Silence of the Lambs changed everything. Thomas Harris’ book became a blockbuster in 1988 and then its movie adaptation swept the Oscars in 1991… and suddenly Hannibal Lecter was a joke on The Simpsons and everyone was talking about chianti and fava beans. Lecter was a maroon-eyed, six-fingered fancypants who humblebragged that he drew his photorealistic sketch of the Duomo from memory the first time he meets Clarice Starling. Essentially, he has ESP and mind control, turning people into serial killers or getting them to commit suicide simply by talking to them, capable of identifying and pricing perfumes, purses, and shoes within seconds, like the world’s greatest contestant on The Price Is Right. After Lecter, a drifter with a knife seemed downright basic.
So serial killers acquired superpowers. Patricia Cornwell’s Temple Gault is a super-hacker karate expert who likes military uniforms. Rex Miller’s “Chaingang” Bunkowski is a 400-pound ninja who can turn invisible by regulating his breathing and heart rate, is immune to poison ivy, and travels everywhere with adorable puppies tucked into his pockets. Their death traps and super plots became so ornate a Bond villain would blush. How could we catch these supervillains who lurked in our bushes and our sheds? How could we stop these hyper-intelligent, enormously talented, essentially superpowered lunatics who wanted to kill our women? We needed superheroes.
Fortunately, Thomas Harris provided those, too.
In his first serial killer book, 1981’s Red Dragon, Harris introduced us to FBI criminal profiler Will Graham, a dude so dedicated to catching serial killers that he gets all up inside their heads until he thinks like them, causing him to become moody, aggressive, and drink a lot. The kind of hero who sacrifices personal happiness to save total strangers, Will Graham turned out to be a very appealing look for a new type of protagonist and he spawned a whole swarm of “mindhunting” FBI criminal profilers.
It helped that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was not only real, but actively churning out criminal profiles for police departments at a rapid clip (600 in 1986 alone). Law enforcement loves criminal profiling, ranking it as “operationally useful” a massive majority of the time. The public loves it too, with television shows like Criminal Minds, Hannibal, and Mindhunter glorifying profilers. This level of customer satisfaction is strange because criminal profiling turns out to be singularly useless in real life, with its successes usually represented by a handful of much-loved anecdotes, and its failures documented in study after study. The short version: criminal profiling leads to arrests about 2% of the time, and in many cases trained profilers perform about as well as people off the street when trying to identify future criminal behavior based on psychological data.
But authors and moviemakers didn’t care! They needed Batman-Profilers to catch their Joker-Serial Killers. Profilers were dedicated men (or mostly men) with strong convictions who went to small towns where evil had been done. They examined the scene of the crime, years of training allowing them to see evidence invisible to the untrained eye, trying to stop these godless monsters before they struck again. They had very little in common with actual FBI profilers who spent most of their time in offices typing reports, but they did have a lot in common with 17th-century witch hunters. Like profilers, witch hunters were men on a mission who arrived in small towns armed with nothing more than extensive training and faith in their infallibility. They visited crime scenes and conducted interrogations to discover the identities of secret evildoers who lurked undetected in the midst of their neighbors, trying to stop them before they struck again. Both serial killers and witches were viewed as nothing more than pure, Satanic evil—so anything you did to capture and/or kill them was totally justified.
Criminal profilers don’t come any more dedicated, or any more ridiculous, than Dr. Dean Grant. Medical examiner for the city of Chicago, he has flashing eyes and few friends. Haunted and dedicated, his concern for victims often spilled over into “a madman’s deliberate obsession.” As he says, with a totally straight face, “The dead talk to me.” When we meet him in Robert W. Walker’s Dead Man’s Float he’s standing over the body of 12-year-old Laura Baines, found floating facedown in an Indiana lake in the middle of winter. The local cops seem happy to write her off as a suicide, but Dr. Grant notes her neatly folded clothing on the shore and decides that a 12-year-old would never fold her clothes so neatly. This is murder!
Disbelievers surround Dr. Grant. The police mock his homicide theory. Jackie, his wife, cries, “Christ, Dean, so what? Another floater. There’s always another floater, always has been, always will be!” But Dr. Grant has the power of his convictions, his faith in science, and his almost fanatical dedication to crimefighting. As he crouches over Laura’s neatly-folded clothing he whispers, “Laura…little girl…you’re priority one…priority one…”
As usual, Dr. Grant is right! There is a drowner at work. A girl possessed by the spirit of her failed Catholic priest brother (who loves the feel of his sister’s underwear and hose against his skin) drowns “weak” people to cleanse them of sin. She learned it from her mother, who trained her other siblings in the same art, and now there’s a network of watery serial killers across America that Dr. Grant… never investigates further. Probably because he has to take on an obese deli butcher who faints at the sight of blood and communes with the astral spirit of King Solomon when he gets high huffing the breath of his victims whom he traps inside plastic bags and asphyxiates over the course of several hours (Dying Breath). There’s also a maniac who hates eyes and is armed with a laser blowtorch on a campaign to murder his mother’s disembodied spirit that flits from woman to woman (Burning Obsession). Or he has to travel to Orlando where two Bob Seger-loving brothers form a “man-and-dwarf murder team” that scalps its victims because the dwarf brother, Van, needs a toupée to cover his bald head to please Satan (who loves hair), who will then turn him into a wizard. When his brother tries to stop the scalpings, Van lashes him with a bullwhip woven from human hair.
But Dr. Grant is just a normal, albeit driven, medical examiner, you cry! How does he stop this rogue’s gallery of weirdos? With science! As his lab assistant says in her “nasally but sensual voice”:
“Anything’s possible in forensic medicine.”
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Probably because author Robert Walker just makes it all up. Profiler fiction revels in the details of forensic investigation, establishing its authority with chemistry talk and microscopes despite the fact that most forensic science is utterly unreliable. In profiler fiction the setpieces aren’t chases and gunplay, but autopsies and fingerprinting. The Dr. Grant books deconstruct those articles of faith by making its forensic science deeply ridiculous. Most of us think of Seconal as a powerful sedative, but are you a doctor? Dr. Dean Grant knows that Seconal will glow in the dark wherever it touches moisture and he often sprays it on the ground to detect blood. He uses infrared photography not to detect heat but to find footsteps left in puddles. He uses a “small nuclear reactor” to create a killer’s “hair chart” which is apparently as unique as fingerprints.
Dr. Dean Grant can scrape condensed human breath off plastic bags, and if you breathe on a slide he’ll put it in “The Tracer,” which uses laser beams to turn it back into a liquid that he can analyze. Bourbon is a chemical, napalm is a poisonous gas, and in Dying Breath they gently brush one victim’s clothing hoping to dislodge random fiber or hair samples, a pretty standard procedure. What isn’t standard is that they upend a bottle of baby powder all over the clothes first.
Profiler fiction establishes its authority by deploying scientific details, but Walker’s books make it all up as they go along, from the science to the plots, hoping to bluff the reader. Masking its ridiculous twists and phony forensics with tough cop attitude, they wind up coming across with all the authority of Dragnet taking on LSD. In doing so, they deconstruct the entire genre, showing that all that talk about dedication and science is a fancy facade that hides the blithe mountain of BS lurking at the core of the profiler genre.
(NOTE: If you want to track down one of Dr. Dean Grant’s silly adventures, Razor’s Edge is definitely the best, followed by Dying Breath, Dead Man’s Float, and finally, Burning Obsession. A laser blowtorch has nothing on a whip-wielding, Satan-fueled would-be wizard.)
Grady Hendrix is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, along with a bunch of other books and movies. His new novel is The Final Girl Support Group (out July 13) and you can find more dumb facts about him over at gradyhendrix.com.
I didn’t realize this was one of your articles at first (although I should have when I started chuckling at describing Lecter as the best Price Is Right contestant) and read it because I’m recently getting back into my childhood interest of Unsolved Mysteries (that’s the OG Robert Stack era, not whatever new reboot is out now) and there are definitely some 80s/90s era psych on display there when it comes to Satanic panic, profiling, serial killers, etc.
That said I do find it fascinating how some of these cold cases are being solved even decades later. One of the most memorable cases from my childhood (Michaela Garecht) was recently solved, so while ‘profiling’ may be nebulous one would hope forensic science can continue to advance.
At any rate, this is another article where as I read the summation of the book, all I can think is ‘well, that escalated quickly’. I always want to find and read these crazy books for myself :)
My favorite depiction of the uselessness of FBI profilers was on The Shield, where the local cops bring in an FBI bigshot with one celebrated case under his belt, who then proceeds to stand around the station spouting useless platitudes while contributing absolutely nothing to solving the case.
@1 – Cold cases solved because of those DNA lineage websites. Makes me wonder if a mandatory DNA database will be a thing of the future…
A few months ago, Mark Evanier wrote on his blog about the time he took a course on criminology in the 1970’s. He wrote that his instructor addressed these kinds of works of fiction, and pointed out that in real life, there was a limit to trying to employ rational reasoning to understand irrational thinking.
Trying to put oneself in the mind of someone who was truly insane, the instructor said, would be like trying to “think” like a dog or a bear—the serial killer might as well be a different species, actually having no conscious idea as to why they were doing what they were doing; it could be for a “reason” no rational person could ever imagine in a million years: they could be killing someone because that person was wearing blue socks that day, or because the “Mind Masters of Saturn” told them to, with no “pattern” or “motivation” that a sane person could hope to comprehend.
@@.-@: Yes, this reminds me of what I think was the pilot episode of the late, lamented Millennium, when the beleaguered authorities of a small town victimized by a serial killer ask Frank Black what the murderer wants, and Black responds (and you must hear this in Lance Henrikson’s voice), “He doesn’t want anything. He’s insane.”
Criminal Minds is fictional af but makes for great comfort watching. Aside from being about improbably pretty people doing improbable things, it argues that some of the most evil things that people can do to each other can be explained and defeated by rational thinking and observation. What is seemingly beyond comprehension actually makes sense and because it makes sense it can be stopped.
Interesting and well written article. I appreciate the statistics on the reliability of criminal profiling. They confirmed (in fact, over-confirmed) my suspicions about how effective it is in real life. I say this as a fan of Mindhunter and Red Dragon. The comparison to witch hunting seems apt. More evidence of how so little really disappears from the world: mostly it just gets rebranded.
The anecdote that shook my faith in profiling pertained to Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a “the Unabomber. ” Apparently for a long the reigning F.BI. theory was that he was a disgruntled ex-menial laborer with a low IQ who’d worked for an airline manufacturer. He turned out to be a Harvard graduate with an IQ of 170.
@3 – yeah, and there is an interesting legality/ethics conundrum there (although I have to admit, emotionally I have zero problem with these rapists or murderers getting caught especially as they usually have multiple victims. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was another somewhat famus UM case that got solved decades later because they were able to match the DNA evidence to a a drinking cup that they obtained because the DNA had matched (partially) with a close relative of somebody who was already a suspect, so they basically tailed this guy until they could get a sample and confirm it was in fact a match.
I live in Madison, WI and several years ago (while I was a grad student) there was a famous/well publicized unsolved murder (Brittany Zimmerman) of a college student in her downtown home in broad daylight (there was also a lot of controversy over the fact that the 911 dispatcher hung up on her and completely mishandled the call, and also allegations of some botched investigation). At the time Madison was considered a relatively safe city for its size, especially for women (I still live here and crime is on the rise but overall still pretty safe), even downtown. A large-ish homeless/pandhandling population but generally harmless (in fact, quite a few quirky, well known ‘personalities’).
Long story short, it sounds like they recently did get a guy in custody for it (it was one of those murders they thought would never be solved) and I’ve heard the parents are pushing for a pretty sweeping policy and collecting DNA evidence at the point of arrest for every single crime to create a database, etc. It’s definitely got some critics who feel it’s a huge overreach of civil liberties since this wouldn’t even be for people who were convicted of crimes. Is it different from finger/hand print databases (don’t they take finger prints when they book you? Or is that just from TV?). Interestingly, the Garecht case was solved because a palm print ended up matching the palm print on her bike and the guy got arrested for some other murder and then they realized it matched, so nothing to do with some of the DNA cases.
I really don’t know how I feel about it (especially given the potential for abuse). On the other hand, I love seeing these cases get solved.
As for profiling, funny thing is the UM episode I just watched was a special on “diabiolical minds” where they tried to do this kind of thing. That said even people who think they are being ‘random’ do usually end up playing their hand in some way. As a computer programmer and somebody who does a lot of troubleshooting/debugging of a complex system to trace down what are sometimes obscure issues, I do kind of enjoy the idea of finding those patterns (I can’t help but think that in an alternate world I might have ended up in forensic science myself, especially because I also have background/passion for biotech/molecular biology). The ‘psychobabble’ stuff is a little less my taste though. I do think most crimes – even the gruesome ones – do usually come down to some motive, even if it’s a selfish one.
While I agree that Forensic Science is very far from the magic mirror it so often functions as in Detective Fiction and other tales of crime, it seems only fair to point out that those reading the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article linked to in the text above might do well to treat the conclusions reached in that article with caution – we’re given a handful of quotes, the names of two experts taking pains to point out that Forensics is a science of probabilities rather than certainties and the author’s conclusion that Forensics is mainly junk science, but given how short this article is (and the inherently limited nature of any magazine article) we simply don’t have enough evidence to call this conclusion anything more substantial than a theory.
I would, quite frankly, like more information on the personal history, qualifications and opinions of the experts in question – to set their quotes in the proper context, if nothing else – and I would most definitely have been interested in hearing from other experts in attendance at this conference, since it seems somewhat unlikely that no more than two persons contributed to this particular presentation (also, If nothing else links to a more full record of the proceedings and to the relevant authorities on the subject would have been much appreciated, as a sign the author was willing to hand readers the tools to survey the available evidence & draw their own conclusions).
Also, it should be noted that I deeply dislike Hannibal Lecter in general and his literary subjugation of Agent Clarice Sterling on so many, many levels.
That is all.
> is immune to poison ivy
This is actually a thing. My father and brothers are immune to its effects. It led to them making quite a bit of money in high school in summer yard jobs that no one else would handle.
A lot of crime fiction has gotten pretty silly about its heroes and villains. They’re all superhackers with unlimited pockets and very high intelligence. When all the MCs are super geniuses they honestly all start to look a bit like Wile E Coyote to me.