March Bonus Episode (Next Take Episode)

[00:00:11] What's up, Ramon? This is the Next Take Podcast Episode 86 with Mikkel and... And Tanyka Where we have conversations on different topics. So, we are approaching the last episode of our Women's History Month series. If you guys haven't listened to our previous episodes, you can check the last three, I believe. Yeah, we've done three.

[00:00:40] Yeah, three episodes. They all have Women's History Month towards the end of the title. You guys can just check out the title and it will just say that. History Month series, yes. That's what it will say. So, what is this episode going to be about, Tanyka?

[00:01:03] So, we're going to be talking about the great Anne Burgess. If you don't know who she is and you've watched Mindhunter, Anne Burgess is the inspiration for the... Again, it's been so long since I've seen Mindhunter, so I don't remember her names, but she is the inspiration for the woman that is the main character in that.

[00:01:33] She's incredible. So, we're going to talk about her. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, first of all, Mikkel, have you seen Mindhunter? Oh, no, I haven't seen Mindhunter. Oh, my gosh. First of all, hey, it's one of the best shows that everyone is hoping will get in that final season that we were supposed to get before COVID hit and ruined everything.

[00:01:59] It is such a good show. I highly recommend watching Mindhunter. It's so good. But, yeah, so Anne Burgess. So, she's studied some of the most infamous killers in modern history, such as Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, and Eric and Lyle Menendez, which we might touch on a little bit, trying to understand their motivations and their actions.

[00:02:29] Her rigorous analysis of these and other notorious figures helped her leave an indeniable mark on the field of criminology. Born in early October of 1936, Burgess was raised in Newton, a suburb of Boston. Although she eventually became accomplished in both fields, Burgess initially pursued a nursing career over teaching.

[00:02:54] She explained to Boston College Magazine that three of her uncles were doctors. When Burgess was 10 or 11 years old, she began helping one of them deliver babies in the countryside. Burgess continued to work directly with patients as part of Boston University's nursing program, performing her clinical work at the psychiatric unit of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. She said, quote,

[00:03:51] 1973 study in the American Journal of Nursing. Working with Linda Little Holmstrom, a sociologist at Boston College, she helped interview 146 survivors of rape from ages 3 to 73. Using their findings, the pair concluded the criminal act was largely about power and control. Yep. Yep.

[00:04:17] For the perpetrators, a major shift from the blame the victim mentality that still persisted at this time and probably even now. So, Burgess and Holmstrom also championed crisis counseling and instructed clinicians on how to recognize signs of rape.

[00:04:42] Soon after the study's release, the FBI contacted Burgess regarding her expertise. And this is where Mindhunter comes in. So, according to BC Magazine, in 1978, the FBI director, William Webster, invited Burgess to the FBI Academy, where she taught classes about how to speak with crime victims and catalog the information they provided.

[00:05:08] This caught the attention of agents, John Douglas and Robert Ressler. McKell's well, we never heard of them, but these are big name people in the FBI. Okay, thank God. Yeah. Okay, that's great. So, who wanted to know if Burgess methods could be used to understand the minds of criminals, particularly serial killers, instead?

[00:05:35] So, that's, I mean, these two basically are the creators of the BAU. Like, yeah, like this is with her there as well. So, she's an important fixture in that. Starting in 1980, with funding from the U.S. Justice Department, the trio began to set the foundation for criminal profiling.

[00:05:55] They examined the motives and methods of 36 killers and categorized them on a spectrum between organized, people more likely to commit premeditated crimes, and disorganized, marking individuals who commit impulsive and careless violence. The group was also the first to examine the connection between a killer's crimes and past trauma.

[00:06:23] Burgess and team applied their work to the active investigation of the 1983 murders of two young boys in Nebraska. After developing a likely profile of the killer, authorities were able to apprehend John Joseph Jobert, the, uh, when it's IV. Which way does that go? Is that five? Six? I don't know. How does that work? What, women's IV? IV? IV.

[00:06:52] Yeah, Roman numeral. Okay, keep going. Okay, thank you. Um, before we even get to that part, if the person has three names, he's a killer. Um, that's the joke. Four? Four in Roman numeral. Okay. The joke is, and I've heard this on other podcasters, if you have three names and you're a junior or a third or a fourth, you are insane.

[00:07:21] Chances are you're insane in some way. Mm-hmm. Just putting it out there. Anyways, he confessed to the murders and was later executed in 1996. Quote, We'd proven that there was value in understanding the criminal mind. To be able to actually use criminal profiling in an active case to hunt down a killer who was the most satisfying reward of all, Burgess wrote in her 2021 memoir,

[00:07:49] A Killer by Design, Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. Burgess' work with the FBI served as Lou's inspiration for actor Anna Torv's character, Wendy Carr. So that was her name in the Netflix thriller series, Mindhunter. A dramatization of the founding of the Behavioral Science Unit.

[00:08:13] Um, Burgess, Douglas, and Ressler published two important books based on their research. The first one was Sexual Homicide Patterns and Motives in 1988, and Crime Classification Manual, A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crime in 1992. Even after her work with the FBI, Burgess continued to play a key role in notable criminal cases.

[00:08:42] And here we go with the Menendez brothers. In 1993, she served as an expert defense witness in the first trial, because she wouldn't probably be allowed in the second trial. If you've watched the documentary, you understand. Um, in the first trial of Lyle and Eric Menendez, the brothers accused of murdering their parents, inside the Beverly Hills home in August 1989,

[00:09:07] Burgess interviewed Eric for roughly 50 hours as part of her involvement, determining allegations of sexual abuse by their father, Jose, were valid and an originating cause of the killings. The trial resulted in a hung jury, but the brothers were later convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. Um, did you watch that documentary on Netflix? Came out, um, late last year.

[00:09:37] So, it came out, like, right after the Monster series that they did on them. Um, so, basically, just quickly here, they- I still yet have to watch the second series. It's, it's good. Mm-hmm. Um, there is probably something that obviously is dramatized, but, um, it wasn't, like, the brothers were pissed. They were not happy about it, um,

[00:10:06] because they said they were never consulted by anybody. Um, so, yeah, they were not happy. I'm seeing it's the first one, Jeffrey Dahmer, I know where it was consulted. Well, yeah, like, that's the families you could have gone to. yeah. Yeah, but in this case, like, they're still alive, and there's so much that, you know, but anyways, um, Well, they left out a lot of stuff? Not that they left out, but it was dramatized. Like, for example,

[00:10:34] they were trying to say that Eric was, like, borderline gay, or something, when he's not, he's, so, never claimed that he was. So, so, Netflix basically exaggerated a little bit? Yeah, because the actor who plays Eric Menendez is gay. And then, obviously, the director being, um, what's his face? Ryan, what's his face? I can't remember his name right now.

[00:11:05] He, too, is gay. So, it's like, you know, I wonder if they just kind of, which is, just doesn't help when we're talking about two men who were abused as children by their father. So, like, it's just, it's kind of gross in that sense. But with Burgess, with the first trial, they really tried to focus on establishing that they were raped and sexually abused by, by Jose.

[00:11:32] And Burgess was a huge factor in that because she actually had them like, like, or Eric, I should say, drawing how he felt about everything, his father. And based on those drawings, they were able to kind of determine something is going on here. The motive isn't, they just wanted to go on a shopping spree. The motive is so much deeper than that. The motive is so much deeper than that.