Joseph Kondro is a killer that raped and murdered the schoolgirl daughters of his friends.
Donald Harvey, the Angel of Death, killed as many as 87 people in (mostly) hospital settings, believing that he was putting them out of their misery.
*just some of his victims
Todd Kohlhepp killed at least 7 men and held captive women in a shipping container.
“Joseph McGowan was a high school chemistry teacher. Joseph Kondro was a family friend. Donald Harvey was a hospital orderly. Todd Kohlhepp was a real estate broker. All these men committed vicious acts against humanity. Long after their convictions, psychologist John Douglas set out to discover why by interviewing them, as he details in this nonfiction work. His hope was to glean more information about serial offenders, to apprehend others faster and more efficiently, and prevent such acts from occurring.” (New York Public Library)
"He {John Douglas} has written text books on profiling as well as co-authored several non-fiction books, including “Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes.” He has teamed with Mark Olshaker on a number of non-fiction books, including the international bestselling “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit.” (The State Journal Register)
“By the time we had completed our initial round of interviews, we knew what type of person could do such a thing, and three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.” - John E. Douglas, The Killer Across the Table
John Douglas & Others
John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
John Douglas on Serial Killers in TV/Movies vs. Real Life
"Isn’t that one of the big misconceptions about serial killers that Hollywood has created? That they are of superhuman intelligence?
Yeah, definitely. Ted Bundy had like a 120 IQ and Ed Kemper had about a 140. But then there are others, like Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, which stands for Bind, Torture, Kill. He had about a 100 IQ and wasn’t any genius. He was able to elude the police by just being lucky. Now, twenty years later he starts communicating with law enforcement again. Look at what the dumbass did: he sends a floppy disk to the police. First he asks them if it can be traced or not. Of course the police say it can’t. So he sends the disk and out pops all this information leading to the Lutheran Church where he was president.
It’s not how smart the killers are. What makes it difficult to solve those cases in this big, vast country is that we have so many different law enforcement agencies, unlike in your country or any other European country. Or even Canada! We have over 1700 different law enforcement agencies! We have morgues with thousands of unidentified people. In some states police will just go up and down the highways looking for bodies or skeletonized remains. You take for example a truck driver, hauling whatever, and he starts out in Washington DC and drives to Los Angeles. He passes through thousands of police jurisdictions. If he decides along the way to pick up a prostitute at a truck stop, where these women hang out, and he kills her and dumps her body across state lines, it is very difficult for law enforcement to even determine who she is and where she’s from, even when the body is still intact. And if the victim is a high risk victim, like a prostitute or drug addict or a runaway, it’s extremely difficult.
Plus: not all police are trained the same. We have some really good departments, but others are not so good. And some departments aren’t even motivated to investigate a crime against a high risk victim. When I was in Vancouver, a reporter told me about all these missing prostitutes and I told him they probably had at least one serial killer running around. The police wouldn’t admit to it, but two years later they arrested this guy Pickton, a pig farmer who was charged with abducting these women and feeding them to his pigs. It was well over a dozen women." (Flash Back Files)
"If the biggest misconception about serial killers is that they are of superhuman intelligence, what then is the biggest misconception about profiling that Hollywood has created?
Well, I’m not permitted to talk about MINDHUNTER, but that will probably be as close to the real job as you can get. There have been a lot of these shows since I retired, from MILLENNIUM to PROFILER. The big show now is CRIMINAL MINDS. What’s wrong with them, is that these guys do everything: they make arrests, they do the interrogations, they go around knocking on doors. They take over the whole investigation. Homicide is a local investigation. You have to be asked in. You can’t just show up and take over. These profilers on these shows are pulling guns. I pulled a gun, but only when I was a street agent in Detroit, working kidnappings and extortions. But when I came to Quantico and developed profiling I considered myself a coach, a tool in a toolbox for police departments to use. But I’m not going to take over their work. Sometimes they would ask if I could do the interrogation. Obviously I could, but I never did. It’s your case. I’ll coach you. At one time we were helping on a thousand cases a year. If you get involved in the case, other than as a consultant or coach, you’ll be in court all year and wouldn’t get anything done. If I do the interrogation I’m suddenly part of the investigation. Can’t do that. I can come up with a criminal profile, or help the investigator to determine the best way to approach a certain type of suspect during interrogation, or help the prosecutor establish probable cause, or help the prosecutor on cross examination strategy or try to come up with a way to get the unknown subject to inject himself in the police investigation – our research showed that certain types of subjects will do that. So as a profiler you can do all that, but you’re not doing the ground work. Oh, and the other thing about it is: just because you got invited, doesn’t mean they want you there." (Flash Back Files)