If you're a true-crime buff, then I can say with complete confidence that Mindhunter is the TV series for you. The new crime show on Netflix, directed by David Fincher (of Se7en and Zodiac fame) is based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by John Douglas, one of the founders of psychological profiling at the FBI's behavioural science unit in Quantico. Douglas (and his erstwhile colleague Robert Ressler) revolutionised the way that police detectives investigated homicides by using scientific method and extensive interviews with notorious offenders to understand the motives and methods of what were then called "sequential killers". Douglas himself served as the inspiration for the characters of Will Graham and Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lector novels, but the reality of his extraordinary career is stranger (and far more disturbing) than fiction.
Although the main characters of Holden Ford and Bill Tench are fictional, their exploits are drawn from Douglas' memoirs. The frightening cavalcade of killers and rapists they meet with, interview and apprehend, are all completely real. In many ways, the show's attention to detail is so meticulous that you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching documentary footage. Scroll down to learn more about how the characters measure up to their real-life counterparts. Be warned though: the following article contains graphic content which some readers may find extremely upsetting.
1. Edmund Kemper
Ed Kemper, played superbly by Cameron Britton, seems almost too far-fetched to be believable. Yet the portrayal of him in the show is frighteningly accurate, to the point that much of his dialogue is lifted directly from real life interviews. Kemper really did have an IQ of over 150, he really was around six foot nine inches tall and was articulate and self-aware about his murderous urges and misogyny. Kemper was repeatedly abused by a misandrist mother as a child and displayed aggressive behaviour from a young age. He was sent to a mental asylum as a teen for murdering his grandparents and later strangled, mutilated and raped (in that order) several women after his release, before turning himself into police after committing matricide. The scene in which Holden is threatened by Ed is lifted from real life, based on an incident where he threatened Ressler while the two of them were alone together. Yet Douglas claims that: "I would be less than honest if I didn't admit that I liked Ed. He was friendly, open, sensitive, and had a good sense of humour. As much as you can say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him."
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2. Charles Manson
Although Manson is never encountered directly in the show, he is referenced several times, and his crimes cast a shadow over the first season, providing Holden with the impetus to invent profiling. In real life, Douglas and Ressler
did meet with Manson, and Douglas states that: "My first impression of Manson was just about diametrically opposite from what I had of Ed Kemper. He had wild, alert eyes and an unsettling, kinetic quality to the way he moved. He was much smaller and slighter than I'd imagined; no more than five foot two or three." But Douglas believed that Manson, although too notorious to be eligible for parole, was no danger to the public. "I wouldn't expect a serious threat like a lot of these guys are. I think he'd go off into the desert and live out there, or else try to cash in on his celebrity for money. But I wouldn't expect him to kill. The biggest threat would be from the misguided losers who would gravitate to him and proclaim him their god and leader." Manson died of natural causes at the age of 83 in November 2017.
3. Jerry Brudos
In contrast to the urbane and sociable Kemper, Brudos was a compulsive liar regarding his background, yet open about his unorthodox sexual proclivities. Brudos first unconsciously juxtaposed sex and violence after his domineering mother burned a pair of women's shoes he'd been wearing in front of him. After then his fantasies only became more extreme. Between 1968 and 1969 Brudos murdered and dismembered at least five women, hiding their remains in a locked refrigerator in his garage without his wife's knowledge. Douglas writes: "Jerry Brudos was a shoe fetishist. If that were as far as it went, there would have been no problem. But due to a variety of circumstances, including his punitive, domineering mother and his own compulsions, it went a lot further - from mildly strange to all but deadly." Brudos died of cancer in prison in 2006.
4. Richard Speck
Douglas characterises Speck, who broke into a dorm room and killed several eight student nurses, as a classic example of a disorganised and opportunistic killer: "As hostile and aggressive as he is, he doesn't have much of a macho self-image. He knows he can't control all the women at once. He's an opportunist - he'll rape one for the hell of it, and from the crime scene photos, we already know that the one he chose was facedown on the couch. She was already a depersonalised body to him ... he admits he killed the women not in a sexual frenzy, but so they couldn't identify him." Speck really did throw a small sparrow that he had reared into a fan, killing it in the process, but this incident was anecdotal and Douglas did not witness it first-hand. Speck died in prison of a heart attack in 1991.
5. Monte Rissel
Monte Rissel, as played by actor Sam Trike, was known for being a young rapist at age 14, who went on to murder five more women before being captured. Rissel insisted repeatedly that his murderous impulses were the result of a miserable childhood and abandonment issues, but Douglas believed that the violence he directed towards women stemmed from his need to dominate sexual partners, as well as his loathing of women who provided him with consensual sex. Like Kemper, he was relatively forthright: "Rissel was calm, deliberate and precise as he recounted his actions to Bob Ressler and me. I'd checked his IQ beforehand, and it was above 120. I can't say I detected a lot of remorse ... But he didn't try to minimise his crimes and I did feel he was giving us an accurate account," Douglas states. "The behaviour he described ... contained several key insights." He is currently imprisoned at the Pocahontas State Correctional Centre in Virginia.
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6. Darrell Gene Devier
Darrell Gene Devier was a little known-child killer and predatory paedophile, who murdered a little girl after raping her on her way home from school. Like in the series, Douglas and Ressler were able to secure a confession from Devier by using the murder weapon to unnerve him during interrogation. They placed the gory rock which he had used to bludgeon the child to death with in the room with them, and thus Devier folded under questioning. Describing the incident, Douglas states: "[Devier] looks instantly at the rock, starts perspiring and breathing heavily. His body language is completely different from the previous interviews: tentative, defensive. The interrogators project blame and responsibility onto the girl, and when he looks as if he's going with it, they bring up the blood. This really upsets him ... he admits to the rape and agrees with the interrogator that he killed her." He was executed for his crime in 1995.
7. Dennis Rader
Throughout the series, the opening scenes feature an ordinary man - known only as "Dennis" in the credits - performing a number of disconcerting actions in Wichita, Kansas. All the hints provided by the series seem to point to this being the infamous serial killer Dennis Rader, or BTK (an acronym which stands for his
modus operandi of "bind, torture, kill."). Rader, who worked as an engineer installing security alarms, killed 10 people over the course of two decades, all the while sending taunting letters and clues to the police and press. Rader was also obsessed with knots and bondage and would bind his victims before asphyxiating them, as well as wearing women's underwear which he took as trophies. He went off the radar for more than a decade, before coming back to mock the authorities. Police were able to apprehend him after he sent them a floppy disk, which contained metadata they were able to trace back to him. Rader is currently incarcerated in El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas and will die behind bars.
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Most of the killers featured in the show have since been apprehended, but that doesn't mean it's safe out there. Far from it. Unfortunately, psychopaths still live among us and even today there are murderers - stalking victims and leaving bodies in their wake as we speak - who have never been discovered. Check out
our article about the five notorious serial killers who are still at large today.
