I like serial killers because I want to know why people do the things they do—specifically the really bad stuff. How can someone be so twisted up in their head they can torture another human being, especially a child? What happened to us in adolescence shapes who we are as people, and that’s definitely the case for some serial killers. But not all serial killers are equal (and not all are psychopaths) but they are all unique. This is essentially the basis for the hit Netflix show MINDHUNTERS, based on John Douglass’s book. The main characters are based on Douglas and another pioneer in the behavioral science unit, Robert Ressler. And please note, there are MANY more key profilers who helped create the BSU, including Robert Keppel and Roy Hazelwood. In the 70s, talking to people like Ed Kemper—having a real conversation with him without showing any disgust for his crimes—was unthinkable. But the profilers pressed on and changed how we catch and study criminals. The show is amazing. Highly encourage you to watch if you haven’t already!

But the crux of the show and their research is this: what are these killers thinking, and why did they do those horrible things? Kemper’s issues go back to his mother—when you hear his stories, it’s not a huge shock he became a killer. Others are wired that way. Gary Ridgway/The Green River Killer told psychiatrists he wanted to see what killing felt like, although he also had a serious lack of confidence around women and saw prostitutes as trash; Bundy wanted to control and frighten, and he wanted private time with the bodies; Jeffrey Dahmer had a substance abuse problem and issues with his sexuality but he had a normal upbringing and no specific triggers in his background. BTK was a family man who deftly compartmentalized his life into specific boxes, keeping careful not to allow his killing box to intersect his personal life, until his ego got the best of him. If you’re interested in Radar, read Katherine Ramsland’s book on him, CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL KILLER. She spent several years interviewing BTK, and the information comes straight from the source.

We know all of these things (and a whole lot more I don’t have space for) because of guys like Douglas, Ressler, Keppel and Hazelwood, and many more. We can never truly understand these people because we don’t know what it’s like to live in their heads. But we can certainly study and try, and that helps law enforcement catch them. And it helps writers come up with seriously scary villains.

Every one of my bad guys—including my Ripper character—is inspired by research into the dark and twisted. I certainly don’t compare what I do to the likes of Douglas and his cohorts, but I do try and understand as much of the bad guy’s psyche as possible before I start writing. The antagonist—and in my case, usually the killer—drives the plot. Everything the protagonist does is really in reaction to whatever the villain is doing, so it’s crucial to understand every little detail about him before I start writing. 99% of that backstory doesn’t make it into a novel. But it still shapes the entire story.

Have you read KILLING JANE? Reviewers are love!

In his book, The Anatomy of Motive, legendary FBI criminal profiler John Douglas said mass murderers are different from serial killers. The serial killer is driven by sexual motives, and he continue to kill because he believes he can outwit the police, but mass murderers have an endgame strategy. They are killing to make a statement, and most will either commit suicide when they’re finished or let the cops do it for them.

James Urban Ruppert wasn’t quite that brave.

On March 30, 1975, (Easter Sunday) James Urban Ruppert murdered eleven family members in his mother’s home in Hamilton, Ohio. As an adult, he was described as average, but he was envious of his older brother’s success. James had flunked out of college while his brother was an athletic star and electrical engineer. At the age of 41, Ruppert had moved back in with his mother, who voiced her frustrations at her son’s failed efforts to hold down a job. He also owed his mother and brother money (to add salt in the wound, his brother married Ruppert’s ex-girlfriend and had eight children with her).

Ruppert had an early love affair with guns as they represented the security and male toughness he’d always been told he lacked. Over the years, his continued failures and growing sense of being powerless cultivated his gun fantasies.

Like most mass murderers, James exhibited early warning signs. Ten years before the murders, the Hamilton Police Department received a report of an obscene phone call to the public library. James Ruppert admitted to making the call, and his delusions were voiced to local police. He believed his mother and brother were trying to discredit him by badmouthing him around town, thought the FBI had tapped his home phone, bugged his car and listened in to his conversations in bars and restaurants.

James received psychiatric treatment. He still believed the FBI and and police were sabotaging his career, preventing him from keeping a job, and affecting his personal life. Ruppert also believed he was being followed by a variety of law enforcement types.

By the time of the murders, his life was in shambles. His mother was sick of supporting him and threatened to kick him out. Her threats came a few days before their annual Easter family reunion, something James always looked forward to.

In the next few days, he inquired about a silencer and was told they were illegal. He then headed for the Miami River and had target practice with his .357 Magnum. He loved the feeling of control the gun gave him and took no notice of those watching him.

The night before Easter, James spent hours at a local lounge talking up a waitress he knew. He complained about his unemployment, finances, and uncaring family. He also told the waitress he had a problem that needed to be taken care of immediately.

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday, James’s brother and his wife were in the kitchen talking with his mother. The children played around the house.

James had retired to his room, having mentioned something about target practice. While there, he collected a .357 revolver, two .22 pistols. and a rifle. He went downstairs and set the rifle agains the refrigerator. His brother asked about his Volkswagen.

Psychiatrists would later say James believed his brother had been sabotaging the car, and the question brought an onslaught of anger and memories of the injustices he felt his brother had done to him since childhood.

James fired the first shot from his .22 pistol at his brother, and then turned on his sister-in-law. Eleven-year-old David and nine-year-old Teresa ran into the room at the sounds. His mother tried to protect her family, but James shot her and both children. He then began walking through the house killing the rest of his family: Carol, 13; Ann, 12; Leanord III, 17; Michael, 16; Thomas, 15; John, age 4. It took less than five minutes.

James then went to the bathroom, cleaned up, and dressed in fresh clothes. Three hours later, he phone the police and told them there were bodies in the house. He met them at the door and did not resist when taken into custody.

The crime scene would stick with everyone who witnessed the carnage. All eight children and two adults had been shot in the head, execution style. James’s sister-in-law was shot in the chest.

“When I walked through that front door, right into the middle of all that carnage, I saw that little 4-year-old boy, with blue bib corduroy overalls on, a long-sleeve blue cotton shirt and lying on the floor at the foot of the couch, stretched out with a bullet hole in his head.  In his outstretched right hand, he had partially opened the tin-foil purple wrapper off a chocolate Easter egg.”
—Prosecutor John Holcomb.

The defense worked hard to convince the jury that James Ruppert was legally insane and suffered from a paranoid psychotic state. One psychiatrist said Ruppert’s reaction may have been uncontrollable, that the suppressed rage accumulating since childhood had taken over. Psychiatrists from the state said the murders were clearly planned and James knew exactly what he was doing.

The 3-judge panel in Hamilton, Ohio sentenced found Ruppert guilty on all account and sentenced him to life. A mistrial was later declared and the second trial was held 125 miles north in Findlay.

Prosecutors revealed evidence from witnesses who saw Ruppert engaging in target practice, asking about silencers, and talking about solving the problem of his mother. Another guilty verdict, and a another trial granted on appeal in 1982. Ruppert’s defense attorney was convinced he was insane. Finally, on July 23, 1982, a second 3-judge panel found Ruppert guilty of first degree murder in the case of his mother and brother, but not guilty of the rest of the murders by reason of insanity. He received life sentences for both murders, to be served consecutively.

He resides in the Allen Correctional Facility in Lima, Ohio. He was denied parole in 1995 and his next opportunity will be in 2035, when Ruppert is 101 years old.

What do you think? Were significant warning signs missed? Was Ruppert legally insane when he killed the children? Was his sentencing fair?

Television shows like Criminal Minds and Bones have made profiling criminals mainstream, but coming up with a psychological sketch of an offender isn’t as easy as an hour of T.V. makes it look. Although they are trained to look at crime scenes and victimology with keen eyes, criminal profilers aren’t mind readers. They don’t practice voodoo or make lucky guesses. Experience has taught them to use a combination of intelligence, observation, and perseverance to outwit the offenders they chase.

One of the grandaddies of profiling is famed FBI Agent John Douglas. Profiling was in the very early stages when Douglas took over the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit and began interviewing incarcerated serial murderers.

The inspiration (and original actor) for the part of Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs, Douglas has interviewed and profiled dozens of serial offenders including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams (Atlanta child murder), Gary Ridgeway (Green River Killer) and San Francisco’s Trailside Killer.

Douglas believes that interviewing the experts – the criminals sitting behind bars – is crucial to figuring out how criminal minds work.

I learned as I went, conducting face-to-face interviews with Ed Kemper, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Speck … whose single positive contribution to society was the window they gave me and my colleagues into the criminal mind. By talking with and observing them, we learned how they thought, from the escalation of their violent acts to victim selection. We learned how to predict their behavior. Most importantly, we learned how they revealed themselves through their crimes. That’s the basis of profiling. You look at the evidence – from crime scene to forensics to victimology – and find in the thousands of pieces of information the behavioral indicators from which you put together a picture of the perpetrator. —John Douglas

No killer has been more prolific in modern times than Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. On November 30, 2001, after more than two decades of killing, Ridgway was arrested and charged with the murders of four women: Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Carol Christensten. To avoid the death penalty, he pled guilty to all forty-eight murders attributed to the Green River Killer from 1982-1998.

He’s taken investigators to more than fifty dump sites and corroborated his confessions with intimate knowledge of the scene. While many victims were known, four new victims have been discovered during these trips.

The Profile

Back in 1983, Douglas knew the Killer targeted prostitutes and runaways along a section of highway between Seattle and Tacoma. The first victim was found along the Green River, and four more bodies surfaced in the next month. After he and his team looked at the crime scene and victimology, they presented a profile that turned out to be eerily accurate. The profile missed only one key point: Ridgway wasn’t underemployed but held the same job for twenty years.

The Profile (Courtesy of mindhunter.com)

• White male
• In his twenties to thirties
• Physically strong
• Familiar/ comfortable with the river
• Inadequate personality
• Would consider it his mission to rid the world of prostitutes, and be self-righteous in this mission (Ridgway went door-to-door in his neighborhood, campaigning against prostitution in the area.)
• Would collect souvenirs from the victims (He took jewelry from victims but did not give it to any woman in his life, instead leaving it in the ladies’ room at work—he got a kick out of seeing women wearing the jewelry at work.)
• Would inject himself into the investigation (more on this below)
• Would follow the press closely
• Would feel no remorse

The Ridgway case has been controversial for all involved because Ridgeway was brought in during the beginning years of the investigation and cleared. But as Douglas points out, the profile is simply a thumbnail sketch of the UNSUB (unknown subject) and many people will fit the profile. One of the key parts of developing a working profile is behavioral clues and victimology. With very little idea of the victim’s lives, it was difficult to walk in their shoes.

Douglas also told police they were looking for someone who could be lured into contact with the law enforcement and suggested staking out the crime scenes because he believed the killer would revisit. The media made this impossible, but it’s important to know that Ridgeway would later confess to going back to the sites, often bringing women such as his wife and other prostitutes to have sex near the bodies (the women were of course unaware of them).

Like Douglas predicted, Ridgeway injected himself into the investigation. He gave information about a particular victim, one Douglas surmised the killer knew because she was killed differently than the others, and because she was posed after her death. Ridgeway knew this particular victim and came forward because he was likely afraid police would make a connection.

So how did Douglas come so close on Ridgeway’s behaviors?  His years of experience with other criminals–men he spent hours listening to–helped hone his instincts and create a new field of criminal investigation, giving police and FBI agents an inside track to the criminal mind.

For more information on Douglas and his books, including Mindhunter, visit his website.

What do you think? Is criminal profiling a guessing game or meticulous, observant science? Do you watch Criminal Minds? Is it an accurate representation?