Last Thursday, the Rensselaer Union Speaker’s Forum hosted John Douglas, one of the FBI’s premier criminal profilers. Douglas is an accepted expert in the field of profiling and an author of nine novels on criminology, including the well-known Mind Hunter.

Douglas was born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island. Remarkably, he didn’t always want to be a profiler, let alone work in law enforcement. He spent his later childhood days in Upstate New York as a farm cadet, aspiring to become a veterinarian. Douglas applied to Cornell University but was rejected. Today, he has an interesting view of the rejection. “When you’re down, don’t give up. You can come back and haunt them,” he offered. Douglas was later invited to speak at Cornell and had a chance to remind them of their mistake.

Instead, Douglas attended Montana State, a school which turned out to be “not quite like Cornell.” Regardless, he bombed out.

Douglas didn’t let these setbacks ruin his life. He was motivated and showed a dedication to do his best. After college, Douglas joined the Air Force and was later recruited by the FBI.

For his first assignment at the FBI, Douglas was stationed in Detroit, a city with one of the highest incidences of murder in the nation (more than 800 murders occurred during his first year). Although he was employed as an FBI sharpshooter, Douglas really wanted to become a crisis negotiator.

He learned a valuable lesson during his time in Michigan. One year, on Super Bowl Sunday, 150 bookies were caught gambling, and Douglas was assigned to arrest two of them. During a conversation with one of the bookies, Douglas asked the bookie his reason for committing the crime. The bookie pointed to two raindrops on the windowpane and bet Douglas that the right raindrop would beat the left raindrop down the pane. Ironically, Douglas lost the bet to a bookie who had been arrested for gambling. However, something that the bookie said after the bet has stayed with Douglas: “We are who we are.”

That lesson perhaps accounts for Douglas’s tough stance on sexual predators and on murderers. He does not support the rehabilitation of these individuals—they are who they are, and the word “rehabilitation” suggests that these individuals had previously been “habilitated.” “I do not believe in criminal justice ... I believe in victim justice,” he said.

This is most likely because Douglas’s work as a profiler requires him “to walk in the shoes of the victim and the subject.” Douglas says that this is one of the hardest roles of his job. Although he does try to visualize the crime, Douglas is critical of the far-off, constipated look on the face of Sam on the TV show The Profiler. Douglas asserts that the particular look doesn’t help him to do his job.

Earlier in his career, Douglas had to learn to control case overload. He often found himself drinking and overexercising due to work pressures but was unable to discuss his cases and experiences with others. One night in a hotel room in Seattle, Douglas collapsed on the floor. He was found three days later only after his door was busted in.

Douglas’s brain had split in the right temporal lobe, and he had no brainwave activity. Doctors placed him on life support. Douglas’s thought at the time was that he was going to be killed, until a nurse kindly explained that he was in a hospital. Because the news was comforting to him, Douglas encourages healthcare professionals to speak with their patients regularly.

Douglas was paralyzed on his left size after leaving the hospital. Even today, he still has trouble with fine motor control. Douglas wrote about his traumatic experience in chapter one of My Lector, known to him as “My Hell.”

Douglas noted that “you’re only as good as the information provided to you.” A common nuisance that he encounters is a medical examiner’s report that basically states, “Yep, the boy is dead.”

Because he has a limited psychological background, Douglas works mostly from experience. In order to better understand the patterns of serial killers, for instance, he interviewed a number of prominent serial killers. He asked them how they committed their crimes and how they felt about various elements of those crimes.

During interviews, Douglas often finds himself using a criminal’s ego to his advantage. He discovered that many of the most dangerous criminal types hear “their favorite CD” in their minds, a fantasy that they act out through their crimes.

Douglas emphasized that his profiles should never replace a full criminal investigation. It is impossible to testify that a person fits the profile that profilers created, although you can use criminal profiles to link several crimes together by observing common characteristics of signature and of motive.

The primary mystery that Douglas has to solve for each case follows the formula: Why + How = Who. During his career, Douglas has done profiling for both the trial of OJ Simpson and the Jean Binet Ramsey cases. Today, Douglas chooses to work pro bono in his profiling cases.