A month after Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested for brutally slaying their parents inside their Beverly Hills home, Dr. Ann Burgess entered the Los Angeles County Jail with a stack of blank paper and a set of colored pencils.
It was April 1990, and the maelstrom around Jose and Kitty Menendez’s double murder – and the brothers’ forthcoming trial – had reached a fever pitch. News articles described the crime scene in gory, painstaking detail. Prosecutors and tabloids portrayed the brothers as greedy, calculated, cold-blooded killers.
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A month after Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested for brutally slaying their parents inside their Beverly Hills home, Dr. Ann Burgess entered the Los Angeles County Jail with a stack of blank paper and a set of colored pencils.
It was April 1990, and the maelstrom around Jose and Kitty Menendez’s double murder – and the brothers’ forthcoming trial – had reached a fever pitch. News articles described the crime scene in gory, painstaking detail. Prosecutors and tabloids portrayed the brothers as greedy, calculated, cold-blooded killers.
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Burgess was among the earliest women to work with the FBI and a key member of what was known as the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit in the late ’70s.
That team has since been dubbed “Mindhunters” because they willingly delve into the darkest parts of the human psyche to better understand what motivates a murderer. What they uncover could make even the most hardened detectives blanch.
And while criminal profiling is not an exact science, it is a method investigators increasingly lean on to identify warning signs of a would-be killer.
CNN spoke to former profilers – all women like Dr. Burgess who worked with the FBI – who have pioneered and practiced ways to connect the dots between evidence and psychology to help solve and prevent crimes.
“You start very slowly,” the now 88-year-old told CNN of her approach with Menendez. “You start with, ‘How far back can you remember?’ … and gradually get up to, ‘When did you first have this idea of what you wanted to do to your parents?’”
Burgess said she spent 50 hours interviewing Menendez and, as she recounts in her latest book, she was later called as an “expert witness” to testify about how Erik and Lyle’s decision to confront their father over what they alleged was years of sexual abuse could have provoked enough fear for them to commit a double murder.
She’s since been accused of profiling Menendez as a way to excuse or justify the brothers’ crimes, but Burgess staunchly rejects that characterization.
“You’ve got to do it for prevention,” she said. “You have to learn something from this.”
That, she says, is the question that drives most criminal profilers: How can we prevent the next murder?
