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Cruelty to animals. Antisocial behavior. A lack of empathy. These are characteristics we now understand to be hallmarks of serial killers. But in the 1970s when criminal profiling and psychoanalysis were considered fringe science, even woo-woo, Dr. Anna Burgess was leading the charge to legitimize this field of study.
Unfortunately, Netflix’s Mindhunter failed to capture the gravity of Dr. Burgess’ presence within the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Inspired by John Douglas’ memoir Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, David Fincher’s remarkable series spotlights federal agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), who are based on Douglas and Robert Ressler, respectively. Together, these two renegade agents launch a research project to interview imprisoned serial killers to understand their psychology with the hope of applying this knowledge to solve ongoing cases.
Dr. Wendy Carr (played by Anna Torv, above), is based on Dr. Burgess but doesn’t make an appearance until episode 3 of the first season. She’s mostly positioned as a secondary to Ford and Tench, not the brains of the operation. This misrepresentation bothered filmmaker Abby Fuller, whose documentary miniseries Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, now on Hulu, places Dr. Burgess at the forefront.
“It’s something our team spent a lot of time talking about,” Fuller tells StyleCaster, of how Dr. Burgess’ contribution has been historically minimized. “I read John Douglass’s book after I read [Dr. Burgess’] Killer by Design
. The word count of how many times Dr. Burgess mentions John Douglas in her book is in the hundreds. But the amount of times that Dr. Burgess is mentioned in John Douglas’ book?” Fuller pauses, “Maybe six.”
Douglas declined to participate in Fuller’s project. “There were potentially some health issues involved, but I did get the sense that he wasn’t as excited for her to take the spotlight,” she says. In an email to StyleCaster, Dr. Burgess said that while Mindhunter did well in representing the cases, they “definitely took liberties when shaping their version of our profiling team.”
There are notable differences in demeanor, too. While Carr was made to appear cold, clinical, and more masculine, Fuller was surprised by Dr. Burgess’ warmth: She’s a loving mother as well as a driven career woman who just so happened to profile horrendously violent people. “She’s more like a grandma,” Fuller observes of Dr. Burgess. “She has a really warm, humble, unassuming personality. There’s just a twinkle in her eye.”
It’s disappointing, but perhaps this should all come as no surprise given the time period. Dr. Burgess entered the workforce in the ’50s when women realistically only had three professional options available to them: teacher, nurse, or secretary. “I thought, ‘I can be a nurse because then I can ask people how they feel,’” Dr. Burgess says in the documentary. “I’m always interested in how people feel, but in academia, in nursing, no one else cared how they felt … Physical illness only, that was the mindset at that time.”
So, she began to talk with and listen to her patients, many of whom had been victims of trauma and sexual violence. Her first book, Rape: Victims of Crisis
, was published in 1974 and fiercely challenged the culture of victim-blaming. It’s why she was invited to speak at Quantico in the first place—to educate male agents on the realities of sexual assault. “They thought rape was just sex, or that women were out there and asked for it,” Dr. Burgess explains. Once she got agents to understand rape and its impact on victims, attitudes slowly began to shift.
Misogyny within the Bureau was rampant, though. “Dr. Burgess had so many stories that I felt were outrageous in terms of the subtleties of the sexism,” Fuller says. For example, “Funders for her research would show up to have meetings with her, they would see that she’s pregnant, and leave 15 minutes later and she wouldn’t get the grant.”
In 1985, owing to a series of successful arrests, a magazine article introduced the world to the men of the FBI’s psychological profiling team. Dr. Burgess wasn’t invited to pose for the group photo. Reflecting on that moment in the miniseries, Dr. Burgess shakes her head and shrugs. “They were sexist, but that’s their business … I had too much to do to get caught up in that,” she says.
But surely this repeated erasure grated on her, I posed to Fuller. “It was a bit of a headscratcher to me, too,” she says. “There have been so many examples of her not being given credit, or fully appreciated for the work that she’s done and she’s always remained so cool about that. But I always wondered if there was more to it, if she, for political reasons, wanted to maintain that composure. I do think it is generational to some degree.”
Now 87, Dr. Burgess is finally getting the mainstream credit she deserves, thanks in part to filmmakers like Fuller. Her ambition has shown no signs of slowing down, either. Dr. Burgess is training a new generation of forensic profilers and is a professor at the William F. Connell School of Nursing at Boston College.
“That might be the other thing that surprised me was her level of energy,” Fuller says. “I think, when we were planning shoot days, I would think, ‘OK, how many hours of shooting can we realistically plan for someone in her mid-80s?’ And the crew had trouble keeping up with her.”
Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer is available to stream on Hulu now.
For more about Dr. Ann Burgess…
In the 1970s, the FBI created the “Mindhunters” (better known as the Behavioral Science Unit) to track down the country’s most dangerous criminals. In A Killer By Design, Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess reveals how her pioneering research on sexual assault and trauma helped the FBI capture some of history’s most violent offenders, including Ed Kemper (The Co-Ed Killer), Dennis Rader (BTK), Henry Wallace (The Taco Bell Strangler), and Jon Barry Simonis (The Ski-Mask Rapist).
