Mindhunter and profiling fallacies
Did you know that there is a petition on the go demanding that Netflix make a third series of Mindhunter.
When I checked, 88,548 people had signed it.
Fan power has occasionally succeeded in getting TV execs to bring back cancelled series. Star Trek, Veronica Mars and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are among the many resurrected after devotees mobilised.
But why would anyone want to consume more of a series about the mindsets of some of the most atrocious murderers in US history?
Well, first, to put it crudely, serial killers sell. Mindhunter features close-up stories featuring infamous figures such as David Berkowitz, Edmund Kemper, Dennis Rader and Charles Manson.
Go on to Facebook pages devoted to the drama and there are polls asking fans to vote for their favourite prison interview scene with a mass murderer (serial killer and mother murderer Ed Kemper wins easily).
Then there are the promos such as the coy ‘Meet Charlie’ Netflix trailer, with the fictional Charles Manson smiling at the viewer.
Holden Ford and Bill Tench
The series follows two FBI agents, Holden Ford and Bill Tench (played by Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany), as they try to establish the practice of what would become known as profiling. This is an attempt to analyse the psychology and behaviour patterns of killers whose appalling crimes are repugnant but little understood.
Ford and Tench, in league with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), want to study the murderers to use the knowledge gained to help capture future perpetrators. The received wisdom of the time is that men like Manson are insane, so what’s to understand.
The two series of Mindhunter were inspired by a 1995 book by John E Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit.
I enjoyed Mindhunter. It was interesting, mysterious and skilfully made by showrunner and frequent director of episodes David Fincher, whose credits also include hit movies such as Seven, Fight Club, The Girl with Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network.
As a snapshot of a time – late 70s, early 80s – when having no psychological insight into the characteristics of indiscriminate killers was the norm, Mindhunter is a thought-provoking look at how these attitudes changed.
Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs
And yet the feeling persists that the show revelled in the cheap thrill of further exploiting various misconceptions about serial killers and the investigations to unmask them. These grotesques emerge as the stars of the show.
This added to a certain reticence I have about the claims of John Douglas, mean that I don’t deeply regret the series’ fade out.
Douglas has rather crassly been called the ‘serial killer whisperer’. His method was to create ‘profiles’ of murderers based on the interviews he did with serial killers.
A certain myth grew up around all this, that sharp-eyed detectives could decode a killer’s motivations drawn from insights gained from those who had been caught.
Douglas wrote several big-selling books about infamous murder cases and how he interpreted their the killers’ accounts. He was consulted by author Thomas Harris for the Hannibal Lecter blockbusters Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs.
Lecter, a fictional character that has done much to fix in the public mind the idea of the anti-hero, genius serial killer, is of course in prison and used to help snare a murderer on the loose.
It is this idea of deciphering a serial killer’s words into a profile of hidden motivations that has been largely discredited.
‘Our motivations are largely unknowable’
Dr Kim Rossmo, a criminologist and expert in geographic profiling who has been consulted by police forces around the world, highlights a case Douglas was involved in back in the 1990s.
In Criminal Investigative Failures (mentioned in my recent post), he cites the 1984 murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop in Ontario. Douglas had done a psychological profile of the killer. When police arrested Guy Paul Morin for the crime, the FBI man claimed this as a success.
However, DNA tests on semen found on the victim’s underwear exonerated Morin, who had served 18 months in prison.
Rossmo takes issue with comments Douglas subsequently made in his book Journey into Darkness. Douglas wrote that the DNA evidence might be a red herring and that it could be a tragic instance when ‘truth and justice will always be elusive’.
Picking up on this point, Rossmo writes, ‘This falls short of convincing. A DNA test is much more likely to be correct than a psychological profile (by a factor of several million). The wisdom in Occam’s razor tells us to adopt the simplest explanation –which, in this case, is that the profile was off.’
Dr Christopher Clark, a consultant forensic psychiatrist at Rampton high-security psychiatric hospital, has also voiced doubts about ‘mindhunting’.
A few years ago he told The Guardian, ‘I’ve learned from 30 years in psychiatry that, however much psychologists theorise about it, our motivations are largely unknowable,’ Clark said. ‘I am more convinced than ever we will never know the motivations for that person doing that thing in that way on that day to that person.’
He doubted that a detective interviewing a convicted serial murderer could glean any unique insights into their behaviour. Such killers have a poor understanding of their own actions and emotions, let alone explaining them to others.
‘They feel a great sense of tension and have sometimes killed or raped someone to ease that tension,’ Clark explained. ‘But they’re not going to clearly tell you why they have done those things.’
He also questioned the academic rigour of Douglas’s original interviews. They had not been conducted properly, the sample was small and no proper research was published as a result of them.
To my mind, the work of people such as Rossmo and Britain’s Professor David Canter (check out his fascinating book Mapping Murder) is fair more interesting than Douglas. Both have genuinely assisted difficult investigations with their use of geographic profiling, and both emphasise scientific discipline in investigative profiling.
Canter has said, ‘To put it bluntly, Douglas’s writings should be in the fiction section. Speculations about the mind of a criminal have never helped a real-life investigation.’
There we have it. Mindhunter is entertaining and suspenseful. But it is fiction.
Sadly, for its devotees and petitioners, as was made clear earlier this year, it looks as though the series has become a victim itself. The motivation was apparently viewing figures and money…
A new industry group has been formed to establish best practice in the production of non-fiction crime programmes. The Association of True Crime Producers represents programme makers in the UK and Ireland, including the likes of Avalon, FirstLook TV, ITN Productions and the team I’ve been lucky enough to work with, Monster Films. Making documentaries about crime is challenging and requires care and sensitivity in dealing with families and victims. One priority is to safeguard the mental well-being of interviewees and production staff when covering distressing cases.
True Crime Xtra is later this month reshowing Murder by the Sea documentaries on which I was a contributor (all made with Monster Films, mentioned above). The most fascinating case was that of Linda Anders, sadly murdered by her awful husband Malcolm, who claimed an intruder had committed the crime. He is eventually undone by clever police work. While I’m pleased the films still find an audience, I am surprised by their festive scheduling – Christmas Eve and Christmas Day…
I fully endorse your suggestion that some examinations of serial killers only serve to almost lionise them and to make them the main focus of their crimes. I feel this particularly strongly, since an ancestor of mine was one of 1920's US serial killer Earle Nelson's victims. In fact, she was the only victim for whose murder he was convicted and hanged (in Canada). I have been horrified to find that of the 44+ victims and survivors of his attacks, only 22 of the murders were attributed to him; his victims were mis-named, mis-described and generally side-lined by press and commentators on the killings, and even Nelson himself has been wrongly identified by previous authors, for whom the gory nature of attacks by the man dubbed 'The Gorilla Killer' seemed more worthy of description than did the facts. My recent book 'The Forgotten Forty-Four: Victims & Survivors of America's First Serial Sex Killer', reflects my extensive research into the lives, families and achievements of his many victims, and corrects many misconceptions about Nelson, too. These women and children (their ages ranged from 8 months to 69 years) were blameless individuals, worthy of our empathy, and not merely police statistics. Amongst the disturbing facts I have uncovered is the blind incompetence and victim blaming promulgated by US law enforcement and medical examiners, and the chilling fact that Nelson lived and worked in two elite US girls' schools, until his behaviour led them to dismiss him.