I got inside the minds of America’s worst serial killers for FBI – psycho’s chilling 32-hour confession still haunts me
SHE famously went face-to-face with vicious murderers and developed the FBI playbook for profiling serial killers.
Dr Ann Burgess, now 87, was recruited by the agency to get inside the minds of violent offenders after her pioneering work on rape victimology, in the Seventies.
The psychiatric nurse, who worked in the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, formed the blueprint that helps to profile killers that is still used to this day.
It was developed after she started to spot ‘patterns’ and similarities between offenders while listening to their confession tapes and interviewing many herself.
Among the notorious killers they spoke to were The Co-Ed Killer Edmund Kemper, BTK Dennis Rader and Taco Bell Strangler Henry Wallace.
Highlighting just a few of the connections, Burgess told The Guardian: “They had always said that these guys had domineering mothers; what we found out is they had an absent father.
“They’re very bright, which was important, that meant they use their their heads; their cognitions were better than average. They did a lot of thinking. They did a lot of what we eventually called fantasy.
“The other important thing is that they couldn’t stop themselves.”
Burgess also pointed out that childhood trauma was a commonality among many serial killers, who often obsessed over one specific incident from their younger years.
She explained: “You can generally find the origin [of the criminal tendencies], if you will, in an early experience or something.”
Burgess’s work also led to a change in how crime scenes were analysed – instead of trying to work out if they were ‘organised or disorganised’, she pushed for investigators to asked different questions to help identify who the perpetrator could be.
She recalled: “What was the gender of the person? What was the race of the person? What was the age? Did he work? Did he have any friends or was he married? All of those kinds of questions are what you need for a profile.”
Now Burgess is the focus of a new three-part Hulu documentary Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer, produced by actresses Dakota and Elle Fanning.
Ahead of its release tomorrow, we look into her fascinating life and some of her remarks about serial killers she has analysed.
Pioneering work
Burgess, who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, honed her valuable interviewing skills early on in her career while training to become a psychiatric nurse.
She studied human behaviour for years while working at a psychiatric unit and later, learned the right questions to ask sensitively to draw out information from rape victims that could identify their attackers.
Burgess came to the attention of the FBI after her pioneering work interviewing survivors of rape and sexual abuse at a time when there was “a blame-the-victim mentality”.
She and collaborator Lynda Holmstrom’s 1973 article – The Rape Victim in the Emergency Ward – found attacks were more about power and control than the act of sex.
It was this specialist research that led William Webster, the then-director of the FBI, to recruit Burgess for the Academy to teach recruits about sexual assault and trauma in 1978.
There, she recognised it was imperative to analyse both the victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives to understand crime – and soon was tasked with analysing recordings by killers.
While listening to them and conducting chats herself, she discovered something she “never noticed before” – patterns that linked attackers, which formed the methodology that helped to solve future cases.
She taught us how to harness the chaos of serial killers’ minds and helped us decipher the undecipherable
John E Douglas, former FBI criminal profiler
Speaking about how it works, Burgess said: “I think it’s helped to capture serial perpetrators because we talk about patterns.
“If you’ve got a serial killer you’re going to have patterns. They don’t just do one thing one way and one thing the other.”
‘Very likeable’
Surprisingly, one of the uniting factors for many of the killers interviewed and analysed by her team was that they were often “very likeable”, which played into their ability to manipulate others.
Burgess previously told us: “The key was not getting manipulated but still being able to see them as persons that have important information, certainly from a research standpoint.
“But some of the serial killers were actually likeable, if you didn’t know what they had done. The likeable part of them is what comes through in the interview.”
Surprisingly Burgess branded serial killer Edmund Kemper – who murdered 10 people including three family members – “friendly, open and sensitive”.
The mass murderer, nicknamed the Co-Ed Killer, shot dead his grandparents at 15 and later after being released from Atascadero State Hospital for the mentally ill continued his attacks.
In the 11 months until April 1973, paranoid schizophrenic Kemper took the lives of eight more women including his mother and her best friend.
He killed them by strangulation or smothering before having sex with their corpses and later dismembered them – all but one were found decapitated.
Burgess says her colleague Bob Ressler admitted he “really liked Ed Kemper”, who was sentenced to eight life sentences in 1973 and remains in prison.
She added: “He talked, he was very personable, he didn’t seem to hold back on anything except some of the details about the crimes.
“So from that standpoint I could see why people would say ‘Gee I never suspected that person.’”
‘No remorse’
While Kemper was “charming”, others were not – including Dennis Rader, who gave himself the nickname ‘BTK’ meaning ‘Blind, Torture, Kill’.
They all have someone they idolize… I guess it’s not unusual in life itself, we all have heroes and people we think a lot of, and I guess serial killers are the same way
Dr Ann Burgess
In 17 years, he murdered 10 people – including a nine-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl – and infamously claimed there was a “demon” inside him, who committed the crimes.
Recalling his 32-hour confession in which Rader discussed the vicious murders, Burgess said: “He never once showed signs of remorse.”
Rader, who had a 13-year gap between his killing sprees, was caught in 2005 after sending a floppy disc to a TV reporter after growing frustrated with media coverage about him.
Burgess said: “That’s how he was eventually got caught – he was not very computer literate and he sent a disc thinking they wouldn’t be able to trace it but of course they did.”
Twisted heroes
Burgess noted that many of the monsters were often inspired by each other – including David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam, who “idolised” Rader, which she noted pleased the BTK killer.
Dr Burgess told crime site Oxygen: “They all have someone they idolize… I guess it’s not unusual in life itself, we all have heroes and people we think a lot of, and I guess serial killers are the same way.
“The Columbine killings in the ’90s, look at how many school shootings have mimicked their behavior.
“So they do go, and because so much is on the internet and you can find out a lot about these persons, that’s what Berkowitz would do.”
Eerie prescence
Burgess recalled meeting The Taco Bell Strangler – Henry Louis Wallace, who raped and killed 10 women, in North Carolina, over a four-year period until 1994.
She described him as “polite and smiling” throughout their interview until he suddenly exclaimed: “I hope you learn something about me. Because I don’t know why I did what I did.”
Burgess added: “His very presence suddenly made the room feel claustrophobic.”
She also recalled interviewing Montie Rissell, who she described as a “paradox” due to him being liked by friends, earning good grades in school and enjoying sports.
What is the FBI?
THE Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was founded in 1908 after the US government recognised a body was needed to handle criminal matters that crossed state lines and to investigate national threats.
It followed populations growing enormously across the States, with more than 100 cities having in excess of 50,000 people – and with that a vast increase in crime too.
The FBI was comprised of former Secret Service agents and was initially known as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI).
It underwent a name change before being known as the FBI from 1935 onwards – the work it carries out is comparable to that of MI5 in the UK.
They focus on threats to national security, investigate specific crimes and assist law enforcement agencies in their work.
As of 2023, the budget for the FBI was $10.8billion.
He raped and murdered five women in Virginia between 1976 and 1977, starting with a sex worker who tried to make his attack “enjoyable”.
Burgess said Rissel “was quite different” from other killers because he chose not to kill one of his victims due to them sharing a connection.
“She had talked about her father having cancer, Montie’s brother had been diagnosed with cancer so he identify with her and let her go,” Burgess said.
“Sometimes what the victim says or does can be a factor on whether the offender lets them live.”
Super Sleuth Club
Burgess’s impact upon detective work has been undeniable, with former criminal profiler John E Douglas citing her as “one of the the sharpest and one of the toughest” he had worked with.
He added: “She taught us how to harness the chaos of serial killers’ minds and helped us decipher the undecipherable.”
In 2022, Burgess released her memoir A Killer by Design: Murders, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher Criminal Minds, which was co-written by Steven Constantine.
The co-author described her approach as being “through the lens of the victim” and helped others to recognise victims “help solve the case”.
To this day, Burgess continues to help victims of crime – she formed a ‘Super Sleuth Club’ alongside other psychiatric nursing professors.
They meet once a month via Zoom to discuss to look into historic, unsolved cases, alongside Greg Cooper, a former FBI profiler who runs the Cold Case Foundation.