You can read the interview
via the below magazine pages or the text below:
An IACSP
Q&A With Former FBI Profiler John Douglas
By Paul Davis
John Douglas is a legendary FBI criminal profiler and the author of true crime books. He is considered a pioneer in the field of criminal profiling.
He spent more than twenty-five years researching and profiling
America’s most violent and dangerous criminals. After serving in the U.S. Air
force, John Douglas joined the FBI in 1970. He served a SWAT team and was a
hostage negotiator before he transferred to the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit
in 1977. Later he taught hostage negotiation and applied criminal psychology at
the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia to new FBI Agents, field agents, and
police officers from all over the United States.
With former FBI Special Agent Robert K. Ressler and Dr. Ann
Burgess, John Douglas conducted a landmark study of predators, published in
book form as “Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives,” and “Crime Classification
Manual.”
John Douglas assisted police with investigative techniques and
proactive strategies in hunting some of the most notorious criminals of our
time. He has confronted, interviewed, and studied dozens of serial killers and
assassins, including Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Richard Speck, John Wayne
Gacy, “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz and James Earl Ray. The interviews and study
were conducted to understand their motives and methods.
John Douglas was the model for actor Scott Glenn’s FBI Agent Jack
Crawford character in “The Silence of the Lambs.” The character Holden Ford in
the Netflix series “Mindhunters,” based on his first book of the same name, is
also based on John Douglas.
Since his retirement from the FBI, he has become an author,
speaker and independent investigator. His most recent book is “The Killer’s
Shadow: The FBI’s Hunt for a White Supremacist Serial Killer,” which is about
Joseph Paul Franklin. Franklin was convicted of several murders and executed.
John Douglas was interviewed by Paul Davis, a regular contributor
to the Journal.
IACSP: I’ve
enjoyed your books over the years, as well as the films based on your books and
cases. I especially liked your current book, “The Killer’s Shadow,” as it was
about one person primarily, a white supremacist sniper and serial killer named
Joseph Paul Franklin. My first question is why did you become a criminal
profiler?
Douglas: I was
recruited by the FBI right out of the Air Force in 1970 at 25 years of age. I
worked for seven years out in the field, working in Detroit and then Milwaukee.
I was always interested in criminal personalities and understanding the
motivation of why. So if I made an arrest, I’d have the guy in the back seat of
the car and I’d ask him if he were willing to talk to me.
When
I got to Quantico at 32, I was the youngest of all the agents. The Behavioral
Science Unit had about eight or nine agents and I was assigned to teaching
criminal psychology. We had road schools two weeks at a time going from one
city to another. I told my partner, let’s go into the prisons and conduct these
interviews of Ed Kempner, Charles Manson and David Berkowitz. We went into the
prisons and conducted the interviews as I wanted to be a good instructor.
IACSP: How did
you get involved in the Joseph Paul Franklin case?
Douglas: By 1980,
when the Franklin case was popping up, David Kohl at headquarters in the Civil
Rights Division called and said they identified Joseph Paul Franklin as this
guy who had been shooting blacks and whites and attacking Jewish synagogues.
They didn’t know where he was, so he asked me if the work we do with violent
crime and serial killers would apply with a criminal like Franklin. I said I
would give it a shot. It is really the criminal personality that you have to
understand. There was a lot of pressure. I was trying to develop a new
investigative tool, and now the Bureau wanted help on this case, and if I
screwed this up, I’m was going to be shipped to Butte, Montana and to work on
cattle rustling.
IACSP: What did
you do initially?
Douglas: I did an
assessment, a profile. In my interpretation, a profile is when you have an
UNSUB, an unknown suspect, and you are analyzing the elements of the crime and
the victim, getting information from the medical examiner, and demographics
from the area where the crime took place. Why plus how equals who when you do
an UNSUB case, but here we knew who he was. He was racial, and I was looking
for strengths and weaknesses and vulnerabilities he may have. We had no idea
where he was and that made it difficult. Criminals have comfort zones. Just as
we like going to the same restaurant, a comfort zone for offenders is where
they work and live, where they used to live, where there were happy times in
their lives, but this guy was traveling around the country. The most difficult
killers to capture are the mobile ones. There are more than 17,000 different
law enforcement in the United States and there is not always a sharing of
information, even from one county to another, no less from coast to coast.
IACSP: I read
that Franklin financed his travels and killing sprees by robbing banks, right?
Douglas: Yes.
Franklin was a successful bank robber. He got his early start in Mobile,
Alabama, where he married two different young women and one had a young child.
I believed that Franklin would be heading towards Mobile. Franklin did show up
in Mobile and he went to a blood bank to make money, as he was afraid we had
staked out the banks. He then traveled to Florida where he was apprehended.
IACSP: What was
involved in your profiles of Franklin and others?
Douglas: We were
involved with research with Boston College and we had a 57-page instrument that
we used to ask thousands of questions. We saw patterns with them, pre-offense
behavioral patterns, post-offense, and a triggering event. We saw an earlier
childhood dysfunction in every one of these guys, including Franklin. We saw
issues, problems and abuse. Franklin’s mother abused him, and his father really
abused him. He was not allowed to socialize. He dropped out of school, started
looking at Aryan Nation Brotherhood and Klu Klux Klan pamphlets. And he joined
the groups and what he later told me was these guys “talked the talk, but don’t
walk the walk.” Franklin believed the groups were infiltrated by the FBI. So he
goes from group to another. He has this hatred towards interracial couples,
Jews, blacks and his goal was to create a race war and hoped others would
follow in his footsteps.
IACSP: Like
Charles Manson?
Douglas: Franklin
really admired Manson and he asked me about my interview with him.
IACSP: What
crimes did Franklin commit in the beginning?
Douglas: The
tipping point was when he was in a shopping mall parking lot and a black and
white couple in a car cut him off. The passenger, a black man, got out of the
car and Franklin shot and killed him and then killed the girl. It was an
impulsive act, and he was surprised he didn’t get caught as there were
witnesses. He changed his MO for the future. For the FBI, it became a civil
rights case and no longer a domestic police cooperation case. It was going to
be a full press to get the guy. I was taking information and analyzing it.
IACSP: Is there
any difference between Franklin and a David Berkowitz or Ted Kaczynski, the
Unabomber?
Douglas: You
start to see common denominators in the background. There is no mental illness
or anything like that. You see early on in their childhood delinquency, signs
of animal cruelty as an expression of hate, they are bullied upon and then
became bullies. They are isolated and anti-social. Franklin read Hitler’s “Mein
Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries,” which justifies what he is about to do.
IACSP: What does
Franklin have in common with Timothy McVeigh and other domestic terrorists?
Douglas: To use
an analogy of a gun, the DNA is going to load the gun, but then it is going to
be the personal life, the psychological experiences, how this person was
raised, that will determine if they are going to pull the trigger. McVeigh’s
parents divorced and he began to feel isolated. He gravitates to weaponry. He
decided to join the Army. He did well as a sharpshooter, and he was assigned to
an armored tank division during Desert Storm. But he became disenchanted in the
way the war was being carried out. He wanted to become a Green Beret and he was
accepted but he was not in good shape and he lasted only a couple of days and
ends up being removed from the program and decides to screw it all. Back home,
he saw what happened in Ruby Ridge, where one of our snipers took out Randy Weaver
and his child. And then Waco, Texas, where little did anyone know at that time,
McVeigh was there when the FBI came in with the tanks.
IACSP: McVeigh
was in the compound?
Douglas: He was
observing from afar and he was in the group of protestors and what he saw was
the same tanks that he used in Iraq was now being used against our citizens. So
those two actions reinforced his hatred of the government. He too is reading
“The Turner Diaries” and other hate group pamphlets. So that was the triggering
point for him and he teams up with Terry Nichols and one other guy and they
targeted the federal building in Oklahoma City, hoping to take out FBI agents.
He doesn’t really care about the children. He called it collateral damage. He
hoped to get away, but the stupid ass had a vehicle without a license plate and
the police brought him in for questioning and they tied him to the bombing.
IACSP: Killing
the children in the day care in the federal building was truly terrible. What
about Franklin?
Douglas: Franklin
wanted to go into the military, and he wanted to be a police officer, but he
had that bad eye. He had an accident with an old-fashioned shade with a spring
in it and it hit him in the eye. He could have saved the eye had his mother
taken him to a doctor. He developed cataracts and ended up being blind in the
eye, but because of his over-compensation, he became a great shot and a sniper.
IACSP: Are the
backgrounds of al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists different from someone like
Franklin?
Douglas: There is
a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation and they question their identity.
You have the ethnicity and religion, and they feel the action of the group is
going to empower them. They join the group and get a sense of brotherhood, a
sense of belonging. The groups also give them a spiritual type of purpose. With
those groups, you know who your enemy is. You know the hierarchy. You know who
to target.
IACSP: How does
the FBI deal with domestic terrorism?
Douglas: If you
have a group like the Klan or the Aryan Nation, you have an organization where
you can get informants and infiltrate them. Years ago, I worked a case on Los
Macheteros, the Machete Wielders, in Puerto Rico. We went down there with a
SWAT team and one of our agents got shot. We assessed the organization and
thought this one person was the leader, but from our wiretaps, we saw another
guy was getting all the calls and he was the actual leader.
IACSP: How can
behavioral analysis aid law enforcement as well as the intelligence community?
Douglas: They can
call upon Behavioral Sciences to do assessments of organizations and of people
within the organizations. Also, when interrogating, we can assist with the
proactive techniques we use. We can also show how we present information
through the media, if you know the adversary is going to be listening. These
are some of the tools in the toolbox.
IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us.
No comments:
Post a Comment