Man Hunter

Robert K. Ressler studies serial killers. His idea that serial killers can act in predictable patterns, potentially providing law enforcement agencies an opportunity to catch them before they kill again, and his unparalleled access to society’s most prolific murderers, resulted in the creation of the FBI’s groundbreaking Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Interview: Suzan Ryan

You were born in Chicago in 1937—an era of bootlegging, gangsters and war. As a young boy, you investigated a child abduction (part of the famous ‘Lipstick Murders’). Did this venture into detecting ignite your interest in criminology?

My father was in the newspaper business, and so I was constantly in the habit of scanning the pages of the daily newspaper. I became fascinated with the Lipstick Murder case as it was in the news every day and had the city on edge. Phillip Kozlowski and I formed the RK-PK Detective Agency, and its headquarters were in the basement of Phillip’s house. We did not wear any disguises, but during the summer we did carry a cap gun.

Even as a child, I was drawn to the investigative aspects of crime solving—especially high-profile cases. At the time, I did not realise that this interest was to later become my passion. I was a boy doing what boys like to do; it’s just that I pursued it more than your average middle-school boy did.

In an unusual twist, notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy (left) once delivered groceries to your home as a teenager…

Gacy lived on the same street as I did, but about two blocks away. It is true that he delivered groceries to our house—that was certainly very common in those days, and because of his proximity it really wasn’t that unusual to learn that later on. It was a sort of macabre preview of our later connection.

Most people have an inherent ability to find a particular skill-set easier to pursue than others—the left brain/right brain skew. Did you always feel this with detection and investigation?

I think I was predisposed to the challenges of conducting investigations, as evidenced by my boyhood sleuthing. Perhaps I inherited that curious nature from my father? My father was an investigator of sorts, working as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune and writing, so I was cognisant of whatever crime stories were in the news. I have always felt completely comfortable in a law-enforcement environment and was drawn to the investigation of violent crimes, especially homicide.

I am fascinated by the diverse and complex nature of human behaviour. There is nothing more egregious than the murder of one human being by another. It is often a difficult and perplexing crime to solve because the victim is unable to assist you or provide any substantive information—except, of course, indirectly through evidence.

Some homicides are straightforward—where you can discern a motive quickly and there is a history between the victim and the offender that provides significant useful information, but when you fuse together extreme violence, sexual components and substance abuse or mental health issues in the homicide, the outcome can be very complex. Motives can often be multilayered and obscure one another. They can rise and fall in importance, and even develop during the crime. It is the study of such dynamic and aberrant behaviour that focused my interests.

You once said that one must be careful when looking into the abyss, as the abyss looks back. Did this understanding of balance come to you naturally, or incrementally via your hundreds of interviews with violent criminals?

Actually, the quote you mentioned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, and if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,” is from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Things get added to our personalities because of our mere presence. In studying some of the worst behaviour, we must take care that in spending so much time in such toxic environs we do not assimilate those parts of evil.

It is a process of finding balance and maintaining objectivity. A key aspect that makes one successful at conducting these analyses is the ability to remain emotionally disconnected from the trauma of what you are assessing. This should not be interpreted to mean that you are not empathetic or simply don’t care—quite the opposite, in fact. If you become emotionally involved with the crimes, distracted by the brutal nature of the violence, or attached to the victims or offenders, your ability to conduct an objective and accurate assessment of the dynamics of the crime become compromised.

You majored in criminology and joined the army, where you gravitated towards the Criminal Investigation Division (which led to the FBI, in 1970). Did some of the work you did there shape your later career?

I was the Provost Marshal in Aschaffenburg, Germany, in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). The first night I served as the Provost, a murder was committed on my watch. I later became the head of CID in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and while stationed there I worked with the FBI out of the Chicago Division, which is where they recruited me to become an FBI Special Agent.

As the head of CID, I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t able to engage in the role of investigator as often as I would have liked. When the opportunity presented itself, I would accompany my investigators to crime scenes; I always wanted to be out with the men in my command, and not stuck in the office pushing papers around.

What were your experiences with understanding the mind and motive of a killer in your early years at the FBI, before behavioural profiling was officially used, or even consciously understood?

My early years were in the Cleveland Division. I eventually transferred to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where I began teaching.

I felt that in order to be true to what I was teaching about behaviour in violent offenders, I needed to better understand why these killers made the choices that they did. This is what spurred me to go into the prison system and start interviewing these violent offenders.

At the time, I didn’t have FBI permission to do these interviews, but eventually I developed a protocol to conduct them. The FBI eventually recognised the importance of them, and I was then able to garner its support for moving the research forward. I wanted to understand how these men felt about their crimes, their victims, getting caught, and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the attempts by law enforcement to track and capture them.

This was something completely new for the FBI. We were breaking new ground and essentially making it up as we went along. We were unencumbered by the laws that are now in place to protect these killers. Today, all interviews with offenders have to be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards. These IRBs decide whether it might be harmful for these men to relive their crimes by talking about them. By the time you get through with the paperwork the inmates have to sign, most won’t talk with you.
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