissa's out playing with her friend, Opel Horton. Two little girls were out riding their bikes. It was the first time Missy Ackerman's Mother had let her alone to go out alone. It was like noon. And Opal, the little friend, came over, and they were going to go riding, and they did.

And they went by their school. There was a playground they played on. But in the process, this car stopped, and a man gets out and stops two little girls and says, which way to town. And, of course, he wasn't interested in which way to town. He was trying to get her and picked up Opel first, through her in the car. over to the passenger side and then went back for Missy. Opal, she's seven years old, tried to get out,

but he had locked the door handle so she couldn't get out. She went back out the way he threw her in. The window was still open. And she climbed out while he's going over to get little Missy and runs and hides behind it. It was a John Deere big tractor, and she hid. And so he takes off with Missy. And as Opel said,

And she said her last memory of her little friend is at the back of the window, and she's calling for Opal. More than a week passes before Anne gets a phone call. FBI agents are having trouble getting Opel to talk. I get a call a good eight or nine days later. I, of course, didn't know the case. And they said they needed someone that could do a child interview. And I thought, that interesting, that they all had kids, you know, that the agents didn't feel they could talk with a seven-year-old child. I flew into O'Hare, and then they sent the little plane.

And when I'm looking at the landscape, and it was all woods. And I thought, oh, boy, where did he take her? Anne is no longer the only woman working cases with the FBI, and she doesn't travel to Illinois alone. They sent Candace Stallone, was one of the first female agents, and she had a male agent with her. So the two came out. I said, I've got to see the parents.

And she said, what do you need to see the parents? And she said, what do you need to see the parent? I said, I've got to get permission to talk with their child. Well, they wouldn't think you needed any permission to talk to anyone. I said, you know, we've got to do this right. Just because they're the FBI, they can't just go barreling in. At least I don't think they should. Anne gets the parents' permission.

She sits down with Opel in a conference room at an FBI control center, just the two of them. She just looked so for a launch. She was this tiny little thing, and I said, what have they been feeding you? She said, I haven't been eating. I said, why haven't you been eating? She says, I'm waiting for Missy. It's heartbreaking to listen to. But Anne knows, as the only direct witness to the crime,

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The FBI knows Anne has experience interviewing subjects with intense trauma. She needs Opel to open up, but wants to avoid triggering the child, which takes time, care, and a deft hand. She leans on a tool used by child psychologists. We did drawings, and she was able to give us some really good information. She said he had these whiskers on his face, and so we figured from that he had been on possibly, and he was, he was on a spree.

As in, he might not have gone home to shave. Opal provides Anne with a description of Missy's abductor and the car he used. It's detailed enough that officials are able to make a composite sketch. The information helps detectives home in on a suspect and later get a conviction. The man's name is Brian Dugan. We got the information out. It got out and of course they found Missy probably a couple of days later. Dugan had drowned her in a creek miles away from the abduction site.

I was always really angry that they didn't call me earlier or call someone earlier to do the interview. Turns out they had stopped Brian Dugan when I know Missy was still alive. He had something wrong with his taillight or he didn't have the right registration or something. And if they had only pulled him in then, I think Missy would have survived. But they let him go with just a ticket. And that's the other thing is a lot of these cases, the guy gets picked. up for something else. And, yeah, they really do slip up, but it's not seen that way.

Dugan had victimized at least a dozen girls and women, raped seven and killed three, including Missy Ackerman. In prison, he comes to terms with his psychopathy. He admits he's a danger to society and would only have continued. In her book, A Killer by Design, Anne talks about how Brian Dugan's M.O. matched criminal patterns that their research was only beginning to help them understand. In 1988, the BSU's research from the criminal personality study gets published in a book called Sexual Homicide Patterns and Motives. Anne is credited as a co-author alongside

agents Douglas and Ressler. Which is still in print. You can believe that. We can believe it. We've used it as a resource for this show. In fact, we've used a few of her books. Think about everything you know about the psychological landscape of serial killers. Early violence against animals perpetuating cycles of abuse, a lack of empathy, a psychological drive to always take their violence one step further. Control, dominance, adrenaline, organized versus disorganized killers. Our modern understanding of serial killers, even the term serial killers itself, can all be traced back to those early days in the FBI, when a few people decided to try and make sense

out of what others saw as chaos. Because, as Anne puts it, they believed that even if a killer couldn't explain their reasons for killing, it didn't mean it lacked cause, an understanding could be a path to prevention. Anne stopped her work with the FBI when it got to be too much. Serial killers knew the name, of her children. They sent Christmas cards from prison, but she still has a sense of humor

about her days spent with agents like Bob Ressler. One time he was with Kemper and he pressed the button for the guard to come to let him out of a locked room and the guard didn't come and Kemper said, you know, in one minute I could snap your head off and then I would own this prison. I would have killed an FBI agent. Do you know what that was? would mean in this prison. Bob's sitting there. He says, everything changed. All of a sudden, he said, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I got into hostage negotiation with Kemper. And then, of course, finally the guard did come. And Kemper said, you know, I'm just kidding, Bob. I don't know if you use the word Bob, I was just kidding. Yeah. That changed protocol.

That's when Douglas came in to the picture. Since leaving the FBI behind, Anne has continued her work as a psychiatric nurse, researcher, and professor. In addition to her extensive work on sexual assault, abuse, and trauma in adults and children, she's written on topics like crime classification, child pornography, post-traumatic stress, elder abuse, mental disorders, and missing and murdered indigenous women. She's testified as an expert witness in 30 states and in some of the biggest murder and rape trials of the past century, with defendants like the Menendez brothers and Bill Cosby, she's chaired the National Research Council's Task Force on Violence Against Women.

She co-founded one of the first ever hospital-based crisis intervention programs for rape survivors. But of all her many achievements, Anne says she's most proud of how far the field of nursing has come and what it's accomplished. She says the highlight of her career has been helping to establish the International Association of Forensic Nurses, an organization that provides ethical, trauma-informed care for people around the globe. Despite everything, it's only recently that Anne has received widespread recognition for her work with the FBI, as covered in the docu-series Mastermind back in the 80s when the media first latched on to the BSU's success story, Anne was noticeably absent from the photos, from the spreads, from really any mentions.

Most, if not all, of the attention was given to the so-called real agents, and not the nurse working diligently behind the scenes. Anne says it didn't bother her that much. Even back then, she had too much to do. And while that remains true, in the past few years, she's come into the spotlight. That's been very surprising to tell you the truth. In fact, it was Stephen who really started this whole thing. I have to blame him for everything.

Stephen Constantine is the co-author of A Killer by Design. He's also the Associate Director of Marketing and Communication at Boston College. He was a new employee at the School of Nursing in the communications department. And it came at a time when Netflix had done. just come out with Mind Hunter. He was following it. I even had to be told it was on Netflix. I was just busy doing my own thing in nursing.

And so he started talking. He'd get me to just talk about the project that we had done Donna Quantico. Here's Stephen on what it's been like working with Anne. She is a pioneer in so many regards, has done so many amazing things for many different fields from crime, to law enforcement, to legal work, to nursing, that it's tough to quantify how much she has changed American culture for the better. So it's a real privilege to work with her and to be able to help her share her story. We asked Anne where she thinks the future of criminal profiling is headed.

She believes AI will play a huge role. In fact, she first wrote a grant to use artificial intelligence at the FBI back in the 80s. She says it sat on the unit chief's desk because they didn't know what to do with it. Now she uses the technology to help with her research on the manifestos of violent offenders and mass shooters. There's a connective thread to her old work with the FBI. Serial killers like Ed Kemper and Israel Keys have suggested their violence would have escalated to mass shootings had they not been caught. And a fun fact right there, it's actually Dr. Burgess's a. granddaughter who is doing the programming work on that research.

But even as her granddaughter starts to take up her mantle, Anne's work continues. She maintains an advanced practical nursing license in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Anne is still a professor at Boston College and a professor emerita at University of Pennsylvania. And in her downtime, she works to solve cold cases with a virtual group she calls the super-slooth, We have an entomologist, we have detectives, we have Greg Cooper, who was fourth-generation FBI profiler when I was at Quantico with him. He has a foundation, Cold Case Foundation. He's part of it with his team. And we've got about 30, 35 people. Anne invited us to join her for one of her super-slooth sessions, and we look forward to taking her up on the offer. Do you have any plans to retire?

No. I had assumed as much. Thanks for tuning in to serial killers, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back Monday with another episode. For more information on the FBI's behavioral science unit and Anne Burgess' illustrious career, check out her book A Killer by Design, Murders, Mind Hunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind, co-authored by Stephen Constantine, and the new docu-series Mastermind on Hulu.

Both were incredibly helpful to our research. Stay safe out there. This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Lori Siegel and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Barrow. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.

A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hixed. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Do you want to hear something spooky? Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot.

Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves. Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water. Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours. Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.