THIS GUY WAS OUT OF HIS MIND!

In March 2017, six months before MINDHUNTER would hit Netflix, Roel Haanen had a long phone conversation with former FBI-profiler John Douglas, on whose memoirs the series would be based. Douglas also prepped Scott Glenn for his role in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and worked as a technical advisor on Peter Jackson’s THE LOVELY BONES. If anyone could enlighten us about the difference between serial killers on the big screen and in real life, it would be him. A shorter version of this interview was part of a special on serial killer movies in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Douglas would talk to us, providing that we didn’t ask any questions about MINDHUNTER, which he was not allowed to talk about yet.

I read your first two books many years ago when they first came out. At the time I was obsessed by the topic of serial killers. I had all these books, not only yours.  

Your friends must have been really scared of you, thinking you were probably a serial killer in the making. [Laughs]

Well, I just wanted to understand what drives someone to kill repeatedly.

Well, it’s mainly for pleasure. But it’s complex. There are many types of killers and many other motivations than just pleasure. The media will always try to make it simple.

One of the first serial killer cases that drew your attention was the Ed Gein case. It was quite sensational when it broke in the mid fifties. You must have been around 10 or 12 years old. Did you hear about it at the time or much later?

I joined the FBI in 1970. My first office was in Detroit, my second in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it really wasn’t until I worked in Milwaukee that I heard about the case. At the same time that I was an FBI agent I was also in graduate school and I heard about the case there and I wanted to study it. Now, what’s really good about being an FBI agent, is that it’s easy to get into prisons to conduct interviews. You don’t even need to explain why you’re there. Gein was one of the people I was interested in speaking with. And everybody was very cooperative. They had these crime scene photos that had been sealed in an envelope with wax since the fifties and they opened them up for me. I had the opportunity to briefly meet him, but Gein was so psychotic that it really wasn’t much of an interview. Not like the ones I did after with other serial killers. It was really weird: he was working in the leather shop at the prison, this Mendota State Mental Institution. Of course, you know, he made body suits and face masks out of his victims.

In PSYCHO, which was inspired by the case, they explain Norman Bates’ behavior by making him a split personality. That was not what was wrong with Gein, right?

No. I don’t like the term split personality to describe a serial killer. People like Gein don’t suffer from a split personality, they suffer from a shattered personality. These guys are disorganized, sloppy in their modus operandi. Usually you catch them pretty quickly. The reason Gein got away with his crimes, was because he lived in Plainville, Wisconsin with a population of about 300 people and very little law enforcement. He was not one of these introspective, intelligent serial killers.

What was it about the case that it not only inspired PSYCHO, but also THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, Buffalo Bill from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and even lesser known movies such as DERANGED and THREE ON A MEATHOOK?

Ha! I never even heard of that last one. Well, it was just so bizarre. I’ve worked over five thousand  cases in my life, and I’m trying to think of one that was as bizarre as the Gein case. I’ve never quite seen one like that, where the subject would peel the skin off and wear body suits and look at himself in the mirror.

Thomas Harris, who wrote the Hannibal Lecter novels, not only drew from the Gein case, but others as well, right?

Yes. Thomas Harris saw a presentation of mine in which I talked about three cases: Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Gary Heidnik. They’re all different types of killers. Bundy being highly intelligent, organized and difficult to apprehend. Heidnik was also extremely intelligent, but he had all sorts of psychiatric problems that got him discharged from the military. He would pass himself off as a minister and recruit followers, which were all street people: prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts. All people with low IQ’s. He had as many as six followers at one time and kept them all down in his basement, shackled with clamps that you normally use for exhaust pipes on cars. Then he got the idea to dig a pit, right there in his basement. He filled it with water and as a punishment he would throw his followers in there and torture them by touching them with an electrical wire. One of his victims died and he ground her up in a meat grinder and fed her to the rest of his captives, as well as his dog. So, Harris got the idea for Buffalo Bill from three different killers: Gein, Heidnik and Bundy who used to lure his victims by pretending he had a bad arm.

Now, another thing about Heidnik: I just told you this story and you would think that this guy is crazy as hell. He was crazy, but to give you an idea: he got a disability check from the military and he invested some of his money. At the time of his arrest he had over 600.000 dollars in the bank. Plus he had the criminal insight to brick up all the windows of his basement, so nobody could see in. And every time he left the house he would turn up the radio real loud, so no one would hear the screams. When I interviewed him in Pittsburgh he was definitely mentally ill, but there was no way the courts in Philadelphia would find him insane. They executed him some years ago.

So that’s Buffalo Bill. Is there any serial killer comparable to Hannibal Lecter?

Is there anyone like him? No. I‘ve seen some really smart killers, but no one as diabolical as Hannibal Lecter. That part was all fiction. How the hell does he get out of the handcuffs? How the hell does he do anything he does? It’s all like magic.

Isn’t that one of the big misconceptions about serial killers that Hollywood has created? That they are of superhuman intelligence?

Yeah, definitely. Ted Bundy had like a 120 IQ and Ed Kemper had about a 140. But then there are others, like Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, which stands for Bind, Torture, Kill. He had about a 100 IQ and wasn’t any genius. He was able to elude the police by just being lucky. Now, twenty years later he starts communicating with law enforcement again. Look at what the dumbass did: he sends a floppy disk to the police. First he asks them if it can be traced or not. Of course the police say it can’t. So he sends the disk and out pops all this information leading to the Lutheran Church where he was president.

It’s not how smart the killers are. What makes it difficult to solve those cases in this big, vast country is that we have so many different law enforcement agencies, unlike in your country or any other European country. Or even Canada! We have over 1700 different law enforcement agencies! We have morgues with thousands of unidentified people. In some states police will just go up and down the highways looking for bodies or skeletonized remains. You take for example a truck driver, hauling whatever, and he starts out in Washington DC and drives to Los Angeles. He passes through thousands of police jurisdictions. If he decides along the way to pick up a prostitute at a truck stop, where these women hang out, and he kills her and dumps her body across state lines, it is very difficult for law enforcement to even determine who she is and where she’s from, even when the body is still intact. And if the victim is a high risk victim, like a prostitute or drug addict or a runaway, it’s extremely difficult.

Plus: not all police are trained the same. We have some really good departments, but others are not so good. And some departments aren’t even motivated to investigate a crime against a high risk victim. When I was in Vancouver, a reporter told me about all these missing prostitutes and I told him they probably had at least one serial killer running around. The police wouldn’t admit to it, but two years later they arrested this guy Pickton, a pig farmer who was charged with abducting these women and feeding them to his pigs. It was well over a dozen women.

Speaking of bad police departments. Did you see Making a Murderer?

Yes I did. The police certainly screwed up that case.

Have you ever encountered police work that bad?

Oh, I’ve been with some shoddy police departments, especially after my retirement. I wrote about that in my very last book Law & Disorder, which is about the work I did for defense attorneys, getting people out of jail who were innocent and were convicted through shoddy police work or even shoddy work by the prosecutor or judge. That got me thinking of my years at the FBI: was I getting the right evidence when I was an agent? Were those interviews done correctly? How did they get the confession? At what time did they turn on the video during the interrogation? After they fed the guy all the information? It has affected the way I feel about the death penalty as well. There are some crimes I still feel the guy shouldn’t take another breath, like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Oklahoma City bombing. With serial killers, because there are so many victims, you usually have a ton of evidence. It’s the single murder cases you have to watch. You don’t know what the police is like, or the prosecutor. You don’t know.

Do you think Steven Avery is innocent?

I’m not sure. I do feel the young kid, Brendan Dassey, is innocent. That part reminded me of the West Memphis Three, a case I worked on. Peter Jackson funded me and a whole team of experts to prove these young kids innocent. He saw the PARADISE LOST movies on HBO and he couldn’t believe how these kids ever got convicted. He got us all together, put us to work and they made a documentary out of it [WEST OF MEMPHIS]. I saw similarities between Dassey in MAKING A MURDERER and Jessie Misskelley from the West Memphis Three. They both have borderline IQ. You could have told Misskelley the moon was made of cheese and he would have believed you. I don’t know about Avery – he’s got that background – but the kid, he was just socially retarded and the police took advantage of that, by letting him give a false confession. We had many cases like that in the US, some of which I wrote about in my book. Take Amanda Knox. Police ganged up on her over in Italy. She was a bright girl, but they just kept badgering her. Eight detectives taking turns badgering this girl.

What do you mean when you say: Avery’s got that background?

Most serial killers have an anti-social or psychopathic personality. Often times it will manifest itself early in life. Every time I’m speaking to a school some teacher will come up to me afterwards and say: what you’re describing, I have a student just like that in my class. You might have heard about it: the homicidal triangle. It was done by a Dr. Macdonald, many years ago, I believe in the sixties. We used it in our research at the FBI. We would look for these three characteristics in early childhood. One is enuresis or bed-wetting, generally as a result of emotional or psychological trauma. The second one is fire setting. And the third one, which I think is a damn good indicator, is cruelty to animals. I’m not talking about burning ants with a magnifying glass, but sadistically torturing small animals. If a child shows these characteristics there’s a good chance he will develop into a psychopath. Unfortunately, if there’s no intervention early on, there’s a good chance this person will commit some type of violent crime. Not all psychopaths turn out to be killers. They can become presidents of countries, right?

Do you get many requests from convicted people who want your help proving their innocence?

Yes. I just got this letter from a guy. He’s in prison for murdering this girl. He wants my help, but there is no strong denial in his letter. He just goes on and on about how the police doesn’t have a case, how they are overlooking other evidence. His finger prints were on the duct tape, with which he taped her mouth and body! Her blood was in his car! I looked up his background. Oh my god! He’s got the fire setting, the animal cruelty, he used to beat up prostitutes. I don’t know about the bed-wetting though. But this guy is a psychopathic personality. This particular type of person has an answer for everything and they are capable of convincing some people that they’re innocent, in spite of all the evidence.

And they’re sometimes very good at blending in.

Yeah. Sometimes the police are looking for this demonic looking person, but often times they just look like you or me. When a serial killer is caught people around him say: That doesn’t sound like him. He was always so friendly. Well, when you say it doesn’t sound like him, you probably really didn’t know that much about him. Again, look at Dennis Rader. He was like Mr Peepers, a little Joe Schmo. Here he had these fantasies about tying women up and torturing them, and all the while he’s married with two children, he’s president of the Lutheran church, he works as a ordinance officer. He got to wear a badge. That’s another thing: a lot of these killers are police buffs. When I asked a serial killer what he would like to be if he could have a regular job, more times than not they would say police officer. Or minister or some kind of counselor. David Berkowitz is a minister in Attica right now. These jobs give you power over others. That’s what drives them.

You mentioned Peter Jackson earlier. You also worked with him as a technical advisor on THE LOVELY BONES. What did you do exactly?

I assisted Stanley Tucci with his role as the killer. When I was working on the case of the West Memphis Three [Peter Jackson] invited me up to New York and he told me he was going to do THE LOVELY BONES. Now, I read the book before he even asked me and I told him how the killer reminded me of a trapdoor spider. He liked that and made me a technical advisor. That character was already very good in the book. He blended right into the community and had this appearance of normalcy. When I read it I thought: this author really knows her stuff. Then I read the back of the book and I see that she was a rape victim at Syracuse University. That is, unfortunately, where she got her experience of violent crime. The book is much more violent than the movie, by the way. I coached Stanley Tucci when they were filming right outside of Philadelphia. They filmed the rest of it in New Zealand, but I wasn’t there, I was only in crummy Philadelphia [laughs]. I coached him in how a killer like that would behave, what he would keep as a memento from his crime. They asked me to role-play with him. I have no acting experience whatsoever, but they asked me to role-play with Stanley, pretending to be an investigator going door to door, looking for suspects.

In that movie the killer was acting out an elaborate plan, something he probably had fantasized about very often. How important is that fantasy for serial killers?

In a fantasy they can control everything, but when they kill in reality they don’t expect the victim to do something, like fight them off, or say something. In the fantasy everything is under control. Also, they have a preferential victim – that is the victim in the fantasy – and generally that victim is of the same race as the killer. So, if the first victim is white, the killer is also white. Serial killings are for the most part intra-racial, but later on, when the killer has gotten away with that first victim and has improved his MO, and he is out looking for his preferential victim, if he can’t find what he’s looking for, he might go after a victim of a different race or age group. Because he got all dressed up for it. Sometimes the police will mistakenly throw out these victims because they don’t fit the pattern.

At the time of the Atlanta Child Murders you predicted the killer would be black.

Yes, and I caught a lot of heat for it. You see, serial killings were mostly perpetrated by white men, at least in the seventies. Up until that time there weren’t many cases known of black serial killers, so everyone assumed the killer was white. But at the FBI we knew serial killings were mostly intra-racial, so that’s why I came out and said that the offender would be a black male.

If the biggest misconception about serial killers is that they are of superhuman intelligence, what then is the biggest misconception about profiling that Hollywood has created?

Well, I’m not permitted to talk about MINDHUNTER, but that will probably be as close to the real job as you can get. There have been a lot of these shows since I retired, from MILLENNIUM to PROFILER. The big show now is CRIMINAL MINDS. What’s wrong with them, is that these guys do everything: they make arrests, they do the interrogations, they go around knocking on doors. They take over the whole investigation. Homicide is a local investigation. You have to be asked in. You can’t just show up and take over. These profilers on these shows are pulling guns. I pulled a gun, but only when I was a street agent in Detroit, working kidnappings and extortions. But when I came to Quantico and developed profiling I considered myself a coach, a tool in a toolbox for police departments to use. But I’m not going to take over their work. Sometimes they would ask if I could do the interrogation. Obviously I could, but I never did. It’s your case. I’ll coach you. At one time we were helping on a thousand cases a year. If you get involved in the case, other than as a consultant or coach, you’ll be in court all year and wouldn’t get anything done. If I do the interrogation I’m suddenly part of the investigation. Can’t do that. I can come up with a criminal profile, or help the investigator to determine the best way to approach a certain type of suspect during interrogation, or help the prosecutor establish probable cause, or help the prosecutor on cross examination strategy or try to come up with a way to get the unknown subject to inject himself in the police investigation – our research showed that certain types of subjects will do that. So as a profiler you can do all that, but you’re not doing the ground work. Oh, and the other thing about it is: just because you got invited, doesn’t mean they want you there.

How does that work?

Well, suppose a policeman from the Netherlands flies out to the FBI, takes a class in criminal psychology and learns about this profiling stuff. Usually these people that come over are high up in the law enforcement chain. And they go back home and the first case they encounter that could need criminal profiling, they request someone from the FBI to help them out. Let’s say it’s me and I fly out there and I meet the guy. Then it’s: Hey John, nice to see you. Thanks for coming. But then he leaves and I’m left with the investigators and you see the look in their eyes: Who’s this guy from the States think he is? Telling us how to do our job! You see that here in the US too. In fact: in most foreign countries they were glad to see us coming, but over here a lot of the time they don’t even want you there.

So how did you get them to accept your help?

Suppose I go out there and there’s this big task force of fifty people and here I come in. Now, you never oversell yourself, but if you have a good grasp of the case, you let those cops know. And then you see what you can do. Either you refocus the investigation – which pisses them off royally, telling them that they’re going off in the wrong direction – or you reinforce the investigation: telling them they’re on the right track, helping them make the right decisions.

Did you meet with a lot of resistance when you started profiling?

Yes, I was so young back then, when I was developing the technique. At 33 I was put on these big cases, trying out criminal profiling. And because I was so young, the bureau was afraid for me. If I screwed up, man, that was it! They would have sent me out to Butte, Montana to work cattle rustling cases or something like that. When I came to these task forces to help them out, I could see those older guys think: what is this bullshit? But nothing beats success. Once you’re successful people start to listen. Now, the actor who’s playing me in MINDHUNTER, Jonathan Groff, he’s about my age when I was doing this work.

Are there any movies that portray a serial killer truthfully?

The movie about Aileen Wuornos was pretty good, with Charlize Theron. She’s an executive producer on MINDHUNTER by the way. She did a good job portraying her, although I’m not convinced the motivation was truthful. In the movie you see that she’s getting back at these guys for all the abuse she suffered in her life. Now, she was abused, no doubt, but I think she was primarily motivated by money.

There is a story that you coached Scott Glenn when he was preparing for the role of Jack Crawford in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and you let him listen to a tape of a serial killer torturing his victim.

That’s right. My attitude was different then. My colleagues and I had so much work. We were so stressed out. And here we get word from higher up that there’s this movie director called Jonathan Demme – I didn’t even know who he was because I don’t watch a lot of movies – who wants to come down here and do this movie with Jodie Foster. And I say: Damn, we don’t have time for this crap! So, they come down and initially I was being a hard-ass, because we had other actors down there before and I didn’t like that. Once Dennis Quaid visited us and he was supposed to be playing a profiler in some movie. So I said to him: Just so you know, we are all under a lot of stress here. There’s so much work. And I would appreciate it if you didn’t portray us in some sort of half-assed way. And he goes: No, no, no. I know what you mean. I was a cop once. So we go: You were a cop once? What he meant was: he had played a cop in a movie! This guy was out of his mind! He thought he knew what it was like to do our work, because he had played a cop in a movie! Oh. You’re a cop? Well, why didn’t you say so before? Let’s do the secret handshake and swap war stories! Give me a break!

So when I heard Demme and his cast were coming down I was preparing for the worst. First of all, they were very surprised to find our work space. I was working in this bomb shelter, see. It was fifty feet below ground. It was a relocation site initially, so in case of a war, they would kick us out and move in these big shots. They saw me in this terribly depressing room – it was all cinder block with crime scene photo’s on the wall – and as filmmakers they loved it. And they asked me to work with Scott Glenn and coach him a bit.

So I said to Glenn: I don’t know how you work and I haven’t seen many of your films, but I just want you to listen to this. This is what we deal with on a daily basis here. This is why I nearly lost my life when I was 38 years of age and why we have so many other agents here with major health issues. I explained the background of the case to him, I said: The names of the guys are Bittaker and Norris. They were convicted rapists who, while in prison, fantasized about raping teenagers. They had this plan to rape a teenager. Not just one, but one for every year of a teenager’s life, so from 13 to 19. And what they did, Scott, when they got out, was they got this van and insulated it, so no one could hear the screams. Then they started picking up hitch-hikers and they would rape them in the back of the van. And this guy Bittaker had a nickname: Pliers. Because that was one of the things he used on his victims. Glenn had told me he was from Idaho, so I said: You’re probably a liberal and against the death penalty. He said: yes. So I said: I want you to hear, Scott, how the criminal mind works.

And the tape is so horrible. I turned it on and here’s the victim screaming and begging for her life. And what they’re doing is: they’re scripting the victim. That means they want the victim to say certain things, to make it sound as if this is a pleasurable experience for them. They have to beg for more pain. But the victim is screaming and howling. And I only played about a minute of the thing. He shut it off and he was welled up with tears. He said: I had no idea, John, that there are people like this in the world. You never get that from reading about a case in the newspaper. These people exist and for some of them the death penalty is too good. Later on, they asked me to go to Pittsburgh, where they were filming, and I meet Scott again and I ask him if he’s still thinking about that tape and he said he had nightmares. After that he told interviewers how I had screwed up his mind and how he wanted to kick my fucking ass. He never said anything like that to me, though.

Did you do anything similar for the actors on MINHUNTER?

No, nothing like that. But I did speak with them to prepare them for the role.

You mentioned your health issues. You nearly died from the stress that all the work brought with it.

Most people have no idea what the work is like. Forensic psychology is a really popular field now because of all the TV shows, but all these kids don’t realize how the work affects you emotionally and physically. These shows don’t let you experience what it’s like to hear or see the pain and suffering of the victims. You meet a lot of the victims’ families and they become your friends and you wonder how they even survive. After I nearly died, I went to the psychologist and he told me if I hadn’t died of viral encephalitis I would have died from something else, like a heart attack. I was dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and burning the candle at both ends. It was so hard to say no to a police department who needed help or to a family member of a victim who needed you to call them. That was when the bureau started giving me man power. But it takes about five years before you get any good at profiling. Plus: not everyone is equipped to do it. To sit down with some bad people and try to get information out of them, speaking with them as if they are your friend, not letting them know you’re horrified when they explain to you how they killed that child. But inside you’re thinking: let them pull the switch on this guy right after this interview. In CRIMINAL MINDS they had a character, played by Mandy Patinkin, who had a stress related illness, and that was based on me.

With all the stress that the job brought, is it even possible for you to enjoy a movie about a serial killer?

No. I try to avoid them. The procedural stuff will always bother me. And as for scary movies, like FRIDAY THE 13TH, I don’t like them at all. They have the sound, the music and the dramatics. You’ll see someone in a dark hallway being stalked and I’m thinking: turn on the light switch! It’s right over there on the wall!

Thank you for speaking with me. I wish you the best of luck with MINDHUNTER.

Thank you. You know, they are already talking of doing five seasons. They’re writing season two as we speak.

Related talks:

• Scott Glenn

• John McNaughton

This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.