Most people have seen Silence of the Lambs or perhaps the show Mindhunter, and obviously, people have gone to interview serial killers in real life as described in the inspiration for the show. But have the killers actually contributed anything useful?
I guess that depends on who they are.
Manson-no. Leslie-probably.
It looks like they got a lot of good information from Kemper. The kind of stuff you just couldn’t imagine knowing at the time without actually interviewing a serial killer.
After his second arrest, Kemper said that being able to understand how these tests functioned allowed him to manipulate his psychiatrists, admitting that he learned a lot from the sex offenders to whom he administered tests.[29]
Hell, sounds like he got some use out of interviewing them, too!
That Wikipedia article on Edmund Kemper mentions him killing cats as a child, before graduating to killing people, which suggests one way to identify people in need of intervention early.
Sure. Criminal behavioral analysis is a whole department at the FBI. The things they learn are unlikely to be useful to you or me, but they are invaluable to people who investigate criminals.
Actually, there’s a lot of justified skepticism around criminal behavioral profiling. There’s very little empirical evidence and research to validate its usefulness, and there aren’t any clearly articulated standards and practices around its usage.
Helpful in understanding. Probably not much in prevention.
One researcher, not recalling her name right away, says that most serial killers were subject to sexual abuse and exhibit symptoms of Disassociate Identity Disorder. These things were usually not discovered before hand and not readily admitted by the perpetrators.
Well, I’ve interviewed 4 serial killers: Walter E. Ellis, David Spanbauer, George Lamar Jones, and one who is still living so I won’t mention the name.
My interviews were not of a forensic nature; just routine medical interviews. But it was useful to me to demonstrate both how normal (and even how charming) they could seem and also how frighteningly banal such evil folks can be.
I did work off and on for a time with a forensic psychologist who specialized in psychopathy and serial killing; Their advice was “never trust or turn your back on the charming ones”.
Isn’t that good advice for any serial killer or psychopath, not just the charming ones?
It’s advice I followed for any inmate patient of mine. But lots of times we health staff types don’t know if the current patient we’re seeing is a serial killer/psychopath/sociopath/etc. So ‘charm’ from anyone is an extra red flag.
I mean as it has lead to the rise of psychological profiling, which is basically pseudoscience. I would say it has led to pretty much only negative outcomes.
Despite two of my favorite TV detectives being criminal profilers (Criminal intent’s Robert Goren, and Fox Mulder) I think criminal profiling as a means to catch a killer is a bunch of happy-hooey.
Look at the hunt for BTK. Their profile was about as wrong as it could be, save for the gender of the killer. They got lucky.
Now, for understanding the mind of a killer after the fact, very useful and interesting. Maybe someday a reliable way of spotting sociopathic killers before they start can be found out.
That’s pretty much true with most human interaction.
John Douglas and Robert Ressler (ex-FBI profilers) have written books describing their work including interviewing serial killers, finding it useful in understanding how these people think and operate.
As for accuracy of profiles, naturally the ones they highlight are the spot-on examples, whether or not they were key in tracking down killers. The profiles that were accurate but too vague to be of much help don’t get equal attention.
*imagining Qadgop getting a medical history from a serial killer. “So, what’s your chief complaint?” 
“All the stabbing’s given me a bad case of carpal tunnel, Doc.”
Mindhunters glossed over it, but there is some thought, and not all in the tin foil hat brigade, that they didn’t catch the right, or perhaps, all of the Atlanta child murderers. The authorities were so eager to close the case that they just papered over the discrepancies.
Ironically (given my dismissal of profiling) actually listening to the profilers might have been better.
To the extent that this is true, it applies to the entire field of human psychology, and especially psychiatry as a branch of supposedly “evidence-based medicine”. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful in certain contexts of being able to generally classify a pathology and provide clinical treatment to some level of efficacy, but the idea that the enormous complexity of human cognitive and affective behavior can be distilled down to highly simplified models of behavior or treated in the same way as as the pathogenesis of an infection is pretty ridiculous on the face. Psychological profiling should not be considered any standard of factual evidence suitable as testimony in a court of law; at most, it is very general guidance which is subject to flawed interpretation.
Interviewing serial killers is useful in understanding their methods of selecting victims and evading authorities, and at least potentially in identifying behaviors that are characteristic of such atavism. However, such people are essentially by definition sociopaths (setting aside those affected by brain tumors or psychosis) and are often narcissistic, and as such will manipulate an interviewer and cannot be trusted to provide truthful insight into their own thought processes even if they can explain them. The notion that a ‘sane’ person with a normal level of empathy can ‘get inside the head’ of a sociopath is basically a construct of screenwriters and novelists with no basis in practice.
Stranger
This. They are master manipulators far beyond ordinary comprehension.You are not adequate to defend against that onslaught.
Any impressions you form are implanted by them and unreliable.