How Real Is Mindhunter?

Mindhunter is a Netflix thriller series from producer/director David Fincher, about a small unit of FBI agents who revolutionized the way law enforcement hunts for serial killers by using psychological profiles drawn up by interviewing dozens of incarcerated killers and figuring out how their minds work. The show is based on the true crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, co-written by FBI agent John E. Douglas, the inspiration for the show's main character. But how true to life is it? Did these crimes really happen, or were they exaggerated for television? Which of the killers interviewed were real people? Did one of the investigators really have a child that is definitely going to become a serial killer?

The general rule of thumb is the agents and investigators are fictionalized versions of real people, with the personal details of their lives largely fabricated for the show, while the killers are depicted with shocking accuracy. For more specifics on the amount of homework the creators of the show have done, read on and see just how real Mindhunter is.

Arguably the central character of the ensemble cast of Mindhunter is Holden Ford, portrayed by Jonathan Groff, the young hostage negotiator whose radical ideas about criminal psychology more or less kick off the whole pursuit of interviews of serial offenders. He is largely based on real-life FBI agent John E. Douglas, whose book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, co-written with Mark Olshaker, was the inspiration for the show. He was one of the very first criminal profilers, and he has written several books on the topic.

A profile on Douglas in the Telegraph gives an idea of how similar Douglas and Ford are, at least in the broad strokes. Like Ford, Douglas is a soft-spoken Brooklyn native who worked as a hostage negotiator and instructor at Quantico. Like Ford, Douglas realized serial killers were not simply monsters to lock in a dungeon, but potential wellsprings of insight and information that could lead to the capture of other serial offenders. Just as Ford uses his relationships with incarcerated killers to glean understanding about active killers, Douglas consulted with Ted Bundy for information that led to the capture of the Green River Killer (and thereby inspiring Clarice Starling's relationship with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs). Many small details on Mindhunter come from Douglas's recollections, including Charles Manson sitting on the back of a chair to seem taller than his interviewers.

Rounding out the trio of protagonists on Mindhunter is Dr. Wendy Carr, a psychology professor from Boston who tries to rein in Ford's wilder and more unconventional notions with something at least resembling professionalism and intellectual rigor. She is portrayed by Anna Torv, who previously worked with the fictional FBI solving space crimes on the show Fringe. Of the three main characters, Dr. Carr is the farthest from her real-life inspiration, but she is nevertheless loosely based on a psychiatric forensic nurse researcher named Ann Wolbert Burgess.

The real Ann Burgess told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Mindhunter shows "probably 80 percent of the cases pretty solid." She said many of the scenes of the main characters are true to life, even if fictionalized, as she said her role–like Dr. Carr's–was to bring methodology, research, and structure to what Douglas and Ressler were doing. Like Carr, Burgess is from Boston, but rather than a psychologist, she is a professor of psychiatric health nursing. Burgess said she suspected this change was to make the character's career a little more understandable, as most people don't properly understand nursing. Two major changes made for the show, however, are that unlike Dr. Carr, Burgess never moved to Quantico, and Burgess is not a lesbian, a character change that was apparently a source of some humor for Burgess's son.

In contrast to Ed Kemper, whose blasé attitude toward his own crimes and his almost pathological desire to help law enforcement lead him to readily confess every detail of his horrific deeds to Ford and Tench, the two agents have a much harder time with Jerry Brudos, known alternately as the "Lust Killer" or the "Shoe Fetish Slayer." It's not until Ford and Tench give Brudos a pair of shoes for him to, uh, enjoy that he opens up about his crimes, and even then he only talks about them in oblique terms, as if he were talking about someone else.

As Biography explains, Brudos's whole history as recounted on Mindhunter is accurate, from his fascination with women's footwear beginning with finding a pair of high heels in a junkyard at age five to his outwardly normal domestic life with a wife and children hiding his darker fetishes and grisly desires. As recounted in the show, Brudos's first murder was of a young encyclopedia saleswoman that he lured in by pretending to be interested in buying a set of books. As his string of murders continued, Brudos would collect trophies from his victims–clothes, shoes, and body parts–and he would photograph their dead bodies and dress in their clothes. Another interesting detail from the show is Brudos fixes Ford's broken tape recorder: Brudos worked as an electronics technician before his spree began.

One of the most notorious killers of all time doesn't make an onscreen appearance on Mindhunter until season two, partly because his infamous reign of terror ended just prior to the events of season one. That killer is David Berkowitz, perhaps better known by the nickname he gave himself, the Son of Sam. Berkowitz is played on the show by Oliver Cooper and some facial prosthetics, and his interview with Ford and Tench might be surprising to some viewers.

As Cosmopolitan recounts, Berkowitz caused panic in New York City by shooting six people in 1976 and 1977 and sending cryptic letters to the police in which he claimed to be acting under the orders of his neighbor's Labrador retriever, which was possessed by a demon. This story is well known because of the media uproar that surrounded Berkowitz's crimes and arrest. But on Mindhunter, Berkowitz admits the demon angle was all just a story to get attention. As Vulture explains, the real-life Berkowitz did admit to exaggerating many of his claims, and John Douglas claims he was never fooled by the whole "Son of Sam" thing. Additionally, Douglas and Ressler did actually consult Berkowitz over the letters sent by the killer who called himself BTK, just as Ford and Tench do on the show, as Berkowitz had also sent letters during his spree.

Although season two of Mindhunter sees its main characters interviewing some of the most notorious criminals of all time–including Charles Manson and Son of Sam–the spine of the season is made up of Agents Ford and Jim Barney working with a task force in Atlanta to uncover the so-called "Atlanta Child Killer," who is eventually alleged to be Wayne Williams, played with uncanny accuracy by Christopher Livingston. The hunt for this killer and the investigation of Williams make up the bulk of the action of season two.

If anything, Mindhunter actually undersells the scope of Williams's crimes. As Good Housekeeping explains, between 1979 and 1981 dozens of black boys and young men, as well as two black girls, were kidnapped and killed, with their bodies dumped in various places around Atlanta. This reign of terror threw Atlanta into a frenzy, and the families of the victims demanded justice and the apprehension of the killer (or killers, as many believed) responsible. Despite the belief within the community the killer was likely a member of the Ku Klux Klan, John Douglas (just like Holden Ford does on the show) argued the killer was probably black, as he would be less likely to be noticed in black neighborhoods and because serial killers rarely cross racial lines. A curfew was imposed in the city for children under 17, after which young adults began disappearing rather than children.

The Wayne Williams case was the first major public effort by John Douglas to prove the efficacy of the methods being developed by the BSU. In addition to his profile of a young black man proving correct, he also successfully advised prosecutors to keep Williams on the stand as long as possible and to goad him about his failures, which provoked a hostile reaction on the stand that ultimately led to his conviction. However, Douglas was officially censured by the FBI for publicly stating Williams was the likely perpetrator of a large number of the killings, not unlike Agent Ford finding himself in hot water for similar statements.

Just as depicted on Mindhunter, Williams was never convicted or even charged with the murders of any children, instead being convicted for the murders of two adults. Unlike most of the killers interviewed by Douglas and Ressler, Williams never confessed to any of his crimes and in fact denies responsibility. And as CNN reports, the mayor of Atlanta reopened the child killer cases in 2019 in order to use modern technology to finally determine a definite killer and provide closure for the families of the victims. According to the Mindhunter book, even Douglas does not believe forensic evidence points to Williams being the killer of more than half of the children lost in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, so the results of this new investigation will be interesting, to say the least.