By ZAAHIRA WYNE
The Free Lance-Star

Date published: 7/9/2002

By ZAAHIRA WYNE

Youth Correspondent

I HAVE STALKERS. I have wackoes calling me all the time. I have killers who, if they get out of jail, are going to come after me because I've kept them in there for so long."

Welcome to the life of criminal profiler John Douglas.

Douglas, who lives in the Washington area, joined the FBI in 1970 after meeting an agent at the gym. In the 31 years since, he has emerged as the pioneer of criminal profiling and worked on world-renowned cases--including those of O.J. Simpson, John Benet Ramsey and Wayne B. Williams.

He's interviewed serial killer Charles Manson, among others, and was the first pick for Agent Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

"John Douglas knows more about serial killers than anybody in the world," says Jonathan Demme, director of the movie. "And he's a great guy, very articulate, very sweet."

Criminal profiling, unlike what some popular TV shows suggest, is based on a deep understanding of the criminal psyche. If an agent knows what makes bad guys tick, he can take crime-scene evidence and put together a fairly accurate profile, or description, of the criminal. Police, in turn, can use the profile to narrow down manhunts and eventually arrest the right suspect.

"The show, "Profiler," makes it seem like a psychic thing," Douglas says. "But it all comes from interviewing a lot of subjects (i.e. bad guys) and getting a sense of what they're all about."

Sounds very simple and logical, but in the '70s, it was unheard of. At the time, Douglas was one of nine agents assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit--a group whose assignment was to go around the country and teach applied criminal psychology to police officers.

The only problem was that the cops often knew more about the cases than the agents themselves.

"The police would say, 'Wait a minute so-and-so. I've worked the case. You've got your facts wrong,'" Douglas explains.

"Sometimes--say for example it was David Berkowitz, a killer in New York--the instructors would ask, 'Is there anyone from New York?' just to make sure that before they started yakking they wouldn't be challenged."

But FBI agents weren't the only ones without enough first-hand knowledge. Psychologists were also in the dark.

"Say you're going to be making a decision concerning probation, parole and treatment, and you don't even know what a guy did" in his past, Douglas points out. "Mr. Psychologist or Psychiatrist, you're dealing with these people, you should [conduct a behaviorally-oriented interview with the criminal].

"When they say they rely on self-reporting, I say, 'You actually believe that a criminal sitting across the table is going to be telling you the truth? If you believe that, you're pretty naïve.'"

Date published: 7/9/2002