John
Douglas is best known to the general public for his groundbreaking work in
criminal profiling. While an FBI agent he served as a SWAT Team sniper and
later as a hostage negotiator. In 1977 he transferred to the Behavioral
Sciences Unit where taught hostage negotiation and criminal psychology at the
FBI academy. He is also credited with creating the FBI’s Criminal Profiling
Program. Though now a widely embraced law enforcement tool, criminal profiling
in its infancy was not warmly welcomed in the too often tradition-minded ranks
of law enforcement (as a retired police chief, I know how accurate that
statement is). Douglas had a hill to climb to convince police that profiling
worked. His unbending dedication ultimately opened doors. The accuracy and
success of profiling cemented the techniques as a standard.
Douglas
carried his work of profiling killers, describing their habits and anticipating
their movements to outlining strategies for the questioning and prosecution of
suspects his efforts helped capture. He aided in identifying and apprehending
the Green River Killer and consulted on the JonBenet Ramsey murder. To garner
insight to the minds of serial killers, he has interviewed Gacy, Bundy, Manson,
Speck, and far too many more to list.
He
has written text books on profiling as well as co-authored several non-fiction
books, including "Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for
Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes." He teamed with Mark
Olshaker on a number of non-fiction books such as the international bestselling
“Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit."
Mark
Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, bestselling non-fiction author and
critically acclaimed novelist whose research and experience have led to
expertise in key issues of public policy, crisis management, and media and
public relations. Early in his career he worked for the St. Louis Dispatch and
wrote for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and numerous other recognized publications.
He is an advocate for victim’s rights, and his work with the Centers for
Disease Control and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Disease led him to co-author “Unnatural Causes” and “Virus Hunter.”
Though
this duo penned a few crime fiction novels (“Broken Wings”), this pair of
devoted men have once again united to produce the non-fiction “LAW &
DISORDER: The Legendary FBI Profiler’s Relentless Pursuit of Justice,”
scheduled to be released March 2013. “Law & Disorder” is an intriguing
venture in to the cases that haunt law enforcement and public alike: those
cases where justice was denied because of bias, bungling, media, or other
influences. Included are Douglas’s own reflections of painful lessons learned
and how it feels to take a stand against the tide when you realize the wrong
person has been convicted.
“Law
& Disorder” is one of those books we need to read, and then read again.
Q)
Thank you both for agreeing to answer a few questions. There was a moment where
each of you knew your collaboration was feasible. What did you see in the other
that made you want to work with him?
MARK)
We often joke that John is a detective pretending to be a writer and I am a
writer pretending to be a detective, and so we each respect what the other
brings to the mix. Actually, when we became aware of each other was when I
approached the FBI on behalf of “Nova,” the PBS science series, to cooperate
with us in showing the real story behind such archetypal novels and films as The
Silence of the Lambs. During the course of production on what became the
Emmy-nominated program Mind of a Serial Killer, which I wrote and co-produced,
John and I got to know each other well. Then, when he was preparing to retire
from the Bureau, he asked me if I’d like to work with him on a book about his
career. I said I would, the result was the best-selling MINDHUNTER: Inside the
FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, and we haven’t stopped since. We turn out to be
a good team. We respect each other’s talents and we genuinely like each other. LAW
& DISORDER is our eighth book together.
Q)
Mr. Douglas: You really did hit some brick walls when trying to convince law
enforcement criminal profiling was a viable tool. What do you believe was the
turning point where the average police officer said, “Wow. This works.”?
JOHN)
As soon as the unit was up and running we started getting requests, at first
mainly from police chiefs and others who had participated in the FBI’s 11-week
National Academy program. But it was really the Atlanta Child Murders case of
1979 to 1982 that really put us on the map. When my colleague Roy Hazelwood and
I went down there at the request of the Atlanta Police Department, we found a
city under siege, with sixteen unsolved murders and no end in sight. All of the
child victims were black and most were boys, and the prevailing thought was a
Ku Klux Klan type hate group.
Once
we examined all of the evidence and visited all of the body dumpsites, what we
had to say didn’t win us any popularity contests. First: This wasn’t the work
of a Klan type hate group. There was nothing symbolic or ritualistic about any
of the crimes; nothing public to create the kind of terror and intimidation
that these groups strive for. I mean, Klansmen don’t wear white sheets to fade
into the woodwork. Second: We were just about positive the UNSUB (unknown
subject) was black. The dumpsites were predominantly in black areas of the city
and as soon as Roy and I visited them and saw how obviously we stood out as two
white guys, we realized a white individual, much less a white group, could not
have prowled these neighborhoods without being noticed. And third: While we
could connect a lot of these crimes together by behavior and physical evidence,
we couldn’t correlate all of them. We concluded that the two girl victims were
not killed by the UNSUB or even by the same offender. A number of the other
cases were individual murders that were lumped in because of the timing.
We
were convinced we were dealing with a police buff or wannabe and profiled a
young black man with a slick come-on who would easily be able to lure these
poor and underprivileged children. He would be enticing them with money and or
the promise of something to change their lives. We conducted a number of
experiments to prove our theories, which are outlined in MINDHUNTER. We were
also convinced the UNSUB was closely following the media reporting on the case
and we were able to use that to our advantage.
Through
his behavior, we were finally able to predict where his next body dumpsite
would be, which is how Wayne B. Williams was caught. Hair and fiber evidence
linked him to several of the murders. Then, when he came to trial, I offered
strategic advice to the prosecution team. The big hope was that the smooth,
confident Williams would take the stand in his own defense, and when he did
that, I advised the very talented and incisive assistant district attorney Jack
Mallard how to “get to” him and reveal to the jury what this defendant was
really like. It worked. Wayne Williams was convicted of two of the murders, and
remains in prison to this day.
After
that case, the requests from all over the country multiplied, we were getting
foreign requests from around the world as well, and they never stopped growing
during the rest of the career with the FBI.
MARK)
John won’t say this about himself, but I will. He became a legendary figure in
law enforcement circles to the point where some observers started asking him if
was psychic. His response was always, “No, but I wish I was.” It was simply an
illustration of Sherlock Holmes coming to life. It all seemed like magic until
John would explain each analysis, and then it all made perfect sense – a
combination of inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning and some inspiration
and imagination based on both innate talent and hard-won experience.
For
example, around the same time John was working the Atlanta Child Murders, he
was called into the case of the Trailside Killer in the San Francisco Bay area,
centered on Mount Tamalpais State Park overlooking the Golden Gate. The murders
of a number of attractive and successful young and middle-aged women whose
bodies were found in densely wooded areas was terrorizing the region and making
people afraid to go out hiking. After studying the case files and crime scenes,
John gave the assembled task force his profile, involving age, background,
intelligence level, etc. And then he added, “The killer will have a speech
impediment.” Everyone sat in stunned disbelief until he explained his
reasoning. And even after that, not everyone took him seriously.
But
when police followed a trail of evidence to David Carpenter, a fifty-year-old
industrial arts teacher, he did indeed have a severe stutter. In fact, John’s
profile was spot-on in every respect except for age. Interestingly, one victim
who survived reported that during her brutal attack, Carpenter’s stutter
temporarily disappeared.
Q)
Mr. Douglas: The horror of murder in all its aspects (the crime, victims, and
perpetrators) has been a part of your life for so long, I have to ask how you
step away from it to maintain your sanity and embrace life.
JOHN)
It’s difficult, and you can’t always do it. I was in my thirties in December
1983 when I collapsed in a Seattle hotel room while working on the Green River
Murders. I came down with severe viral encephalitis that basically shut my
brain down. I was in a coma at Swedish Hospital for a week and not expected to
live. They even picked out my burial spot in a Veterans Cemetery. I was
handling so many cases at the same time, travelling so much, feeling this intense
pressure from the Bureau and responsibility to all the victims and all the
individuals who would become victims if we didn’t take some of these serial
killers off the street, I had this premonition something was going to happen to
me. In fact, just before I left on the Seattle trip, I took out additional life
insurance. Altogether, I was out on disability five months.
Even
beyond situations like that, you realize from time to time how much you
internalize what you do. I mean, you don’t come home to the dinner table and
have your wife say, “How was your day?” because she knows you’d say something
like, “I spent the morning studying crime scene photos from twelve prostitute
killings in Rochester and I’m pretty sure the killer is coming back to
masturbate over the bodies. I think that’s how we’re going to catch him.”
Or
another example, when our kids were young, I’d be with them in a park or
someplace, and I’d suddenly think to myself, This looks just like the stream
they pulled those children’s bodies out of down in North Carolina.
So
ultimately, I think, you just have to embrace life and realize there is more
good than evil in the world. You have to maintain that perspective, you have to
maintain a sense of humor, and you have to try to reassure the gift of every
day.
One
thing that has been very meaningful for Mark and me is the relationships we’ve
developed with a number of families of murder victims. The FBI doesn’t
encourage getting emotionally involved with cases, but in my line of work,
you’d have to be pretty insensitive not to. We’ve shared weddings and birthdays
and other happy events as well as funerals and memorials. Some of these people
have become like family to both of us and our wives. I think they appreciate
our understanding that while their lives will never be the same after their
horrible losses, that they will never stop grieving and there will never be
“closure” – a word most victims hate, by the way – that they are more than just
the tragedies that befall them.
Q)
Mr. Olshaker: You keep returning to crime, but your expertise also lies in
health. What sparked your interest in virus and disease to become actively
involved to a level of national recognition and respect?
MARK)
First of all, I come from a medical family. My late father was a pediatrician
and then a psychiatrist who did a stint a St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital and
taught part-time at the George Washington University Medical School for fifty
years. Both of my brothers are doctors; one in emergency medicine and one in
radiology. The radiologist’s wife is a gastroenterologist with a specialty in
liver transplantation. So that all might have given me some background. But
what I think made me so interested in the subject is that crime and disease
have a lot in common. They are two great evils that plague the human race and
both are wrapped in mystery. Shortly after the publication of MINDHUNTER, while
John and I were getting ready to tackle JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS, I collaborated
with Dr. C.J. Peters, a legendary epidemiologist with the Army and later Chief
of Special Pathogens for CDC, on VIRUS HUNTER, chronicling his exploits against
mysterious and deadly diseases around the world. And I realized that what C.J.
and John do are not too dissimilar from each other. Not to overdramatize it,
but they are both detectives engaged in single combat against death and injury
and pain, or as the docs call it, morbidity and mortality. These men are both
specialists – when you have a case that you haven’t seen the likes of before,
that is baffling and potentially deadly, these are the guys you want to call
in.
I
guess I love the mystery, I love the high drama, I love the intensity, I love the heroism and
I am awed and humbled by the stakes. In both criminal justice and public
health, you see the human condition at its extremes; writ large, if you will.
Of the three venues in which I have spent most of my career – documentary
films, novels and nonfiction books – these are the two subjects I’ve covered in
all three; not once but again and again.
Q)
Mr. Olshaker: Your film work has covered history, architecture, science,
medicine and drama. On the outside, Mark Olshaker appears to be a complicated,
resourceful, driven man. How do you hope your family views him?
MARK)
I suppose what I really hope is that they think of me as someone who is
endlessly curious about just about everything. And I’ve been very fortunate in
my career as a writer that I have been able to spend so much of my time “living
other people’s lives” vicariously. I’m amazed and extremely grateful everyone
time a fascinating man or woman lets me “tag along” on his or her career so I
can get it right when I write about it. I am a huge fan of both theater and
architecture, and have been privileged to be able to write about and produce films
with some of the modern greats in each field. And as for history, I think that
has to be the central discipline for any writer.
Addressing
your three highly complimentary adjectives: I guess I am driven and I hope I’m
resourceful. But as to “complicated,” once you get to know me, I think I’m
fairly simple and straightforward.
Q)
Lastly, do either of you have any parting comments for fans or those not
familiar with your work?
JOHN)
In some ways, LAW & DISORDER is a departure for us. Our previous books,
from MINDHUNTER through THE ANATOMY OF MOTIVE, all had as a general theme the
idea of catching the bad guys and delivering justice to victims and their
families. THE CASES THAT HAUNT US was kind of a transition, in that we were
taking cold murder cases from Jack the Ripper to JonBenet Ramsey and trying,
after you clear away all the myth and hype, to figure out what actually
happened and didn’t happen.
When
I was in the Bureau and headed up the Investigative Support Group at Quantico,
we were overwhelmed by case consultation requests and could only work for the
police/prosecution side. Except for rare exceptions like David Vasquez in
Virginia, we were not in the exoneration business. But when I retired and
started getting consulting requests from both sides, I came to realize that
profiling and the kind of behavior-based criminal investigative analysis we had
developed was just as applicable in determining who had not committed a given
crime as it was in determining who the actual perpetrator might have been. This
caused me not only to agree to work for the defense in certain cases, but also
to reflect on and re-evaluate a number of cases throughout my career. It’s
difficult ever to admit you might have been wrong in a certain case, but if you
have gained the insight and perspective to understand why you might have been
wrong, that can be a very useful and enlightening experience. Why
investigations and prosecutions go bad and what can be done differently is one
of the main themes of LAW & DISORDER. It is really a cautionary tale of
what happens when theory supersedes evidence and prejudice deposes rationalism.
MARK)
John is referring to a case early in his career, that of the so-called Chicago
“Lipstick Killer” William Heirens, whom John interviewed in prison for his
serial killer study. Revisiting that case made us both realize that an
investigator can only be as good as the evidence and case materials he is
presented with. And we’re not saying it’s easy. In the book we present two
murder cases, neither of which John worked, in which the convicted defendant
went to his execution proclaiming his innocence and declaring that the state
was killing a man who had done nothing wrong. Later scientific evidence proved
that one of them was, indeed, guilty. In the other case, all of the forensic
scientific evidence and data pointed to his innocence.
On
the other hand, the book portrays two major cases John did work – the JonBenet
Ramsey murder in Colorado, where he was instrumental in keeping two innocent
parents from being charged, and the “West Memphis Three” in Arkansas, where he
helped get three innocent men out of prison – one off death row. We also did a
complete forensic analysis of the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy,
for which her flat mate Amanda Knox and Amanda’s new boyfriend Raffaele
Sollecito, were charged, convicted and served harsh prison time. Like the
Ramsey case, John was none too popular when he started stating publicly that
Amanda and Raffaele were innocent and that their trial had been an egregious
miscarriage of justice. And like all of the other cases in the book, these are
fascinating, character-driven stories. But the tragedy in each one that
compounds the tragedy and horror of the original murders, is that good,
evidence-based investigation could have prevented all of those miscarriages
justice.
What
we found in each case we examined – and believe me, each one of these is
representative of so many others – what each case has in common is that the
crime itself fit into a pre-existing attitude or belief system and that ends up
directing both the investigation and the media coverage. This attitude or
belief system might be held by the police, the prosecutors, the community, the
media or practically anyone associated with the case. But if it is not
combatted, if objectivity and rationality don’t intervene, the results can be
disastrous and justice is buried along with the victims.
JOHN)
And so we end LAW & DISORDER with an enumeration of the factors that lead
to bad verdicts and our prescription for how the criminal justice system should
be improved to prevent or lessen the chances of this kind of thing happening in
the future. We hope all of our readers – those who work in the system as well
as members of the general public – will pay attention and join in the public
debate.
