The photograph is telling: an FBI team has caught a most wanted serial killer, and in the newspaper photograph, the woman on the team, whose work led to this triumph, is missing. In the all-boys’ club of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, the entry of Dr Ann Wolbert Burgess was in itself a small miracle. Back when she started consulting with the FBI’s newly-formed Behavioural Sciences Unit (BSU), the concept of solving violent crimes by profiling the perpetrator was fresh, and quite at odds with traditional law enforcement's get-the-guns out approach. Also, it was rare for a woman to be included in the team.
While working as a nurse, she had co-founded one of the first hospital-based crisis counselling programmes at Boston City Hospital with sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. Together, she and Holmstrom conducted extensive research on rape survivors in Boston and published their findings. This caught the attention of the FBI and an invitation to consult with the BSU and develop methods of psychological profiling of serial killers.
When Dr Burgess first went to FBI headquarters in Quantico, the men showed her the most gruesome pictures of the murder victims’ bodies, thinking that she would run out screaming. Not only did she stay on, she brought her observational skills and expertise as a psychiatric nurse to the room, and helped solve several crimes, without demanding attention or credit for her work.
Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer, a new docuseries (on Disney+Hotstar), based on her book, A Killer by Design: Murders, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind (co-authored with Steven Matthew Constantine), gives a glimpse into how the soft-spoken woman waded into the darkness of the worst crimes, without losing her own mental balance or gentle manner. When she was growing up, there were hardly any career opportunities for women except, teacher, nurse, secretary. Her unusual career choice of criminal profiler may have landed in her lap by a twist of fate, but what she made of it — despite the scepticism and undisguised sexism of the time — is remarkable. She did all this while teaching at a nursing college, and raising four children, within a happy, supportive marriage.
The film The Silence of the Lambs had an actor playing her FBI collaborator John E Douglas (the other was Rob Ressler), but she was absent in it; she did inspire the fictional Wendy Carr character on the show Mindhunter, but when the BSU started operations their work was not glamorous, it was mind-numbing trawling through material, analysis and tabulation. The media’s coverage of violent crimes was invariably sensational and even flippant in the way they gave serial killers of women and children cute names like Happy Face Killer, Green River Killer, the BTK Killer, Ski Mask Rapist and so on. Rape was rarely reported, because women were seldom believed; even cops thought rape victims were “asking for it”. The local police in small towns were not trained to look for hidden clues, and so cases were eventually referred to the FBI; profiling was still at a nascent stage, but it took a sharp, attentive — and, when it came to victims — sympathetic mind, to find patterns and connect dots.
She listened to tapes of killers like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Edmund Kemper to understand their minds and modus operandi. Because of her kind manner, her interviews with the traumatised victims often revealed clues that the gruff, “tell us what you know” questioning style of male cops did not manage. She patiently listened to and drew out Opal Horton, an eight-year-old girl who had managed to escape from killer Brian Dugan, while her friend Melissa was abducted and killed. She made Opal recall and sketch details of the man’s appearance and his car, and that resulted in the arrest of the murderer. She noticed minor details, like a twin set of footprints near where one of John Joubert’s murdered victims had been found, from which she deduced that the killer must have been small in build and unable to carry his victim into the field where he abused and killed a little boy.
Her husband, Allen, understanding the importance of her work and her dedication to it, used to fly her and the kids to Quantico whenever she was needed for a case. Her children, now grown up, recall the gunshot sounds of her typewriter, and coming across books on sexual assault and criminal psychology. She did all the “mom” things like cooking and cleaning, while also solving crime, so for many years the kids thought that was a normal lifestyle.
Her work with victims gradually changed the perception of how sexual violence against women was perceived by society, media and law enforcement — when women were believed, they reported crimes. As an interviewee observed, the ripples generated by Dr Burgess through her cases, her writing and appearances on TV, led to the current MeToo movement. Popular actor and Bill Cosby was among the first major celebrities accused and convicted of serial sexual abuse. His first accuser, Andrea Constand, gives Burgess credit for believing her and helping trigger her memory, even though she had been drugged and remembered little about the rape. (“The body keeps score,” said Dr Burgess). Constand settled out of court, but more women came forward and Cosby was eventually convicted of sexual assault (the conviction was overturned a few years later, but “America’s Favourite Dad” was disgraced and punished).
After Dr Burgess retired, she took up a few private cases, and was castigated by the public, police and media for testifying on behalf of the defence in the high-profile case of the two Menendez brothers, who were accused of murdering their parents. They did not deny the charges, but the motive was not clear, till Burgesses’s calm questioning revealed years of horrific sexual abuse by their father. There was a storm in the media — the ‘battered wife’ defence had been accepted in the cases of abused wives killing their husbands, but perhaps for the first time, the secret of the abuse of boys and incest was blown out of family closets. The brothers were convicted, but the case brought to light what American society had been shying away from accepting — that families were not always safe havens for children.
In the three-part series, directed by Abigail Fuller, criminal behaviourist and homicide investigator Sarah Cailean says, “It is time for people to recognise there is not an aspect of modern criminal psychology that has not been significantly impacted by Dr Burgess’s work… and it does matter that people know that.”
Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author
