11/2/2022 0 Comments Ted bundy heads on displayRessler would request files on violent-crime cases from the places he visited, and used these to build a rudimentary database. “I was blown away by this different way of looking at violent crime.” “It was the first time I’d heard of criminal profiling and behavioural analysis,” he says. Safarik was a detective working violent crimes, and attended a two-week homicide course (though he wasn’t taught personally by Ressler). He would travel across America and the rest of the world to teach the process of analysing a crime scene and criminal behaviour to create a profile of a probable suspect. He was attracted to what he called the “fledgling” Behavioural Science Unit – then consisting of just two men – and he became its chief profiler. He joined the FBI in 1970, before in 1974 becoming a class counsellor for visiting police officers at the FBI National Academy in Quantico. Ressler worked as an investigator for the US Army in Germany, Thailand and back at home in Illinois. TED BUNDY HEADS ON DISPLAY SERIALWhat made me a cop? What made him a serial killer?” “I sometimes wonder how we ended up on the opposite sides of the law. “We were in the Boy Scouts together,” Ressler later recalled. Ressler had lived just four blocks away from him. Gacy was nicknamed “The Killer Clown” for his dressing up to entertain children. Little did Ressler know, he had grown up close to another notorious serial killer – John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 young men and boys. “I wanted to understand people like William Heirens.” (Or, rather, the way Heirens was framed in the public eye: he confessed under police torture, and his conviction remains the subject of debate.) “The Lipstick Murders just caught my imagination, and that never went away,” Ressler later said. Meanwhile, the police arrested William Heirens, a 17-year-old fetish burglar. Inspired by a Little Rascals-type film, Ressler and his pal formed a detective agency to catch the killer – mostly by following people around while disguised in long coats. The culprit was dubbed “the Lipstick Killer” after scrawling a message on the wall of one crime scene: “For heavens Sake catch me Before I kill more I cannot control myself.” In 1945, his native Chicago was rocked by the murders of two women and a six-year-old girl their dismembered body parts were found in the sewers. Ressler was just nine years old when he became fascinated with killers. “He was constantly driving the research to understand these individuals – whether it was serial murder, spree murder or mass murder.” “He had passion for understanding these violent offenders,” says Mark Safarik, a former FBI profiler, and Ressler’s partner at Forensic Behavioral Services. In American Boogeyman, on the Bundy trail, he’s played by Jake Hays, while his interviews are the basis for David Fincher’s Netflix series, Mindhunter, in which he’s reimagined in the character of Bill Tench (played by Holt McCallany). He referred to getting into the criminal mind as his “hobby-horse”. The FBI man, who’s credited with coining the term “serial killer”, conducted a number of interviews with murderers (including Bundy) that enabled the Bureau to create profiles of those who were still at large, based on the psychology, patterns and behaviours of the ones behind bars. These followed Zac Efron’s portrayal of Bundy in another film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, and Netflix’s divisive 2019 series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.īut Ressler’s work deserves the limelight: he changed how murders are investigated in the real world. The Elijah Wood-starring film No Man of God has just been released on DVD, while Ted Bundy: American Bogeyman, led by Chad Michael Murray, has briefly appeared in American cinemas. Today, almost 50 years after the American press first framed Bundy as charming and enigmatic, the obsession continues – often at the expense of remembering his 30 (and likely more) female victims, whom he kidnapped, raped and killed. “This guy was an animal,” he added, “and it amazed me that the media seemed unable to understand that.” In his 1992 book, Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler described in detail the worst of Bundy’s 1970s crimes. The pioneering FBI profiler Robert K Ressler was never impressed with the cult of personality around Ted Bundy.
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