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JOHN DOUGLAS
The “Father” of Criminal Profiling
By Todd Fuqua
The career trajectory for John Douglas (BS 70) is part luck, part fate.
His journey from the Air Force to the Federal Bureau of Investigation took him through many twists and turns, not the least of which included face-to-face meetings with some of this nation’s most notorious murderers.
But before he became an FBI agent and the inspiration for the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” John was a serviceman at Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, New Mexico.
“I was supposed to go to Lackland Air Force Base (in San Antonio, Texas) but ended up training in Amarillo,” John said. “They tested me and were going to send me to radio intercept school. There was an opening at Cannon, and I didn’t want to stay on the training base, so I went there.”
The job at Cannon was “miserable,” but John found his way into special services, responsible for the base’s athletic programs. While stationed at Cannon, he began his bachelor’s degree in psychology, completing it in under four years.
Just after starting his master’s degree at Eastern, John met FBI Agent Frank Haines (MED 64), who ran a one-person field office in Clovis. He saw something special in John and suggested he apply to the Bureau.
“I had never even considered law enforcement as an option, but he convinced me,” John said. “I went to Albuquerque for the interview and to take the test. Within 30 days, I was in Washington, D.C., with the new agent class. I was among the youngest in the class at 25 years old.”
Fourteen weeks later, the ENMU alumnus was assigned to the office in Detroit, Michigan, and later was stationed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He worked violent crimes, fugitive cases, and hostage negotiation before being transferred to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to begin teaching. He trained law enforcement officers across the nation, where he ran across some friction.
“I saw the FBI agents challenged. Some police officers we were training had worked some of the cases discussed in class,” John said. “They were arguing with the instructor, and that’s not what I wanted.”
This friction inspired John to delve into what motivated criminals to commit particularly heinous crimes. During one trip to California, John convinced his partner to get an interview with Charles Manson. This was first of many interviews with convicted killers the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) conducted.
“The tool of criminal profiling was there, and the FBI was dabbling in it, but they weren’t organized. They never went into the prisons to do interviews for this. My interviews were from an investigative perspective, and I began coming up with many terms to refer to the job. I was shaping the tool.”
He first came into prominence from his work investigating the Atlanta, Georgia, murders of 1979–1981, thanks to an interview with People Magazine, in which he successfully profiled the unidentified killer as a young black man. After the arrest of Wayne Williams, he helped convince a jury that Williams was the murderer, earning John a letter of commendation from the FBI.
His job entailed more than just catching criminals. Sometimes he was in the business of working to exonerate the wrongly prosecuted.
John pointed to his assistance in the “West Memphis Three” case of three men convicted of killing three 8-year-olds in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993–94. They were later set free after new forensic evidence came to light in 2007, and John provided an analysis of the killings, which disputed the original conviction.
He was also instrumental in defending Amanda Knox, presenting evidence supporting her innocence in a murder case in Italy, and he provided an analysis in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case in Colorado, concluding that the family was not responsible for the death of their 6-year-old daughter.
“I received a lot of criticism from many within the law enforcement community who believed the family was responsible,” John said. “The case remains unsolved, but DNA ruled out the family as suspects years later. This case still haunts me, and hopefully, it will be solved one day.”
His career as a criminal profiler also led to consulting work while he was a unit chief with the FBI, including work on the 1992 Oscara-warded film “The Silence of the Lambs.” He has also served as a consultant on several true-crime shows.
After retiring from the FBI, John collaborated with Mark Olshaker to write his first book, “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” published in 1995. It was a New York Times bestseller in hardcover and paperback, bringing him fame. He has written and published 15 books in his career.
“After the book, I was a celebrity, and it was really weird,” John said. “I never imagined I’d end up being the father of criminal profiling.”
Eventually, Netflix adapted his story for the screen as the “Mindhunter” series, but it portrayed a more dramatic interpretation of his work.
“They Hollywood-ized it, of course,” John said. “The interview process and how it evolved is true. There was a lot of skepticism within the FBI about what we were doing.”
Recently, John used his experience as a criminal profiler to create a class titled “How to Think Like an FBI Profiler” with the online streaming platform Masterclass.com. He is also a soughtafter speaker, discussing his career and its impact on the law enforcement community.
This ENMU alumnus is a busy man, but he remains focused on advice given him by the late ENMU Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Dr. Garland Tipps, while John was still an undergraduate.
“Dr. Tipps was excellent in personal psychology, and he’s the one who motivated me to go into graduate school in psychology. Dr. Tipps talked about the importance of balancing your life, and it felt like he was talking directly to me,” John said. “He said to imagine walking down a forest path in the dark. If you shine the flashlight too far ahead, you’ll lose sight of what is right in front of you and fall. That stuck with me.”
