Title: Mindhunter
Author: John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Year: 1995
Genre: True Crime, History, Autobiography
John Douglas is an FBI special agent who worked to invent and establish the practice of criminal profiling within the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit. During his work he entered the world of serial killers, asking why they committed murder and whether this knowledge can be used to help catch future serial killers. It was selected by my local bookshop for their true crime book club read and I had no prior knowledge of the book before it was chosen.
The book is for the most part an autobiography of John Douglas although it begins in an intense moment in 1983 where Douglas suffered a brain hemorrhage following the pressure of working in the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit in criminal profiling, having intense nightmares which he explains in graphic detail.
From this prologue Douglas goes back to the beginning, explaining his life at school and working various jobs, not really finding a place anywhere until he found the FBI. From there he was asked to head the Investigative Support Unit where he began a study of serial killers, how they operated and why they did what they did to find the common connections between them that he could then use to try to find out who the suspect was in future serial killer cases.
Douglas talks to many different killers in the book and recounts what they said, including famous killers of the 60s, 70s and 80s such as Charles Manson and also discusses other cases of the era such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
The book also mentions unsolved cases of the 1990s such as the Unabomber case and the Washington Green River murders, although my edition was updated in 2017 with a chapter that confirms these cases were resolved and for example in Washington Green River murder case, the perpetrator largely fitted the profile Douglas came up with in 1995, apart from the fact he was married).
The book is interesting in the amount of cases it covers, although its depictions of them are quite graphic so they aren’t for the faint-hearted as there are many violent and sexual crimes discussed in the book.
Also the book clearly has had a massive cultural impact, with John Douglas’ work providing inspiration for Jack Crawford’s character in The Silence of the Lambs, as well as it’s own Netflix series so it is interesting from that perspective and some of the common things that we think about serial killers is confirmed in this book e.g. troubled upbringing, being cruel to animals or other children, bed wetting, setting fire to things etc. and part of me wonders whether this is something we already knew or whether it was this books impact that made people think of these characteristics.
This also provides me with my main critique of the book and probably of criminal profiling as a concept, how much of it is actually down to a methodology invented by Douglas and how much of it is really just investigative work e.g. a few cases Douglas mentions the killer dumped bodies in the same place so part of his profile is that the killer must know the area well which doesn’t really seem like a profile but more like stating the obvious that would be explored in an investigation anyway?
Likewise many of the cases seem to bleed into one another and Douglas profile often seems to have the same characteristics over and over again. This was something we discussed in our book club that criminal profiling could lead to confirmation bias and group think where it only works in a certain number of cases with a certain type of perpetrator and I was curious about cases where it didn’t work as the book very clearly is one-sided in only showing the successful cases (although of course a few mentioned were still ongoing in 1995).
Whilst the book was entertaining and for its cultural impact I think it is worth a read but it isn’t one that I would want to read again as I felt like it was quite one-sided and also writing this review about a week after finishing it I have struggled to remember much detail from it.
If you have read this book, let me know in the comments down below what your thoughts are.
