Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers

Fan of the Netflix series Mindhunter You may remember the character Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who works with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in order to more effectively catch them, but you may not know who inspired the character. Ann Walbert Burgess‘s long and illustrious career is finally getting some attention in a new Hulu documentary. Mastermind: Think like a killer.

Burgess herself thought it was “fun” to see a fictional character based on her, but noted that Hollywood took a bit of liberty: “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 the study of sexual assault, victimology, and criminal psychology.

Mastermind That should go a long way towards making things right. Hulu has brought on director Abbie Fuller, who is Chef’s Table Netflix series. Fuller may seem like an unlikely choice to make a true-crime documentary, but the streamer thought she’d bring a fresh perspective to a well-worn genre. “I love the elements of true-crime documentaries, but I thought I could make it more elevated and cinematic and character-driven,” Fuller said. [Ann]which also contains elements of actual crimes,” Fuller told Ars.

There’s no doubt that the public fascination with serial killers is quite morbid, and Burgess worries that media coverage and Hollywood films have made murderers into celebrities: “Despite how obviously horrific they were, their brutality and the suffering they inflicted on their victims, they were somehow romanticised,” Burgess writes in his memoir. Premeditated Killer: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decode the Criminal Mind“The inconvenient details that hindered this story – the loss of life, the mental health issues and the victims themselves – were simply ignored.”

That said, someone interested in the twisted psychology of serial killers, or crime in general, isn’t necessarily a surefire way to become a sociopath or murderer. “I think we all grapple with light and darkness and how we see it in the world,” Fuller says. “Humans are inherently interested in what makes us who we are – human behavior. And if you’re interested in human behavior, serial killers exhibit some of the most fascinating behavior that exists. Grasping the darkest corners of darkness and trying to understand it is a way to ensure we never fall into that darkness.”

“I think it’s a human factor,” Burgess said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. It’s interesting to try to understand why people commit these horrific crimes. Why would someone do something like this? But I also think people like to play detective a little bit. I think that’s normal. No one wants to be fooled, no one wants to be a victim. So what can we learn to avoid that?”

For Burgess, the victim has always mattered. She collaborated with Boston College sociologist Linda Lytle Holmstrom in the 1970s to found one of the first crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital. The two conducted research on the emotional and traumatic effects of sexual violence, interviewing nearly 150 rape victims in the process. They were the first to realize that rape was about power and control, not sex, and coined the term “rape trauma syndrome” to describe the psychological aftereffects.

(WARNING: The following contains graphic details about a violent crime.)

Their work caught the eye of FBI agent Roy Hazelwood, who invited Burgess to teach victimology and violent sexual crimes to agents in the budding Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, starting a decades-long collaboration that established criminal profiling as a legitimate practice in law enforcement.