Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers

Fans of the Netflix series Mindhunter might recall the character of Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who joins forces with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in hopes of more effectively catching them. But they might not know about the inspiration for the character: Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, whose long, distinguished career finally gets the attention it deserves in a new documentary from Hulu, Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer. Burgess herself thought it was "fun" to see a fictional character based on her but noted that Hollywood did take some liberties. "They got it wrong," she told Ars. "They made me a psychologist. I'm a nurse"—specifically, a forensic and psychiatric nurse who pioneered research on sex crimes, victimology, and criminal psychology. Mastermind should go a long way toward setting things right. Hulu brought on Abby Fuller to direct, best known for her work on the Chef's Table series for Netflix. Fuller might seem like a surprising choice for making a true crime documentary, but the streamer thought she would bring a fresh take to a well-worn genre. "I love the true crime aspects, but I thought we could do something more elevated and cinematic and really make this a character-driven piece about [Ann], with true crime elements," Fuller told Ars. There's no doubt that the public has a rather morbid fascination with serial killers, and Burgess certainly has had concerns about the way media coverage and Hollywood films have turned murderers into celebrities. "Despite how obviously horrible these killers were, despite their utter brutality and the pain they inflicted upon their victims, they'd somehow become romanticized," Burgess wrote in her memoir, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. "All the inconvenient details that interfered with this narrative—the loss of life, issues of mental health, and the victims themselves—were simply ignored."

That said, it's not like anyone who finds the twisted psychology of serial killers, or true crime in general, fascinating is a sociopath or murderer in the making. "I think we all grapple with light and dark and how we see it in the world," said Fuller. "There's an inherent fascination with what makes someone who they are, with human behavior. And if you're interested in human behavior, a serial killer exhibits some of the more fascinating behavior that exists. Trying to grasp the darkest of the dark and understand it is a way to ensure we never become it." "I think it's a human factor," Burgess said. "I don't see anything wrong with it. There is a fascination to try to understand why people commit these horrifying crimes. How can people do these things? But I also think people like to play detective a little bit. I think that's normal. You don't want to be fooled; you don't want to become a victim. So what can you learn to avoid it?" For Burgess, it has always been about the victims. She co-founded one of the first crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital in the 1970s with Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. The duo conducted research on the emotional and traumatic effects of sexual violence, interviewing nearly 150 rape victims in the process. They were the first to realize that rape was about power and control rather than sex, and coined the term "rape trauma syndrome" to describe the psychological after-effects. (WARNING: Some graphic details about violent crimes below.)

Their work caught the attention of Roy Hazelwood of the FBI, who invited Burgess to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to give lectures to agents in the fledgling Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) on victimology and violent sex crimes. Thus began a decades-long collaboration that established criminal profiling as a legitimate practice in law enforcement.

All the way to the FBI

That's where Burgess met agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas, who had been conducting their own side project of sorts, interviewing 36 captured serial killers. After listening to some of the tapes—which she likened to "eavesdropping on the rawest fringes of humanity"—Burgess believed their approach could yield significant insights into the mind of a serial killer, and she could bring the necessary academic rigor in terms of methodology to the project. Their work would eventually be published in a book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. Burgess was an unlikely figure at Quantico in the 1970s—a petite young woman from academia joining the quintessential boy's club. And while she ultimately earned the agents' respect, in the beginning, there were several attempts by her male colleagues to see if they could shock her as a kind of test or rite of passage. Burgess recalled that Douglas, for example, kept a human skull openly displayed on his desk and would gauge visitors' reactions. "He would watch to see where your eyes went," she said. "Did you look at it? Did you try to avoid it? Did you ask about it? That was the test." One of the cases Burgess worked on was the "Ski Mask Rapist," whose MO involved breaking into homes, tying up the victims, and raping them in front of any men in the house before robbing them. Burgess and the agents studied his progression from the earliest to the most recent rapes; they thought the Ski Mask Rapist was escalating toward murder. Burgess participated in a group session that led to a criminal profile of the culprit: a man in his late 20s or early 30s, never married, meticulous about details, in good physical shape, who was educated, had likely served in the military, and saw himself as an "alpha male." The profile was distributed to police departments in areas where the Ski Mask Rapist had been active, leading to the arrest of Jon Barry Simonis in Lake Charles, Louisiana, who matched the profile in nearly every respect.

Burgess soon found herself involved with another troubling case involving the kidnapping and murder of two young boys in Nebraska: 13-year-old Danny Eberle, taken while delivering newspapers on his paper route, and 12-year-old Christopher Walden. Eberle's body was found in a patch of grass along a gravel road, stripped to his undershorts with hands and feet bound, with multiple stab wounds indicating he had been tortured to death. Walden's body was better concealed and had not been bound, but his throat had been slashed so deeply as to almost decapitate him. Ressler and Douglas worked up a criminal profile with the help of Burgess and other agents, which led them to a third unsolved killing in Maine of 11-year-old Ricky Stetson, who had been stabbed, bitten, and strangled. That profile and other evidence led to the arrest of John Joubert, who confessed to all three murders. He received a life sentence in Maine and the death penalty in Nebraska, where he was executed by electric chair on July 17, 1996. This is innately disturbing subject matter, and Fuller had the unenviable challenge of deciding how much graphic detail to include and how much to withhold, particularly when children were the victims. Too little and one runs the risk of watering down the horrific nature of the killers' crimes; too much and one veers into titillating sensationalism. This is especially difficult when dealing with explicit crime scene photos. The Joubert case provides a prime example. Fuller chose to include just a couple of fleeting crime scene shots, with more graphic details of what the boys suffered verbally mentioned in passing. Joubert's capture was a critical victory and validation for the BSU, so it was celebrated justly. That said, "How can we ever feel like a celebration when we know that three young boys were killed?" Fuller said. Her solution was to end that scene in silence, showing school portraits of the boys when they were alive to remind viewers of what had been lost. It strikes just the right note of somber reflection and appropriately centers the victims rather than the monsters who tortured and killed them—a guiding principle of Burgess' entire career.

Another gut-wrenching case involved two young girls, one of whom survived. On June 2, 1985, Melissa Ackerman and her friend Opal Horton were riding their bikes in Somonauk, Illinois, when a man in a blue AMC Gremlin pulled over and asked for directions. He grabbed Opal first, tossing her in the front seat of the car, and then grabbed Melissa. Opal managed to jump out an open window and escape, hiding in a tractor tire at a nearby John Deere dealership. Melissa was not as fortunate; her body was found in a ditch 15 days later. Police arrested a man named Brian Dugan, who drove a blue AMC Gremlin, but they needed more evidence to link him to Melissa's murder. Burgess had the unenviable task of interviewing the traumatized Opal, trying to draw out as many details as the little girl could remember about the man who'd abducted Melissa. She had Opal draw pictures as they talked about what had happened that day. Dugan was convicted and received a life sentence; DNA evidence later confirmed that Dugan was also responsible for the rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicario in Naperville, Illinois, in 1983. This was a case that still haunts Burgess to this day. Constant exposure to the worst of human behavior can take a mental toll, and Burgess has worked hard to strike a balance between the horrors she witnesses in her work and maintaining a healthy and wholesome family life. (She is married with several children.) Burgess credits her nursing background with helping her learn to compartmentalize. "We see a lot of heartbreaking situations, but we can't just listen and empathize," she said. "We have tasks to do." She also made sure she always had someone she trusted to talk things over in "debriefing" sessions. And her love of music helped her cope with the stress of testifying in the courtroom: she played Helen Reddy's "I am Woman" to don her psychological bulletproof vest. "I didn't like going to court, it was a very intimidating situation, since the other side was going to try to take you down as much as they could," she said. But testifying also gave her the opportunity to share the truth about the criminal mindset based on her research.

Testifying for the defense

That's why Burgess agreed to testify for the defense in the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers accused of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty, on August 20, 1989, in the den of their Beverly Hills home. The prosecution maintained their motive was financial, as the brothers inherited their parents' considerable wealth. The defense insisted that the killings were motivated by longstanding sexual abuse of both brothers by their father. Erik testified that they confronted their father on that fateful night about the abuse, and Jose threatened to kill them if they told anyone. The boys thought Jose meant it, so they went outside to load their shotguns and returned to strike first. The Menendez case is a prime illustration of what Fuller finds so admirable about Burgess and her work over the decades. "It has a lot to do with her steadfast ability to constantly stand up for what she thinks is right in spite of what culture or society or anyone else around her thinks," said Fuller. "It's such an empowering part of her story. It starts in 1972 with her original rape trauma study, which went against the mainstream. She couldn't get funding." When Burgess started working with the FBI on studying the minds of killers, the topic was dismissed by those higher up the bureaucratic food chain as pointless "woo." Why even try to understand how the dredges of humanity think? "She saw value in that work," said Fuller. Burgess also saw value in the Menendez case, given the powerful stigma against male-on-male sexual abuse. Many of her former FBI associates looked upon her testifying for the defense almost as a betrayal, but Burgess stuck to her principles in the face of such criticism. She believed that the Menendez brothers had indeed been abused, and this should be taken into account during their trial, although she did not condone the murders. The trial ended with two deadlocked juries, but the brothers were later retried separately and sentenced to life in prison.

The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were particularly bad decades in terms of the prevalence of serial killers, but we see far fewer headlines about these kinds of crimes in the 21st century. Is it because they are fewer in number, or have serial killers continued to evolve along with criminal profiling advances and are therefore even harder to catch? "We don't know," Burgess admitted. "We do know they've caught a number of serial rapists and killers in the last decade, but there are fewer cases certainly than in the 1980s and 1990s." Those successful captures don't mean there aren't even more serial killers lurking out there who just happen to get away with it—a sobering thought. Burgess routinely would ask subjects during interviews how they might have been caught earlier. Usually, the police didn't pick up on their mistakes or didn't make critical connections or a witness didn't turn them in. And sometimes, "They're just very good," she said. "Things do change, and you want to keep up with the techniques. We know they're using social media as a way to access victims. Some serial killers are professional men. There was a lawyer, for example, and a doctor with over 50 victims, just here in Boston. They often don't get caught because they are 'respectable' people. There's a case in Maryland where the suspect stayed in the area after committing the crime. That's unusual. So we'll never know everything about them. We don't have all the answers. [The BSU] didn't get it right every time, and that can haunt you. But often you learn more from the ones you don't get right" That's a driving factor in why Burgess, now in her 80s, is still a professor at Boston College's William F. Connell School of Nursing and engaged in active research. She's also involved in a virtual international club called Super Sleuths that meets once a week via Zoom to analyze cold cases from all over the world. "We have entomologists, we have pathologists, we have detectives," she said. "Bringing everybody's expertise to one case is very important. Sometimes we solve them. I really encourage people to do that. People can start their own Super Sleuth club." All three episodes of Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer are now streaming on Hulu.