Meet the Woman Whose Research Helped the FBI Catch Notorious Serial Killers

Fans of the Netflix series Mind Hunter You may remember the character of Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who teams up with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in hopes of catching them more effectively. But you may not know who inspired that character: Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, whose long and distinguished career is finally getting the attention it deserves in a new Hulu documentary, Mastermind: Think Like a Killer.

Burgess herself found it “amusing” to see a fictional character based on her, but noted that Hollywood took 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 has pioneered research into sex crimes, victimology, and criminal psychology.

Brain should go a long way toward setting things right. Hulu has hired Abby Fuller to direct, best known for her work on The chef’s table Fuller might seem like a surprising choice to direct a true-crime documentary, but the streamer thought she would bring a fresh perspective to a well-worn genre. “I love the true-crime aspects of it, but I thought we could do something a little more elevated and cinematic and really make it a character-driven piece with some true-crime elements,” Fuller told Ars.

There is no doubt that the public has a rather morbid fascination with serial killers, and Burgess was certainly concerned by the way in which media coverage and Hollywood films transformed the murderers into celebrities. “Despite the obvious horror of these killers, despite their absolute brutality and the pain they inflicted on their victims, they were somehow 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, the mental health issues and the victims themselves – were simply ignored.”

That said, it’s not clear that anyone who finds the twisted psychology of serial killers, or crime in general, fascinating is a sociopath or a murderer in the making. “I think we all struggle with light and dark and how we perceive that in the world,” Fuller said. “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 has some of the most fascinating behavior that there is. Trying to grasp the darkest part of the darkness and understand it is one way to make sure we never become one.”

“I think it’s a human factor,” Burgess said. “I don’t see anything wrong with that. There’s a fascination with trying to figure out why people commit these horrible crimes. How can they 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 get caught, you don’t want to become a victim. So what can we learn to avoid that?”

For Burgess, it’s the victims who have always been at the heart of her concerns. In the 1970s, she co-founded one of the first crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital with Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. The pair researched the emotional and traumatic effects of sexual violence, interviewing nearly 150 rape survivors. They were the first to understand that rape was about power and control rather than sex, and coined the term “rape trauma syndrome” to describe the psychological aftereffects.

(WARNING: Some graphic details of violent crimes below.)

Their work caught the attention of the FBI’s Roy Hazelwood, who invited Burgess to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to lecture to agents in the fledgling Behavioral Science 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.