Mindhunting with Sarah Weinman

"What is it about the culture that has conditioned us to favor the wants and needs and desires, however horrible, of a serial murderer, as opposed to--most often--the women and girls that they harmed and killed?" This week, Sarah Weinman takes us on a backpacking trip through true crime history and American pop culture, and tells us about the myths and realities of criminal profiling—and why they're sometimes so hard to pull apart. And finally, we ask the ultimate taboo question: are serial killers boring?

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Articles discussed:

The Case of the Fake Sherlock
What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert

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Sarah's other show, You Are Good
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Links:

https://thecrimelady.substack.com/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/richard-walter-criminal-profiler-fraud.html
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/09/secrets-of-top-serial-killer-expert-france-stephane-bourgoin
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: And okay, I get that we're amassing an army of Ken dolls, but for what purpose? 

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. We are getting toward Halloween season, and so we are talking today about the FBI. Our guest today is Sarah Weinman, author most recently of Scoundrel, and editor of Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning. And on the show, you know we like true crime and we like reckoning even more. 

To quote the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Volume 55, Issue 12, “The criminal profiling process is defined by the FBI as, ‘a technique used to identify the perpetrator of a violent crime by identifying the personality and behavioral characteristics of the offender, based upon an analysis of the crime committed.’”

If you have been near a TV in the last 20 years, you might know this field as the one depicted in Criminal Minds among many other shows, most famously used by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. This is a program that began in the ‘70s in a period that is now enshrined in lore as the first mind hunters, including John Douglas, figured out how to identify a criminal they had not seen and had only forensic information about by thoroughly investigating a crime scene, thinking about trends in violent crime and in criminal typology, and essentially creating a field of investigation that can at times be extremely useful and can at times be about as good as a random guess but that we love to think about in our fictions and that we love to believe in. 

Anytime the American legal system relies on our faith in a field where we as the American public want to believe that someone can get the right kind of training to walk into a crime scene and simply know who did it, that's going to lead to some problems, and I wanted to talk about that today. 

This is a true crime episode, but it's one where we're really talking about institutional failings more than the specifics of crime. Listen with care but know that our focus is elsewhere. And that's about it. We're excited to bring this episode to you. We're excited to be easing into fall. I hope you're enjoying some sweater weather or hating some sweater weather. Everybody loves sweater weather, but you don't have to like sweater weather. It's okay. Whatever you're doing, do it well. Have fun with your friends. Enjoy this episode.

*recording* 

Intruder entered through kitchen sliding door, used a glass cutter, a ring, and a suction cup. He's entering a school. All the prints are smooth gloves. Blonde hair. Strong. Size 12 shoe imprint. Blood AB positive typed from saliva on glass from licking the suction cup.

 Look at him, Starling. Tell me what you see.

Didn't he care that he left saliva on the glass. 

He's a white male. Serial killers tend to hunt within their own ethnic groups. 

It was hot out that night. 

He's not a drifter. He's got his own... 

So inside the house must have felt cool. 

What? 

What he does with them takes privacy. He's in his 30s or 40s.

He's got real physical strength combined with an older man's self-control, he's cautious, precise. And he's never impulsive. He'll never stop. 

Why not? 

He's got a real taste for it now. He's getting better at his work. 

Not bad, Starling.

Sarah: The internet is full of writers, editors, and investigators. And then there's my guest today, Sarah Weinman, writer, editor, investigator, Canadian. 

Sarah W.: There's something about being Canadian that confers special status. It's true. 

Sarah: What are you up to? What mysteries are you working on these days? 

Sarah W.: As we are speaking, I am a little over a month out from the publication of my most recent anthology called Evidence of Things Seen, True Crime in an Era of Reckoning, which is a follow up but also stands alone from an earlier anthology I edited called Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession, which reprinted Sarah Marshall's wonderful essay for The Believer on Ted Bundy, the myth, the man and all the ways in which we got that particular narrative wrong, but it also includes all sorts of other amazing writers. 

Sarah: I have given you an assignment. I sent you a little self-destructing video and said your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to tell me about criminal profiling. And in particular, FBI profiling. Because I found it very interesting. There have been a couple of examples recently of people claiming to be ace criminal profilers and turning out to be massive charlatans. 

One was a French guy named Stéphane Bourgoin, and then there's Richard Walter. Both of these people did similar things, although in one case it was about lying about being important to the profiling community while, in fact, just writing a lot of plagiarized true crime books in France. And in the case of Richard Walter, it was about actually testifying in trials and having an actual CV, although one that you strategically pad and add a lot more prestige and a lot more work history to, but actually having a role in the way people are punished and whether people are convicted of crimes. 

And the question that I had about these two fakers, who nonetheless, despite a lot of lying, had an effect on the way we see crime and criminals in America, is what does it mean to be a criminal profiler? How did we come up with this field, which is a fairly recent one? And does it attract charlatans because the skill set you need to do it involves, at the good end of things, overconfidence, and at the more sinister end of things, an actual attraction to the idea of lying for a living?

Sarah W.: I think the answer to all of your questions is ‘yes’. It's interesting too, that in addition to Bourgoin and Walter, after we had our phone call about this, I hadn't realized but there was an article about a third one just recently, who was called Britain's Mind Hunter. So yeah, the headline was he was an ex-FBI serial killer profiler than his lies caught up with him. And it's about a true crime writer in Britain named Paul Harrison. He had also claimed to have interviewed various serial killers and mass murderers. And yet he made it all up too. 

Sarah: Oh wait I remember I encountered this one because, didn't he claim to have interviewed the Yorkshire Ripper and then someone reached the Yorkshire Ripper for comment and he called him a ‘wazik’ or something like that, some insult so British that you're like, what?

Sarah W.: When Peter Sutcliffe enters the chat, you know it's not going to end well. 

Sarah: Especially when Peter Sutcliffe is there to be like, excuse me, I may be the Yorkshire Ripper, but this is taking things a bit too far.

Sarah W.: I may be the Yorkshire Ripper, but I am still a more reliable narrator than this guy.

Sarah: This is such an interesting job to have or pretend to have. And the question again is like, where do we draw the line between pretending and doing? Can you talk about the origin story here? Because I feel like there are, I'm sure quite a number of people who didn't spend their formative years watching Oxygen, and therefore don't know what I'm talking about.

Sarah W.: And the thing is, if we're going to talk about an origin story of criminal profilers, we actually have to talk about the origin story of the detective because profilers are essentially a state sanctioned kind of detective who is using his mind to figure out certain traits. And even though there's supposed to be some science attached, really there isn't. 

So I think we have to start with another Frenchman, Eugène François Vidocq. And he was born in July of 1775. He actually lived all the way to 1857. And the thing about him is that he started life as a criminal. He was a thief. He just did a lot of aberrant behavior. And then he managed to figure out that it was better for him to turn to the other side. And that all of his expertise and all of his knowledge as a thief and a criminal would serve him well if he took this band of other criminals that he had developed and turned them into essentially field soldiers in pursuit of other criminals, because who was better situated to catch criminals than other criminals?

Sarah: So basically the first police force or one of them or the first detective agency is just a bunch of people snitching on everyone they used to work with.

Sarah W.: Yeah, pretty much. And the loose organization that Vidocq created was called the Sûreté. And it was an informal organization of a plain clothes unit. So it wasn't like they were dressed in uniform. They were just people acting undercover or what we would call undercover. 

Sarah: This is the next Leonardo DiCaprio movie though, right?

Sarah W.: Oh my god, yes. 

Sarah: It’s like an adult Catch Me If You Can, but everyone's French and wearing period clothing. I would pay 12 to see that.

Sarah W.: So the sûreté originally started with eight people. And then by 1823, so 12 years later, it had 20 of them. The year later, it had up to 28. So every year it would grow and grow. At one point, Vidocq, who aside from being first a criminal and then a detective, he also was a memoirist and frankly a self-aggrandizing memoirist. 

But here's how he described his work from the period of expansion. “It was with a troop so small as this that I had to watch over more than 1,200 pardoned convicts, freed some from public prisons, others from solitary confinement, to put in execution annually from four to five hundred warrants, as well from the préfet as the judicial authorities, to procure information, to undertake searches, to obtain particulars of every description, to make nightly rounds so perpetual and arduous during the winter season, to assist the commissaries of police in their searches, or in the execution of search warrants, to explore the various rendezvous in every part, to go to the theaters, the boulevards, the barriers, and all other public places, the haunts of thieves and pickpockets.” 

Sarah: He who is not mean himself, who must walk down those mean streets of Paris.

Sarah W.: All we do is keep reinventing the same trope, don't we? Even if Raymond Chandler wasn't directly reading the memoirs of Vidocq, it was in the air because the point is that the relationship between criminal and detective and real-life detective and fictional detective, they're actually a lot more blurry than we'd like to think. Most people want to take them apart and consider them separately. But it might be more interesting to look at them as a totality. 

Sarah: One of the interesting things about police and detectives in America is that they're political by definition, I would say. And every element of political life, as humans know it, is pretty theatrical and pretty symbolic, and it involves a lot of kind of performing a reality into being. So it makes sense to have this kind of symbiotic relationship with fiction.

Sarah W.: Yeah, absolutely. 

Sarah: Okay, so here we are, I guess in early 19th century France. How does this idea spread and is the detective something that we just didn't need, or we didn't need before society reached a certain scale or, the things we needed to protect reached a certain price point?

Sarah W.: I believe a lot of this had to do with books. The fact that Vidocq published his memoirs that were then translated and also that he had the attention of novelists like Victor Hugo who based characters on him and Les Misérables and those were translated. That meant that the idea of detective work and policing could be transmitted to other countries. So if the Sûreté, which then became a much more organized police force, developed over the 1830s and 1840s. 

And then eventually England takes this up and starts the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard and in America that comes in a little bit later. And all the while you also have other novelists and writers and that gets us into Edgar Allen Poe and he comes up with this detective, Auguste Dupin. Who, being French, I think is clearly modeled after Vidocq also, and he's essentially the first of this idea of the great detective who arrives on scene to try to figure out why somebody died, or why this horrible circumstance has happened, and figures out usually something plainly obvious, but is missing in plain sight is what actually was the solution. 

Sarah: Of course. I read a couple years ago the Murders on the Rue Morgue, if I'm getting all the prepositions right there. I don't think there's a wishbone of that, but there should be. And I was struck by how, like Watson and Holmes ended up being, the great detectives described by his buddy. And that there's a scene in the opening where Dupin is like, I see you're thinking about this and his friend is like, oh, how did you know that? He's like, you saw this thing and it made you think of this thing and then this other thing and finally this thing. And the guy is like, you got me. 

And it feels to me like so central to the sort of idea of the detective, both the dream and the nightmare of the detective is that somebody can just know everything that's in your brain. I think the reality that influences how much more difficult investigations can be than we want them to be, or conclusively knowing the truth can be, is that human beings are much more complicated and have more complicated and unknowable thoughts and motives than we would like to assume.

Sarah W.: I also think, too, that the rise of the detective in the early to mid-19th century was also happening at a time of great political upheaval. The revolutions of 1848. Happened a year before Edgar Allan Poe died and a few years before Vidocq died in 1857 and Napoleon was not just exerting his influence while he was alive, but even many years after his death. And so I think at a time of upheaval, two things can happen, which is you go in the direction of extreme order, or you go in the direction of extreme chaos. And if there's all this revolutionary fervor, and then people get tired of revolutions, it's like, what do they do? 

And we would see this, especially in America in the 20th century between world wars and pandemics and red scares and lavender scares and civil rights stuff and anti-communist witch hunts, and it's just this constant going back between order and chaos and chaos and order and in fiction, there has been this preference for order, and I think that does contribute to why there's been such a body of literature of detective fiction, because life is chaos and we want order to fix it, but we know that in real life we can't actually fix anything, but hey, maybe some great detective can come along with their little brain cells or their intuition or their big brain. The myth becomes the reality becomes the myth. The snake is constantly eating a tail until you don't know whether the tail is a snake and vice versa. 

Sarah: It makes total sense to me that especially in times of precarity, we lean toward fiction that gives us that feeling. And I think my question so much of the time is like, why can't we leave it at fiction? Why do we then have to bring fiction into the way we write laws?

Sarah W.: As much as we want to believe that laws are these immutable facts that have been written in stone tablets from biblical age, in actuality, they're crafted by humans with all sorts of foibles and flaws who were emerging from deeply racist and misogynist societies who didn't recognize that a great swath of humanity was actually human. So to then go back to originalism and say, this is how we should always be doing this. Really? You're just going to completely erase the last 250 to 300 years because it was written down in a text written by a bunch of weird dudes. Okay, then. 

Sarah: It's so funny that this is the argument we can't stop having, but should we do that? And it's like, no, why should we do that? 

Sarah W.: And also who's asking those questions of should we or should we not? And why are we giving them preference? It's also why I take issue when anybody describes themselves as apolitical. Because, frankly, existing is political and even the prospect of never making a choice is an actual choice. And this comes up too particularly with detective fiction, where there is this move to keep politics out of the fiction. But if you have a worldview, and if crime fiction in particular is a window upon society, how can you divorce it from politics? It's just marinating in it. 

I think we're getting maybe not super off track because ultimately it's all part of talking about crime fiction and especially detectives of every kind and maybe it's just because I just this morning finished Beverly Gage's massive biography of J Edgar Hoover that came out last year, which won all the prizes and deservedly but also I have to say spending four to five days in the company of J. Edgar, not so great for my brain.

Sarah: We just did an episode on Bonnie and Clyde where he certainly does not come across as a fun-loving guy. 

Sarah W.: So I think it's also important to bring Edgar Hoover into the conversation because without the FBI, you wouldn't have contemporary criminal profiling, even though the first profilers that I think of worked outside of the federal system. The ones that are in our pop culture consciousness, you can really thank two guys in particular, although there would be subsequent ones, but one was Robert Ressler and the other is John Douglas. Both of them wrote books about their exploits and all of their books really, I think that they must have gotten injuries from patting themselves on the back so much.

Sarah: Repetitive self-congratulation-itis. 

Sarah W.: Repetitive self-congratulatory strain injury. 

Sarah It can happen.

Sarah W.: I also should say that my own formative reading included those profiler books. Wrestler's book, whoever fights monsters, because of course that line is from the Nietzsche quote of whoever looks into the abyss, be careful that the abyss doesn't look back into you. It really is this man struggle against man kind of thing.

Sarah: Yeah, which is a quote that drives me crazy. Because what do you think that means when we get down to it?

Sarah W.: I quoted a lot. So I'm probably guilty of perpetuating it as well. For me, it's always meant that if there's an abyss, you have to be careful that you're staying on the right side of the line. And by right side, I just mean that you don't let yourself get too overwhelmed by the work that you're doing, that you fall in and essentially lose your mental health completely to it. 

Which also brings me to John Douglas and his books, Mindhunter and Journey into Darkness were the two that I know that I read in college, and I just remember being blown away by the work that Douglas and Ressler had been doing. First as the behavioral science unit and then it was later called the investigative support unit, I think. Because they didn't like BSU because it sounded like bullshit, but also that Ressler and Douglas were often at odds with one another, even as you couldn't really have one without the other, at least initially. What was initially called the ‘behavioral science unit’ grew out of essentially psychological techniques that had been employed in policing in the years prior. 

And perhaps the most famous example of this proto profiling was by a guy named James Brussels. So he was a psychologist who had been brought in to figure out some kind of psychological examination of the mysterious figure who had been leaving bombs all over New York City in this stochastic reign of terror that started around 1940 and wouldn't end until 1957. Nobody knew who was doing it. I think one person died. Mostly it was just people getting injured, people feeling that they were under attack. 

Sarah: It just goes to show how fickle we are, that we don't talk about this guy more because a 17-year reign of terror is really nothing to sneeze at.

Sarah W.: Maybe it depends on what circles you run, because I'd certainly heard of this guy for a while.

Sarah: Yeah, I know you're in a better crowd than I'm for Mad Bomber literacy. 

Sarah W.: I'm not sure. Growing up the Unabomber was very central, and his reign of terror was 17 years. So I think as long as Ted Kaczynski was still the Unabomber uncaught, there was a lot of flashback and precedent talking about the Mad Bomber of New York City, who would later be identified as George Metesky, and here is at least how the lore had it, which is The NYPD flummoxed, brought in this guy, the psychologist named James Brussel, and he worked up what would now be called a profile, but at that point it was just an examination of a figure who he thought would most likely be the bomber. 

And what he arrived at was somebody who was very high strung, very well kept, probably lived with his mother. Probably lived in an outer borough or maybe even a suburb. He had some direct grievance with Con Edison because the initial bombs were of Con Ed facilities. And that if they found him, that he would be dressed in a three-piece suit, double breasted, buttoned. And indeed, when the police finally identified George Metesky, he was living with his mother and he was wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. And this was thought of as, oh my god, this profiler totally got it right. 

Sarah: Incredible copy. If you're working for a newspaper at that time, I feel like you're like, this thing writes itself.

Sarah W.: Oh my God. And especially if you were working at a tabloid and it's 1957. So it's really at the height of I think tabloid culture. So it was a time of pretend order. But really, there was so much chaos underneath it. No wonder people just went completely crazy in the 1960s, or they figured out who they really were and everybody had this massive freakout, including the FBI, which is also why, for somebody like J. Edgar Hoover, the 1950s were really the pinnacle of his career because he could just rail against communists and have everybody in this sort of law and order mentality, and he wrote this book called, Masters of Deceit. By wrote, I mean he put his name on it, but it was written by FBI agents, but it was definitely his worldview talking about the dangers of communism and how essentially having a degenerate lifestyle was going to ruin America. And of course it became a massive bestseller because there are all these oldsters or people who just had not endured anything or maybe had suppressed it entirely. Who are like, yeah, let's have some law and order and it's also why what we think of as the 60s. happened later in the 60s into the 70s and didn't involve nearly as many people as we think. 

Sarah: That's something that I find so interesting about the 60s and that I feel like really applies to the culture today is that like we formed this cultural idea I think partly out of self-comfort and denial that almost everybody was swept along by this free-loving, psychedelic awakening wave, or at least we're listening to some Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And in fact, what it really looks like is like this relatively small inflammation of the conservative American body, which then rallied with a much stronger force of antibodies against it.

Sarah W.: But it's all part of the same soup. And yet people put this tremendous faith in cops that they knew what they were doing, that they could use their big brains to solve crimes. And what has been borne out with all sorts of junk science. And unfortunately I think profiling is proving itself to be junk science-y. But it's this idea that if you put a lot of confidence in the brain of a single individual above all else, that this could lead to a lot of confirmation bias and eventually wrongful convictions. I don't think we can ever fully grasp the enormity of how often somebody is wrongfully convicted or how often somebody doesn't get a fair trial or doesn't get due process or doesn't have adequate representation. And if you pulled it all apart, it's like, how can you possibly think there's any justice to be had from this criminal legal system? 

But to dwell on this can be incredibly depressing. So instead it's like, no, we must put all our faith in cops. We must give them more funding. So instead we have this big battle between good and evil, the evil of cunning serial killers and the good stalwart detectives who are going to take them down. 

Sarah: He missed Easter with his wife and kids. He's got an ulcer. He's staying in a motel!

Sarah W.: And he's always a white dude. And this is also part of Hoover's FBI that from the time that he took office as head of the FBI in 1924 to the time that he died in 1972, that's 48 years. You could not really be a Black person and be an FBI agent. You couldn't be a woman and be an FBI agent. You couldn't have long hair and be an FBI agent. You couldn't have tattoos. 

Sarah: It's like Bob Jones University, the FBI. 

Sarah W.: Essentially you all had to look like Clyde Tolson to be in the FBI. 

Sarah: And okay, I get that we're amassing an army of Ken dolls, but for what purpose? 

Sarah W.: Oh my god. Now I just literally had this image of the, “I'm just Ken” number done by FBI agents.

Sarah: Yes. You know what? It's AI. Good job for AI for once. Yeah, and that the aesthetic is so important. And I think that's something I find so interesting about gender in America is that clearly men and women like each other fine to some extent, but there's also I think for many people, especially in adulthood, this profound longing for camaraderie with people who you share a gender with or at least neighborhood of gender because I don't know, I've always remembered this like stupid ESPN documentary about the 1985 season for the Chicago Bears and at the end of everyone has traumatic brain injuries and is pretty disabled by pain and the injuries they got on this very celebrated season we're talking about. 

But every one of them, whose answer they showed, at least, in this thing, who they asked, would you go back and do it all over again if you could? They're like, yes. I was part of something bigger than myself. I was part of a team. I was part of a group. I don't know. It's interesting that cop is a job that little kids want to have, and I'm sure that there are plenty of reasons for that, including the fact that small children enjoy thinking about violence.

Sarah W.: Oh yeah, no question. 

Sarah: But also there's this very simple human need to be part of a group of similar people with a similar interest who all wear the same outfit. And that's okay, we just can't pretend that it's more than what it is. 

Sarah W.: It's like with Martin Scorsese movies about gangsters. What is it actually about? It's about community and it's about family and it's about brotherhood and it's about masculinity. And this all figures in, but it often is so unexamined. As a result, people are just too busy in this purported good and evil hunt and don't really take a step back and go, wait, why am I doing this? Who is this really for? Am I actually accomplishing something? Am I really making the world safer? Is it really good that someone comes in with terrible racial prejudices and this informs how they do their job for the rest of their life? So this all figures too in how people do profiles, because the idea of profiling is to make assumptions about people, and often they are wrong.

Sarah: And to jump back for a second to something you said earlier, I love the way you explained the Nietzsche quote that's in, so many 80s horror movies, where if you gaze into the abyss, be careful, the abyss doesn't gaze back into you, roughly, because I always saw that as this overly simplistic kind of demonic view of human evil, for lack of a better word, or our belief in human evil and this idea that if you get close to it, or if you try and understand it, it'll jump into you. And I always felt that's ridiculous. And it's the enemy of being able to cultivate any empathy. 

But I really think that you're right. And at least when we use this quote today, or if we use that hint at that belief today, it is maybe historically a way of talking about the reality of trauma without having to acknowledge that because you don't have a language for doing it, or it makes you feel in this case, potentially less masculine, because the truth, I think, is that if you spend time interacting with or in any kind of workplace closeness, kind of just the awful things people do to each other and the burnout that so many people experience attempting to make the world a slightly better place. That is real and I think the trauma that people experience, especially dealing with violence or the aftermath of it, is very real and it feels like that saying, the way that we use it or that ideology as it crops up in fiction is like the Manhunter paradigm. It's not that Will Graham is going to be destroyed emotionally because he's too similar to Hannibal Lecter. It's because he just can't keep being an FBI agent. It's killing him. He hates it so much. 

Sarah W.: I'm so glad that you brought up Manhunter and particularly that you brought up Thomas Harris. If there's one person who the blame can be laid at their footsteps for how we understand criminal profiling and essentially the relationship between fictional cops and actual cops, it's Harris, who I should point out, he did embed with the behavioral science unit. So he was an Associate Press reporter. And then this book becomes, not a colossal hit, but enough that he didn't have to do dilly reporting anymore. And he was casting around for something else to do. And he learns about the behavioral science unit, and he starts hanging out with these guys. So the Russler’s and the Douglas’s.

Sarah: I also love that they're just like, yeah, come hang out, whatever. It makes me think of the episodes of The Simpsons where Martin gets to hang out with the other boys. 

Sarah W.: Yeah, totally. So Harris is around and he's absorbing what these FBI agents who are going around essentially interviewing serial murderers and mass murderers in prison to try to get at the mind of a serial killer. Harris gets this idea from listening and learning about these serial killers to make this amalgam into one Francis Dolarhyde, who is the actual killer that Will Graham is hunting and Hannibal Lecter. And the first result is Red Dragon, which is still a really great novel and really thrilling.

Sarah: I just listened to the audiobook of it again for the first time in many years. And it is, especially when it gets into the evidence analysis stuff, the people racing to figure stuff out at Quantico and I feel like it has, in its own tortured way, like a lot of empathy with Dolarhyde. And that's something that's interesting about these books is that they work so hard to create. Very detailed histories for these serial killer characters.

Sarah W.: And not just that they're detailed histories but that you can engender empathy without ever forgetting the horrors that they perpetrated upon their victims And I do think that early on, particularly in Red Dragon, a little bit less so in Silence of the Lambs and then by the subsequent books Harris had totally fallen in love with Hannibal Lecter and was essentially writing his own fan fiction of the guy.

Sarah: Yes. It's like in And Just like That. You're just like, this character has the same name and description and yet all of the things they're doing are just the worst ideas I've ever heard of. 

Sarah W.: What is going on here? But to go back to Red Dragon, the first introduction of Hannibal Lecter, at least the way I recall it when I first read that book, probably in my early 20s, is this is one scary motherfucker. And it really is this battle of wits that I have been describing that Lecter is a truly evil, scary guy, and Will Graham is the right side of the law, the John Douglas stand in, the whatever you want to call it. 

That book is good, and it's a hit, but it takes Harris so long to write Silence of the Lambs, I think it was seven or eight years before that book appeared. And by that point, Hannibal Lecter is a bigger character. And then he creates Clarice Starling, who is also a fascinating character, but also now we've added this gender disparity between the big good and evil battle and she's from the south and she's got her own issues and maybe there's underlying sexism.

Sarah: And she’s 22 years old so she's really punching above her weight here.

Sarah W.: Literally fresh out of college and she's hanging out with the investigative support unit guys okay yeah of course lecture is still scary he's still a little bit more nuanced, but it’s almost as if when he escapes that suddenly everything takes on the sheen of unreality. I really feel like you can detect the moment when Harris lost his distance with his characters. That suddenly he's like, oh no, I am them. They are me. I have looked into the abyss, and I have fallen in. Because it had been 11 years since Harris had published The Silence of the Lambs. And everybody was like, when's his next book coming? What are they going to do? He finished the manuscript. He didn't get edited as far as I know. It went straight into production. 

Sarah: It really feels like it.

Sarah W.: And then they published it! And it was embargoed. So there was like a two-month window between when the publisher announced, oh, it's done. Here's the pub data. What's going to happen if people line up? And then everybody read it and was like, what in the actual fuck is this? 

Sarah: I am so thrilled to hear it wasn't edited because to believe in a world in which it is edited is to believe that someone could either through their own incompetence or because they were forced to do their job so nonexistent.

Sarah W.: And some people are like, oh, it's campy comedy, but I don't know. It just felt like a real betrayal of what Harris was trying to do in Red Dragon and yet he was the author of his own betrayal and it's because he wasn't writing fiction anymore. He was writing fan fiction and yes, I know fan fiction is fiction, but they do have different aims, emotionally and to some degree psychologically. And to just see how he had fallen into the abyss and really become Lecter and thought of him as a hero and thought of him as, yeah, sure, why shouldn't he and Clarice get together and carve up some guy and eat his brain and, celebrate with drinks and that's the end. You're like, what is going on here?

Sarah: You're like that's the end? I agree totally that it feels like fan fiction of the character that you made and I feel like to some extent maybe it reveals the absurdity of the classic dyad of the detective and the killer because Hannibal Lecter, I think part of what went wrong is that he just became so comically overpowered that he couldn't have an adversary anymore and it really shows what happens within the dream of the arch criminal where at a certain point, if we're imagining anyone to be so superhumanly smart, then they stop having understandable motives. 

There's just kind of nothing to relate to, which is part of why I think that's so insidious as a fiction, because I think part of the super humanly intelligent criminal idea as a way for us to wall ourselves off from the realization that the criminal is the human and, the same way that laws aren't real. The idea of the criminal is a made-up category because you're defined as a criminal by the fact that you've broken a law. And we've all done that.

Sarah W.: Which I think both goes all the way back to Vidocq and the fact that he was able to transform himself from criminal to detective while knowing that he was never actually fully sloughing off his identity as a criminal. Going all the way to the present day with the fraudster profilers. And I don't think it's an accident that Paul Harrison, the Brit, and Stéphane Bourgogne, the Frenchman, in particular, who were true crime writers who claimed that they had interviewed these serial killers in the wake of their subsequent exposures in media, there's been this sense of some degree of apology, but not fully owning up to what they had done, some degree of, I fabricated this, but still claiming that they had been in the company of certain killers. 

And then with Richard Walter, who was the actual self-styled profiler, he was part of the Vidocq society. And I have since heard that the society itself is really in jeopardy, mostly because one of the founding members, the autodidact sculptor, Frank Bender, died some years ago. Richard Walter is now a fraud and Bill Fleischer is getting old and everybody else who's going is who do we trust here? What is going on? 

I read that New York mag piece about Richard Walter with almost a heart and throat thing because even though a lot of the allegations about him had been reported out as recently as I think the early 2000s, just the way that Dave Herbert put it all together and also got these amazing, non-denial, denial quotes from Walter about his fraudulent credentials and the fact that he had basically been languishing in a state Michigan prison, not doing much of anything, and somehow self-aggrandized his way into being a criminal expert. It's truly one of my favorite pieces of the year. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I feel to me, there's something really compelling about how it just feels intuitive to me that job rewards, especially in a trial setting, blithe overconfidence. I think I first started thinking about this concept when I saw Errol Morris's, The Thin Blue Line, which is a really great documentary from the late 80s.

Sarah W.: It certainly is. 

Sarah: And so in that documentary, we meet this forensic psychologist named Dr. Grigson, and this is a case that it becomes quite clear by the end of the film where two men were in a car, a cop pulled them over and was shot dead, one of the men implicates the other man who then goes to prison for many years, and then it's quite clear that the guy who implicated his friend was in fact the one who shot the police officer. And Errol Morris has it all on tape. It's great. Grigson interviews the innocent man very briefly and then basically puts together a profile and testifies to the fact that this man is 100%t a killer and he will 100% kill again if he is ever released and therefore he has to stay in prison or be executed and he never went back on his claim and even when evidence kind of overwhelmingly proved that he had been incorrect, that was of no importance to him. 

And it feels like there's something to me that shows up again in this trinity of fake profilers we now have. People who have faked their qualifications to some degree, but sometimes ending up with very real results and putting actual people in prison. Where, in many cases, and including courtrooms, we often don't want the truth, right? Because the truth is I don't know, or this person could resemble this, or maybe they would be dangerous, or maybe not, I don't know. Because we don't like to be told ‘I don't know’ about matters of crime and innocence and guilt and life and death. We want to be told, I know what's going on. And so it feels like through that need, it makes itself a field that is uniquely open to simply lying. 

Sarah W.: Because telling a lie is still telling a story. And it's the cliche of never let facts get in the way of a good story, but also that every part of what we call the criminal justice system is made up of competing narratives of who wins at the best narrative, who creates from various nonlinear investigative tools, a compelling narrative that leads to a suspect who can then be arrested and go through the further narrative of a trial, and then the further narrative of conviction and even appeals and at least in some instances, all the way up to the execution. That's also part of a narrative. If that narrative is disrupted, and someone is wrongfully convicted and released, why so many prosecutors simply refuse to accept that this is the actual truth and that they were wrong. 

And that's why we're often so taken aback when prosecutors do admit they're wrong. Because it happens so rarely, because it's like, oh no, we lost one of the W's that we had on the board. Oh no, I might lose my job. Oh no, I might lose my election. And profiles are also narratives. So even if they're bullet point lists, but they're creating some idea of a suspect out of wholesale cloth, even if they might be white 25 to 35 and they might be married and have a secret life. 

And that's also why with the recent arrest of a suspect in the Long Island serial killer case, at least he's been arrested for the murders of three women. He's definitely a prime suspect in a four if they just haven't pulled together all the details to charge him in time and we don't know how many others the suspect might be deemed responsible for, you notice I'm using language that's very qualified and I'm not using his name because I don't think it's that important but it was interesting to see people who had done profiles of the guy go, I was right it was this guy and it's based on what really because yeah, he was married, and he led a double life that seems pretty obvious, or…

Sarah: It would be weird if he wasn't living a double life, that would really be something to write home about.

Sarah W.: Right? How we do policing and how we do legal work is all about what stories do we tell ourselves? It's like the famous and too often quoted Joan Didion line of, we tell ourselves stories to live. But we also tell ourselves stories to create the sense of justice being served and order rising out of chaos, instead of maybe we live in a really random, stochastic, messy, nonlinear world. We don't have a lot of good resolutions. Life is unfair. Hold the people closest to you even closer, and mutual aid is great.

Sarah: I'm fascinated by the kind of second life that Joan Didion quote has because the full context of it is I believe we tell ourselves stories in order to live in the sense that we have to tell ourselves stories, even if they don't connect to the facts, even if they amount to us lying to ourselves, because otherwise we'd lose our minds entirely, as opposed to mostly. But it's become, I feel like, sometimes this kind of overly merchandised nice quote that's like, it's so nice that we tell stories, and No, it's not! It's terrible sometimes that we do that! But to get to the profile thing, and what it is and isn't, is it fair to say that on the most basic level, a profile is basically you are telling whoever is looking for somebody kind of what they need to look for. You're like, I'm going to narrow it down for you. You're looking for a white male who lives with his mother and works for the postal service or something like that.

Sarah W.: That is more or less what profiles do. And on the one hand, they're not supposed to be prescriptive, they're only supposed to be a very loose guideline and police have to still do the work and make the connections and come up with evidence that can lead to actual charges that can then hold up in court. But because profilers, particularly the ones created by novelists, but also that have been manufactured by themselves, have created this outsized myth that they know better than average humans. And that leads to a lot of mistakes. 

And one of the reasons that I got really skeptical about John Douglas in particular was after the resolution of a pretty infamous case in Canada, where a nine-year-old girl named Christine Jessop had been murdered in 1984 in southern Ontario, and one of her neighbors, Guy Paul Morin, was arrested. He was tried and then he was acquitted, but it's Canada, so you don't have double jeopardy, and they were able to toss that acquittal or do something in appeals where he was retried and convicted, but then DNA evidence came in 1995, which excluded his DNA, and his conviction was then thrown out. 

But Douglas, who had done a profile of this case specifically wrote, I think, in Journey into Darkness, I know that Guy Paul Morin was exonerated, but I still have doubts and frankly… he basically insinuated that he still thought the guy did it. And I was just like, excuse me, are you woefully ignoring DNA evidence? And also an amazing thousand page book by the journalist Kirk Makin called Redrum the Innocent because ‘redrum’ is ‘murder’ backwards, which was essentially the definitive, until recently, account of all the ways in which this case went wrong. 

And in recent years, thanks, I think, to subsequent technological developments with DNA, where more sophisticated technologies could employ much tinier amounts of DNA. Labs in Canada were able to figure out not only definitively that Morin didn't do it, but that it was this other guy who was another neighbor who had been in the home of the Jessop’s and who knew Christine and he had died of suicide in 2015. I think because he thought law enforcement was finally getting close or maybe he was tracking the DNA evidence and didn't want to be around anymore to spend the rest of his life in prison. And the poor family now has to go the rest of their lives thinking, we let this man in our home. He was our friend, and we thought this other neighbor did it. I can't even imagine the enormity of what they are grappling with. 

I believe there was a great piece of Toronto life last year, this magazine, that really unpacked some of this. But that was a formative case for me growing up. Christine was nine in 1984. I was five. There were other similar missing children and murdered women and girls. They tended to be white. They tended to be in Ontario. Just this idea that you could be murdered by a neighbor and then all this stuff going on. It was one of my first exposures to this idea of wrongful conviction. And John Douglas blew it, but he wasn't going to admit that he was fully wrong. 

Sarah: Yeah, and that's something that's interesting about the whole enterprise, too, to me, right? That in the FBI in the 1970s, a very small number of guys interviewed a really very small number of serial killers. It's what, 37 different people? 

Sarah W.: Something like that.

Sarah: Something like that. Something in the 30s. And then they are like, there you go. We've figured out how the mind of a serial killer works and it's like really from that sample size after that amount of time.

Sarah W.: And then the problem is it creates this whole cottage industry of we must hear from the killer.

Sarah: Yeah, especially on streaming platforms, evidently. 

Sarah W.: Jesus Christ. Edna Buchanan's first book, which I hope never gets reissued, and I don't think she even wants it, is called Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, where she spent hundreds of hours with this guy, Carr, who had done really just unspeakable things to women and girls and was in prison talking his ear off and she's I'm writing this book because I think it's important for people to understand how a serial killer's mind works. Is it though? Do we really need to know this level of detail? Do we really need to be marinating in this? 

And then Robert Keppel and friends go and hang out with Ted Bundy for god knows how long and did a similar thing. Or Katherine Ramsland with BTK. What is it about the culture that has conditioned us to favor the wants and needs and desires, however horrible, of a serial murder as opposed to most often, the women and girls that they harmed and killed.

Sarah: I have spent a lot of time thinking about Ted Bundy, and one of the things I find so interesting about the interviews he did with Bob Keppel, for the most part, which were presented in the media subsequently, is Ted Bundy helps the hunt for the Green River killer. And then also the interviews that he did with Ainsworth and Michaud are like, for the most part, him just describing himself in the third person. And he's like, the killer might be like this. Because I'm like this. Not me, but someone is like this. And it's really nice that you got to spend so many hours reliving your past crimes and talking about yourself, but if there's nothing else. 

And this is part of the basis of the whole thing, going to see Hannibal Lecter to hear what he has to say about how to catch Buffalo Bill thing. What you really get when you try and do that is someone being like, I don't know why I'm like this, but here's some things that I like to think about doing, and also maybe have done, and you get to listen to my fantasy.

Sarah W.: And so by giving a platform to serial killers, it is comparable to giving a platform to, say, far right extremists. Are we really benefiting from this? We're just presenting the most horrible thoughts without proper context or without any sense that there should be a filter or even that it should be incredibly moderated.

Sarah: As if they're interesting on their own. I think you can use them to gain insight. There is like potential value to them, but simply presenting it as if there's something there, it's like, you guys, serial killers are famously for the most part white men and white men are boring. I think this is our best and most inflammatory take today, which is that serial killers are boring.

Sarah W.: Isn't that inflammatory though? 

Sarah: I think so. I think the need to believe in the mastermind or the kind of evil doer, I think it connects to the need to believe that they are self-aware in some way, and they can be like, I'm doing this because of these things. None of the rest of us do that, so why would they be able to do that? 

Sarah W.: God help us the time when we hear that a serial killer is reading Bessel van der Kolk and can quote, The Body Keeps the Score, back to investigators and please understand your trauma. Oh, God, we are in for it.  

Sarah: A serial killer who won't get off TikTok.

Sarah W.: Yeah. That I think we have to prepare ourselves for, too. 

Sarah: Batten down the hatches. And this is something that, growing up with serial killer fiction, I really started to notice as a pattern and be bothered by this idea that if you are evil, or if you're, a serial killer mastermind, then by definition, you're smart, and you understand what you're doing, and you understand why you're doing it. And therefore, what you're doing is somehow seductive to get back to this kind of the abyss gazing into you, and it's not just trauma. 

And in reality, I think that hides the fact that to be capable of destroying other human lives means that you are less healthy than other human beings, and that you have not ended up in a more evolved place, you are in a bad place where you would probably like to not be if you had any choice in the matter, but apparently you don't. 

And I don't know, there's something that I always think about how, particularly in American mythology, where this is also important to us that like America was itself built on conquest, which means it was built on murder and slavery and genocide, which again, contains a lot of murder, it's just worth pointing out how much we've embraced murder historically as a culture in order to exist here and how maybe that's why we like serial killers so much, partly.

Sarah W.: Our foundational myths are really bloody. Look at Westerns and serial killers are just part of that. It's this idea that we're going to be conquering heroes against the evil other, but those who commit serial murder, they're humans like the rest of us. They just went wrong in ways that most of us don't go wrong and to assume that they’re other, I think, does everybody else a disservice too.

Sarah: Yeah, I think so too. And then it makes us prone to thinking they're more interesting than they are. And they're simply not. 

Sarah W.: They're simply not. 

Sarah: And to get back to the Metesky profile, or original profile so he nailed the suit thing, right? He got a lot right. And I feel like what is easy to forget as we build the myth of the profiler is that you can get a lot right and then still say a lot of other stuff that is just irrelevant.

Sarah W.: It's like cold reading that if you're paying attention to people's nonverbal cues, you can intuit stuff, but it doesn't mean that you're a psychic, it just means that you're able to read people. That's also part of the other thing that I say a lot, which is the two other foundational American myths are white supremacy and grifting. But that also pertains to profiling, that most often profiles are done by white guys about other white guys, and the grifting, we've already talked about with respect to perpetuating frauds and wanting to present yourselves as experts or refusing to admit that you're wrong. 

You can come up with a profile that gets, say, two things right, and people latch on to the two things you got right, but then there's still 20 other things that you got completely wrong. Or you just weren't in the same ballpark as the actual suspect that's apprehended. It just lends this idea that so much of policing and investigation depends on intuition and gut feelings. And I'm right and I know who would commit this terrible crime. And this eyewitness has direct testimony even though we know eyewitness testimony gets things wrong so often. 

And it's this idea that circumstantial evidence, which can lead to wrongful convictions because DNA counts as circumstantial evidence, that somehow that has greater authority than the outsized police hero, human being, who's really actually becoming a comic book character. 

Sarah: And that I think the thing about detective work generally and profiling in specific is that part of the reason and I'm sure that you and I are drawn to this and to so many other people are is like, not just because of kind of the dream of the fantasy of being able to conclusively figure everything out, but also because it feels really good to figure anything out. And it's cool to find new information and put things together. And to a great extent, that is what we do. That's what you do as a writer. 

Sarah W.: That is exactly what we do.

Sarah: Yeah, and that's what I attempt to do on the show and it feels amazing to enter a field of questions and exit kind of having found new information, or at least found insight and feeling like you have a slightly better grasp of the world and that the next story you encounter maybe you'll be a little bit better able to understand it and grasping patterns and the pursuit of knowledge is one of the really special things that humans share, but then it feels like the pursuit of knowledge can resemble conquest in its own way because we begin to not simply want to know things, but to know everything without a shadow of a doubt, and that's where it becomes impossible. And the idea of FBI profiling specifically feels it is taking the imprimatur of the FBI and using it to say I represent the federal government. How can I be wrong? 

Sarah W.: I don't think it's an accident that we, or at least I don't know who the current FBI profilers are, I don't think they're out there generating publicity in the way that Ressler and Douglas did. And to a lesser extent, say Roy Hazelwood, who I always felt like knew what he was doing, but maybe not, I don't know. But I think that the less publicity you generate for your work, the more I might actually trust in your work. And that maybe if I've heard of you more than I should have, that should be cause for skepticism. 

But then, here I am, somebody who generates publicity for the work that I do, even though I really want people to judge my work, my books, my articles, the anthologies that I edit. I'm not going quietly in the background here either. But I'm also not a profiler. I'm just trying to work on my own journalism and shed further light on people and cases and stories that might not have had enough light shed upon them. But it's something that I'm aware of, which is the tricky balance between the work that we do and the publicity that it might generate and how that can also double back upon itself. 

Sarah: I definitely think about that in my own work because, I started off making the show after having spent many years being like, I have these thoughts, can I please write something about them? And editors for the most part are like, no! Review this book and we'll give you 150 American dollars. And so starting off making the show, I was like, I am powerless in this arena of ideas, and I just want someone, anyone to listen to me about my belief that we tend to get it wrong when we write about young women embroiled in scandals that involve bad behavior on behalf of the men they love, basically, or who they end up entangled with. And then, over the years I have gotten, I would say, arguably too much positive reinforcement for having the opinions that I have and once you have reached a certain number of listeners or audience of whatever kind and you have received the feedback from people like yay we love it when you say that! Say that more! And you're like what if I did keep pressing this button forever. And I am aware that I am also in a position where to some extent, I have been behaviorized into saying certain things because people like it when I do that. And that's just something that can happen to pretty much all of us, I think.

Sarah W.: And that absolutely happens with people in very regimented work structures like policing or the FBI or law enforcement in general, that they're part of this stricture that gives them an identity and from that they can become bigger versions of themselves. And then when it goes away, they retire, or they have done something that gets them forced out. What do they have left? Do they have developed selves? Not so much. So maybe by doing profiles or becoming fraudulent, that creates an identity. It fills all sorts of gaping voids within themselves, and they can't figure out how to do it in healthy ways. So they find massively unhealthy ways to do it. 

Sarah: Yes. And also then, it's the attempt to actually solve crime, which I think in many cases is a good idea. Are we approaching it all wrong? Yes. But should we simply, if there is a murder, just be like, huh, drag. No, probably not. But you know that it's like, things get so dangerous when you take something. And we see this the same way with our current independent blockbuster Sound of Fury, that if you're like, look, this guy is helping to stop child trafficking, look, he's catching a serial killer. He can do whatever he wants. And it's like, let's not turn something that may or may not be a real problem into simply an excuse for a guy to become a protagonist.

Sarah W.: It's like everyone in this scenario, be it criminal, detective, serial killer, fictional character. Everybody wants to be a main character. And main character syndrome in life and in fiction, it's a real problem. 

Sarah: The future belongs to side characters. That's what I think.

Sarah W.: I can accept that.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for coming mind hunting with us today in the pale moonlight. Thank you to Sarah Weinman for being our guest and putting our service to the test. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing, for everything, and for laughing at that little joke I just made.

And a special treat for those of you who listen long enough to get to the credits, Carolyn has a new song out, it's on all streaming platforms, and it's a cover of Townes van Zandt's, I'll Be Here in the Morning. And you deserve to hear it.

*Caroline sings*