Murder: True Crime Stories - BTK, Bundy, and the Birth of Criminal Profiling

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

In 1973, a 7-year-old girl was taken from her tent at a Montana campsite while her family slept. The FBI had no evidence, no witnesses, and no leads, but two agents in a basement at Quantico thought they could describe the killer based on the crime scene alone. What they built would be tested on some of the most notorious cases in American history, including the Ted Bundy manhunt, the Atlanta child murders, and the hunt for BTK. It also raised a question that still doesn't have a clean answer: can you really look at a crime scene and know who did it? This is episode 3 of The Crimes That Built America, a special four-part series on Murder: True Crime Stories hosted by Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Monday, with all four available now, ad-free, on Crime House Plus. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @murdertruecrimestories

Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy. Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America ad-free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crimehouse Plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of murder, true crime stories, and the rest of the crime house shows ad-free and released early. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com. listening on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of this show's page. This is Crime House. In every crime drama, there's a moment when the FBI profiler walks in, looks over the case file,

and tells the detectives exactly who they're looking for. Maybe it's something like he's a white male in his 20s who drives a brown sedan and lives with his mother. For half a century, that scene has been a fixture of a... American television. But it wasn't invented in Hollywood. It was invented in a basement at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia in the early 1970s. And it was tested for the first time on a campsite in Montana in 1973. After a seven-year-old girl named Susan Yeager was taken from a tent while her family slept 10 feet away, authorities launched the largest search in Montana history. It didn't bring them any closer to Susan. With no physical evidence, no leads, and no theory, the FBI tried

something nobody had really done before. They worked up a profile of the kind of person who would do this and waited for him to slip up. A few years later, the same method would be used to draft a wanted poster for a fugitive named Ted Bundy. And a few years after that, the unit that created it would send an agent to Florida's death row to spend five years interviewing Bundy. They were trying to understand how his brain worked. This is the story of how the FBI learned to see inside the mind of a killer, the cases that prove the method and the agents who knew they were on the right track when no one else did. People's lives are like a story. Here's a beginning, a middle, and an end. but you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Today, we're continuing our series on the crimes that built America in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Over the course of four Mondays on the murder true crime stories feed, we're covering the cases that built the American criminal justice system as we know it, or tragedies that led to greater protections for everyone. Miranda writes, the FBI, criminal profiling, the system that protects and advocates for missing children. Each one exists because of a specific crime, a specific family, and a specific moment when the country decided enough was enough.

Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crimehouse Plus subscriber, all four episodes are available right now. Completely ad-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. You'll get part one and part two at the same name. time plus exclusive bonus content. For our third episode of the crimes that built America,

I'm talking about the birth of criminal profiling. It starts in 1973, when a seven-year-old girl was taken from a campsite in Montana. The FBI had nothing to go on. No evidence, no witnesses, no leads, but two agents at Quantico had an idea. They thought they could describe the killer based on just the crime scene, what they built would give law enforcement something it never had before. A way to know who they were looking for before they had a suspect. It would be tested on some of the most notorious cases in American history, from Ted Bundy to the Atlanta Child Murders. It's also been debated ever since. All that and more coming up. Missouri Headwaters State Park sits in the high prairie of southwestern Montana.

about 30 miles west of Bozeman. Three rivers meet there to form the Missouri, the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin. Lewis and Clark stopped there in 1805. I was born around there in 1973. In June of 1973, Bill and Marietta Yeager drove out from Farmington, Michigan, just outside Detroit, to camp there.

They brought their five children along. The Yeagers were devout Catholics, mass every Sunday, rosary every night. Marietta was the center of the household, practical and steady, the person who held the family's schedule and faith together. She and Bill had been saving for years to take the kids out west, and the summer of 1973 was the year they finally made it happen. According to Marietta, their youngest, seven-year-old Susan, was the most excited about the trip. They drove from Michigan across the Great Plains, through Minnesota and the Dakotas, into the high country of Montana.

By the time they pulled into the campground at Missouri Headwaters on the evening of June 24th, they'd been on the road for days. The kids were exhausted. Everyone was ready for bed. They set up two tents at the campsite, Bill and Marietta in one, the five children in the other. Sometime after midnight, a man approached the children's tent with a knife. He cut a slit down the side of the canvas, reached through it, and pulled seven-year-old Susan out. He didn't make a sound. None of the other children stirred. Neither did Bill or Marietta ten feet away in the other tent.

By morning, Susan was gone. Her sleeping bag was empty. the side of the tent had been slashed open. A child had been taken from a public campground in the middle of the night with her family sleeping beside her. The case made the news immediately. The Gallatin County Sheriff's Department was at the campsite within the hour. The FBI arrived from Bozeman that afternoon. The FBI agent assigned was Pete Dunbar at the Bureau's Bozeman field office.

he organized what became the largest manhunt in Montana history. Over the following week, search and rescue teams comb the campground, the surrounding prairie, and the foothills to the east. Volunteers from Three Forks and Bozeman joined the effort. Dogs were brought in. Divers search the river. FBI agents interviewed every camper, every campground employee, every gas station attendant and motel clerk within 50 miles. miles. The Yeagers stayed at the campsite through all of it, watching the search teams come back empty-handed every evening. Marietta later said that the not-knowing was the hardest part.

She could have handled grief, but she couldn't handle silence. Still, the search turned up nothing. The campground had dozens of families coming and going every day, so tire tracks and footprints were everywhere and useless. The slit in the tents was clean, no fabric snagged, no tool marks, no DNA. There were no witnesses. In a campground full of people, someone had taken a child without leaving a single piece of physical evidence behind. But in those first few days, before Dunbar had exhausted every lead, there was one thing the FBI was counting on, a ransom call. In 1973, when a child was taken, kidnapping for money was the most common scenario. If the caller made contact, the FBI could trace the line, arrange a drop, and catch them at the exchange.

On day three, a call came into the Bureau's regional office in Denver. A man said he had Susan and wanted $25,000, about $175,000 in today's money. A week later, the same voice called the Gallatin County Sheriff. This time, the price had gone up to $50,000. To prove the call was real, the caller described Susan's appearance in detail, including a distinctive fingernail on one of her index fingers. The family confirmed the detail was accurate.

For Marietta, the calls meant one thing. whoever had her daughter was still out there, still reachable, that meant Susan might still be alive. The FBI arranged a controlled drop, a specific place, a specific time, agents in position. The caller never showed. A second drop was arranged. He didn't come to that one either. Then the ransom calls stopped and the case went quiet. The Yeager stayed at the campsite as long as they could, but eventually with no sign of Susan and four other children to get home, they made the drive back to Michigan. It was 1700 miles. Every mile took them farther from their daughter. Back in Farmington, Marietta held the family

together the way she always had, meals on the table, kids in school, rosary at night. But every week, She called Pete Dunbar, sometimes more than once. She'd ask if there were any new leads, any reason to think Susan was still alive. Most weeks, there was nothing to tell her. She kept calling anyway. Marietta Yeager was not someone who gave up. Tip still trickled in from time to time, psychics, cranks claiming to be the kidnapper,

suppose sightings from as far away as Wyoming and Saskatchewan, None of them led anywhere. By the fall of 1973, the case was dying. Then, in February of 1974, eight months after Susan vanished, a 19-year-old waitress named Sandra Smoligan disappeared from the town of Manhattan, Montana, about 25 miles west of the campground where Susan had been taken. Sandra had gone to bed one night and simply wasn't there in the morning. the door to her apartment was unlocked, the bed was empty, there was no sign of a struggle.

Her car turned up a few days later at an abandoned ranch outside of town. Local police looked at Sandra's life and found one person of immediate interest. Her ex-boyfriend, a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran and handyman named David Meyerhofer. Meyerhofer had been honorably discharged from the Marines a few months before. before Susan Yeager disappeared. He'd served as a communication specialist in Vietnam, came home to Manhattan, and set himself up as a carpenter.

He was quiet, polite, and well-liked. His family was respected in town. When Dunbar heard about the Smoligan case and the name attached to it, he recognized it immediately. Meyerhofer had already been questioned in Susan's disappearance the previous summer. A witness had reported seeing some of the summer,

someone matching his general description near the campground before Susan was taken. Dunbar brought him in, asked his questions, and ran a polygraph. Meyerhofer had passed. Now Dunbar brought him in again, this time for Sandra. Meyerhofer was cooperative. He said he hadn't seen Sandra in weeks. He agreed to another polygraph. He passed that one too. Two people gone from the same stretch of rural Montana, the same name in both case files, and an FBI agent who couldn't prove any of it. Dunbar was stuck. Meyerhofer didn't crack under questioning. He didn't fail polygraphs.

Dunbar needed a different approach, something that didn't depend on physical evidence or a confession. That spring, an invitation landed on his death. desk. The FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia was offering a workshop for field agents to instructors from a small new unit called the Behavioral Science Unit were teaching something they'd been developing in a basement office at the academy for the past two years. They called it criminal profiling. Nobody Dunbar worked with had ever heard of it. He signed up anyway. The workshop was held in a windowless classroom underneath the FBI Academy. One instructor was Howard Taiton, a former Marine and criminologist who'd been with the Bureau since 1962.

The other was Patrick Mullaney, a psychologist who'd spent years teaching at Catholic schools before joining the FBI. Between the two of them, they had one idea that nobody else at the Bureau was willing to take seriously. They argued that if you studied a crime scene carefully enough, you could work backward from the evidence to a psychological portrait of the person who committed it, not a physical description, a behavioral one. What kind of person does this? How do they think? What's driving them?

Dunbar sat through the presentations. Then he went up to Taiton and Malaney afterward and asked if they'd look at a real case, He had two, actually, a missing seven-year-old from a campground, a missing 19-year-old from the nearest town, and a suspect he couldn't break. They said yes. Taiton and Mullaney went through Dunbar's case files. The crime scene evidence, the ransom calls, the interview transcripts, the polygraph results. Then they gave him their profile. They said the man who took Susan Yeager was a young, white, men.

male, local to the area, military background, intelligent but socially isolated. He would function well on the surface, hold down a job, seemed normal to his neighbors, but underneath he had serious psychological problems. They believed he was likely schizophrenic. And then they told Dunbar something that reframed everything he'd been looking at for the past year. Mullini explained that a schizophrenic offender could dissociate from his own crimes. He could commit an act of extreme violence one day and genuinely not experience stress when asked about it the next. He could sit in a chair, answer every question, and pass a polygraph. Not because he was a skilled liar, but because the person sitting in that chair and the person who had committed the crimes

were in his mind not the same person. The profile was. The profile. matched David Meyerhofer on nearly every point. Young, white, local, military, a loner who seemed normal. And if Taiton and Mullaney were right about the schizophrenia, the polygraph results that had cleared Meyerhofer twice weren't evidence of his innocence. They were a symptom. Taiton and Mullaney had one more prediction. The caller had shown in need to prove himself, to taunt, to stay connected to the crime. They said that kind of offender would reach out again to the family, and he would do it on the anniversary of the abduction. Dunbar flew home to Montana.

He contacted Marietta in Michigan and arranged for a wiretap on the family's phone line. Then he waited. For three months, nothing happened. Then, on June 25, 1974, one year two years, the day after Susan was taken from her tent, the phone rang in the Yeager household in Farmington, Michigan. Taiton and Malaney had been right. On the evening of June 25, 1974, one year after Susan was taken, the phone rang in the Yeager household in Farmington, Michigan. The FBI had the line tapped. Susan's older brother, Daniel, now 16, answered first. A man's voice asked to speak with

the family. Daniel handed the phone to his mother. Marietta had spent the past year preparing for this moment without knowing it. As a devout Catholic, she'd been wrestling with her own rage, praying for the strength to respond to whoever had taken Susan with something other than hatred. by the time the phone rang, something in her had shifted. For the next hour, she talked to the man who had taken her daughter. He told her Susan was alive. He said she was safe, that he was taking care of her. He described details about the abduction that only the kidnapper could have known.

Marietta stayed calm. She asked questions. She kept him talking. minute after minute while the FBI recorded every word. Instead of screaming at the voice on the other end of the line, she spoke to him with compassion. She treated him like a person. It was the last thing he expected.

At one point in the conversation, she called him David. He went silent, then asked, who are you talking about? Who is David? By the end of the call, the man was in tears. Marietta had broken something in him that a year of FBI interrogations never had. Afterward, the FBI matched the recorded voice to tapes from David Meyerhofer's earlier interviews with Pete Dunbar. Investigators traced the call to a phone line in three forks that had been tapped with military-grade equipment.

exactly the sort of thing a marine communication specialist would know how to build. But a voice comparison alone wasn't enough for a warrant. So Marietta went further. She arranged a face-to-face sit-down with Meyerhofer. Sitting across from the man she believed had killed her daughter, Marietta told him directly that she knew. She told him she recognized his voice on the anniversary call. Then she put it in writing.

Based on her sworn affidavit, Pete Dunbar obtained a federal search warrant for Meyerhofer's property. They found Sandra Smolligan's remains at his home, at an abandoned ranch outside of town. They found bone fragments that were later confirmed as Susan's. On September 28, 1974, David Meyerhofer was arrested. He was 25 years old. Under questioning, he confessed to four murders. Susan Yeager, Sandra Smolligan, and two local boys from earlier years. 13-year-old Bernard Holman killed in 1967 and 12-year-old Michael Rainey killed in 1968. The next morning, less than 24 hours after his confession, Meyerhofer hanged himself in his cell at the Gallatin County Jail. The Susan Yeager case was the first time criminal profiling had been used to help identify a suspect in a real investigation. It didn't solve the case on its own.

Marietta Yeager's courage on that phone call and in the face-to-face confrontation that followed did as much. as any psychological analysis ever could. But Howard Taiton and Patrick Mullini, the two FBI agents who had drafted the profile from their basement office at the Academy, had given Pete Dunbar a framework when he had nothing else. They told him what kind of person he was looking for.

They explained why the polygraphs kept failing, and they predicted almost to the day when the killer would reach out again. One case, one correct predict, one killer caught. The question was whether it would work again. And to answer that, Taiton and Malaney needed to turn a single case into a method. That meant going back to an idea that was older than either of them. By 1956, the NYPD had been hunting a serial bomber for 16 years. He had planted more than 30 bombs in phone.

boathes, theaters, and train stations across the city. After years without any progress, the police turned to a New York City psychiatrist named James Brussels for help. Brussels studied the bomb designs, the letters, and the crime scenes, and produced a detailed portrait of the man behind them. He said he was middle-aged, foreign-born, Eastern European, single, living with a female relative and meticulous about his family. his appearance. When the police arrested George Mateski in Waterbury, Connecticut in January of 1957, he matched the description to a T. He lived with his two older sisters. Was neat and clean shaven. He even changed into a double-breasted suit before heading down to the police station. It was a

remarkable piece of intuition. But it was also a one-off, one psychiatrist, one case, one set of predictions that happened to be right. What Taiton and Malaney wanted to build at the FBI Academy was something bigger. They wanted a method they could teach to other agents that could be applied to different kinds of cases and was grounded in real data rather than a single psychiatrist's instincts. In 1972, the FBI gave Taiton and Mullaney's work an official home. It was called the Behavioral Science Unit, and it operated out of a windowless basement at the FBI Academy in Quantico with 11 agents. Their colleagues were skeptical. Describing a killer's personality from a crime scene sounded to most agents, like guesswork dressed up in academic language.

but the unit had one thing working in its favor, a captive audience. Every year, thousands of law enforcement officers from around the country came to Quantico for training. Taiton and Mullaney taught their criminal profiling course as part of the curriculum, and when those officers went home and hit dead ends on violent cases, some of them called Quantico for help. The Yeager case had come through that pipeline, and afterwards, the phone started ringing more often. In 1975, two new agents joined the unit.

Robert Ressler was a Chicago native, a Michigan State criminology graduate, and a former Army criminal investigator. John Douglas was a younger agent who'd been teaching at the academy and gravitated toward the BSU's approach. They both respected what Taiton and Malaney had built, but they wanted to take it further. The existing method worked from crime scenes and case files. Wrestler and Douglas wanted to go to the source. They wanted to sit across from convicted killers in prison and ask them directly what had been going through their minds when they committed their crimes. The Bureau wasn't enthusiastic, sending agents into maximum security prisons to have open and, ended conversations with convicted murderers, raised obvious concerns, safety, liability,

and what it would look like if something went wrong. Nobody at headquarters gave Ressler and Douglas' formal approval to do it. So they did it on their own time, during road trips for the FBI's teaching program, stopping at nearby prisons along the way. Their first interview was with Edmund Kemper. a man known as the co-ed killer who was serving a life sentence at the California medical facility in Vacaville. Kemper had murdered six young women in the early 1970s, along with his own grandparents, his mother, and her friend. He was six foot nine, weighed over 300 pounds, and had an IQ of 145.

When the guards brought Kemper into the room, Douglas was struck by how a number. enormous he was. But Kemper turned out to be articulate, self-aware, and willing to talk for hours, about his childhood, about the abuse from his mother, about how he chose his victims, how he earned their trust, how he thought about what he'd done afterward. It was the most detailed account of a serial killer's inner life that any law enforcement officer had ever required. courted. And the insight behind it was simple. If you wanted to understand how violent criminals think, you had to ask them. After Kemper, Douglas and Wessler started doing prison interviews regularly, visiting convicted offenders across the country during their teaching road trips. They had tape

recordings and transcripts piling up notes on dozens of killers. What they didn't have was a way to turn all of it into something organized and usable. In 1978, one of their BSU colleagues, an agent named Roy Hazelwood, heard about an article in the American Journal of Nursing that caught his attention. It was written by a psychiatric nurse and researcher at Boston College named Ann Burgess, and it was about rape. Burgess and a colleague had interviewed 146 survivors of sexual assault and concluded that rape was primarily an act of power and control, not sexual gratification.

It was a significant reframing at a time when victims were still routinely blamed for their own assaults. Hazelwood called Burgess and invited her to Quantico. She wasn't an agent or a traditional psychologist. She was a researcher and a mother of four who had spent years studying her. crime from the victim's side. Walking into the FBI Academy for the first time, it must have been intimidating. The place was full of former athletes and ex-military men. But Burgess understood something the agents hadn't fully grasped, that studying killers without studying their victims was only half the picture. The victim's experience what the offender did in what order. In what

order and how the victim responded was itself a form of evidence. It revealed the offender's need for control, their fantasies, their psychological signature. When Burgess sat down with Douglas and wrestlers interview transcripts, she saw patterns the agents had been too close to the material to notice. She organized the data by offense type, victim characteristics, and offense. background. She built a coding system that turned hours of prison conversation into a real data set. Over the next several years, the team interviewed 36 convicted serial killers responsible for 118 known victims. Out of that work, they developed the framework that would define the field, a classification system that divided violent offenders into organized killers who planned

their crimes and concealed evidence and disorganized killers who acted on impulse and left chaotic scenes behind. They published their findings in 1988 in a book called Sexual Homicide, Patterns, and Motives. They followed it with the Crime Classification Manual in 1992, which became the standard reference for law enforcement agencies worldwide. Somewhere along the way, wrestler coined a term for what they'd been studying. He called them serial killers. The phrase entered the American vocabulary and never left. By the late 1970s, the behavioral science unit had gone from an obscure experiment to something the FBI had never had before, a team that could study a violent crime and describe the person who committed it before he was.

caught. But most of that work had been done quietly, behind closed doors far from the public eye. Most police departments in America had never heard of criminal profiling. That was about to change because a convicted killer named Ted Bundy had just escaped from a Colorado jail and nobody knew where he was. Ted Bundy was 31 years old, tall, clean cut, articulate, and plumbed. polite. People who met him described him as warm. Women trusted him. He had studied psychology at the University of Washington and briefly attended law school. He had also been killing since at least 1974. Over the course of four years, young women across Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Utah had been vanishing. Some were found dead. Others were never found at all. Bundy had a pattern.

He approached his victims in public, often in broad daylight, and they simply disappeared. By the time he was arrested in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1975 for an attempted kidnapping. Investigators in multiple states were starting to realize the cases might be connected. Bundy was convicted of the kidnapping and extradited to Colorado to face a murder charge. He escaped from custody twice. On the first time in June of 1977, he jumped from a second-story courthouse window in Aspen, Colorado, and lasted six days before being recaptured. The second time, on December 30th, 1977, he didn't get caught.

He sawed through the ceiling of his cell in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and crawled through the building's duct work above the jail. Then he dropped down into the head jailers apart, through a closet and walked out the front door in civilian clothes. By the time anyone realized he was gone, he had a full day's head start. He flew to Chicago, Illinois, took a train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, then made his way south through Atlanta, Georgia, to Tallahassee, Florida, where he rented a room in a boarding house near the Florida State University campus.

halfway across the country, the detective still working his Colorado case understood what was coming. They said it publicly. Bundy was going to kill again. It was only a matter of time. It took him two weeks. On January 15th, 1978, sometime after 3 in the morning, Bundy broke into the Kai Omega Sorority House. at Florida State University, carrying a wooden club. He moved through the building room by room.

He killed two women, 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, and 20-year-old Lisa Levy. He severely injured two others, 20-year-old Kathy Kleiner, and 21-year-old Karen Chandler. That same night, eight blocks away, he attacked another FSU student named Cheryl Thomas in her apartment. She survived. Three weeks later, on February 9th, he abducted 12-year-old Kimberly Leach from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida, about 150 miles to the east. Her body was found two months later. On February 10, 1978, the FBI added Bundy to its 10 most wanted fugitives list, along with the standard photograph and physical. description, the wanted poster included something new, a psychological assessment of Bundy,

written by Howard Taiton and Robert Ressler. It described his behavioral patterns in likely psychology, and it was the first time a criminal profile had ever appeared on a federal wanted poster. Five days later, on February 15th, a police officer in Pensacola, Florida, pulled over a stolen Volkswagen Beetle during a routine traffic stop. The driver gave a fake name. After a brief struggle, the officer arrested him. Within two days, fingerprints confirmed it was Ted Bundy. The profile didn't catch him.

A patrol officer on a routine stop did. But the wanted poster had gone to every police department in the country. And for many of them, it was the first time they'd seen a criminal profile attached to a federal case. In the months after Bundy's arrest, requests to the BSU from local law enforcement agencies began to climb. Bundy was convicted of the Chi Omega murders in July of 1979 and the murder of Kimberly Leach in 1980. He received three death sentences. He would spend the next decade on Florida's death row. While Bundy awaited execution, the BSU took on its highest profile case to date. Between 1979 and 1981, at least 28 African American children,

teenagers and young adults were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia. The city was consumed by fear, and most of the country assumed the killings were racially motivated, committed by the KKK or another far-right group. The FBI brought in John Douglas, one of the BSU agents who, had been conducting the prison interviews with Robert Wessler. Douglas studied the case files and crime scene geography and wrote a profile that was deeply unpopular. He concluded that the killer was likely a young black male, someone local who could move through the community without drawing attention. Douglas argued that he wasn't driven by racial hatred, but a need for control.

By the spring of 1981, several victims' bodies had been pulled from rivers south of the city. Police began watching the bridges at night. On May 22nd, officers near the Chattahoochee River spotted a 23-year-old Atlanta man named Wayne Williams near one of the disposal sites. Investigators later matched fiber evidence from his home and car to multiple victims. Although Williams maintained his innocence and has continued to do so ever since, the jury convicted him of those two murders in February of 1982. He was never charged with the remaining cases. The Atlanta investigation put the BSU's name in front of every police department in the country.

But whether Williams was responsible for all 28 deaths remains an open question to this day. By the early 1980s, the BSU had a growing reputation and a framework that was starting to gain traction. But there was a gap in what the unit actually understood. Most of the serial killers that Douglas and Ressler had interviewed in prison were impulsive offenders who left evidence behind and were caught relatively quickly. The BSU knew far less about the other end of the spectrum. The killers who planned carefully, concealed their tracks, and disappeared back into ordinary life for years. In Wichita, Kansas, a man who called himself BTK, short for Bined Torture Kill, had been murdering people since 1974 and sending taunting letters to police and local newspapers. between attacks, he went home to his wife and two children, served as president of his church council,

and worked as a city compliance officer. Agents at the BSU had consulted on his case. Their analysis was broadly accurate. A white male, employed, married, likely involved in his community. But knowing what kind of person B.T.K. was hadn't led anyone to his front. door. He wouldn't be identified until 2005. When he sent police a floppy disc, they traced to a church computer in suburban Wichita. The man behind the letters was a 59-year-old named Dennis Rader, and he had been hiding in plain sight for more than 30 years. Ted Bundy represented the same

gap. He was the most famous organized killer in American history, and he had been sitting on death row in Florida since 1980, refusing to talk to the FBI. In 1984, a young BSU agent named Bill Hagmire decided to try. He wrote Bundy a letter. To everyone surprise, Bundy agreed to meet. The first conversations didn't really go anywhere. Bundy probed, deflected, and tried to control the room. Hagmire listened without pushing back. He came back the next month. And the month after that, over the course of more than a year, Bundy began to open up. Over the next five years, Hagmire visited Bundy regularly at Florida State Prison. Bundy described his crimes in ways he had never shared with anyone.

How he selected and approached his victims. How he avoided detection, how he thought about what he'd done. The details confirmed what the BSU already thought about organized offenders, but it also complicated their theory. Bundy wasn't just calculating. He was also impulsive, reckless, and desperate. The clean categories didn't quite hold. By the end, Bundy called Hagmire his best friend.

Hagmire later reflected on what that meant. quote, here you have a guy giving you a warm handshake and you're thinking, this is the same hand that held a hacksaw while he cut off a young girl's head. On the evening of January 23rd, 1989, Hagemeyer sat with Bundy for the last time. Bundy asked him to help write letters to his mother and his young daughter. Hegmeier agreed, but chose not to attend the execution the next morning. On January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in Florida's electric chair. He was 42 years old.

In 1985, four years before Bundy's death, the FBI had formalized the BSU's work by creating the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, along with a national database called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program or ViCap. For the first time, a detective working in unsolved murder in one state could search for similar cases anywhere in the country. If a crime scene in Ohio matched a pattern from an unsolved case in Texas, VICAP could surface the connection. The database has been used in thousands of investigations and is still in operation today. Criminal profiling also entered American popular culture in ways nobody at Quantico anticipate. Thomas Harris' novel, The Silence of the Lambs, and the Oscar-winning film that followed it, drew directly on the BSU's work. The FBI character Jack Crawford was based in part on John Douglas.

After his retirement, Douglas wrote the book that gave the field its most famous name, Mind Hunter, which later became a Netflix series. Criminal Minds ran for 15 seasons on CBS. The image of the FBI profiler became as recognizable to Americans as the beat cop or the detective. But the method has never stopped being debated. The classification system the BSU built, which sorted violent offenders by how organized or impulsive their crimes appeared, was based on just 36 interviews, a small sample by any scientific standard. Critics called the categories too rigid and too suburb. objective. And profiling didn't always work. The unibomber wasn't caught by a profile.

His brother turned him in. During the DC sniper attacks in 2002, early profiles pointed to a lone white male. The killers turned out to be two black men working together. But profiling changed the conversation. Before the BSU, American law enforcement had no shared language. for serial violence, no method for connecting cases across state lines, and no framework for understanding why certain people did what they did. After the BSU, it did. And Burgess, the psychiatric nurse who turned the BSU's prison interviews into usable science, is still teaching at Boston College as of this recording. She is 89 years old. After her daughter's case was closed, Marietta Yeager became one of the most prominent voices in America's anti-death penalty movement.

She said she had forgiven David Meyerhofer, not because what he did was forgivable, but because the hatred she carried was destroying her from the inside. She spent decades speaking about her family, about forgiveness, and about choosing to live beyond the worst thing that had ever happened to her. her daughter susan was seven years old when she was taken from a tent in montana the bone fragments recovered at an abandoned ranch were the only things left of her the people who built criminal profiling couldn't undo what happened to the yakers but they made sure that the next time a case like susans landed on an agent's desk there would be somewhere to start thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next Monday for part four of our series on the Crimes That Built America. It's the story of how one boy's murder built the missing children's movement and created a little show called America's Most

Wanted. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad-free. No waiting Part 2, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crimehouse and bonus episodes every

month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime story's team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertowski, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dylan, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.