The Prequel to Mindhunter: How Dr. James Brussell Created the World of Criminal Profiling

Read Michael Cannell's exclusive guest post about Dr. James Brussell, the psychiatrist who pioneered criminal profiling, then make sure you're signed in and comment below for a chance to win a signed copy of Incendiary!

It’s impossible to switch on a television these days without running across a profiling drama. They’re everywhere—Criminal Minds, The Blacklist, Hannibal, Law and Order, to name a few. Those meaty-faced FBI agents populate the TV dial, their hands on coffee cups and ties loosened, earnestly picking over forensics and conjuring suspects out of thin air. We all used to watch Friends. Now, the TV switcher leads us to humanity’s darkest reaches.

Our collective fixation with profiling is on the upswing with the success of Mindhunter, a much-discussed new Netflix series based on a 1996 memoir by FBI Profiler John Douglas. Set in the 1970s, Mindhunter loosely recalls the real-life story of two special agents—eventually joined by a behavioral psychologist—who plumb criminal pathology by interviewing incarcerated serial killers. Working from a windowless room several floors beneath the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, they categorize the personality types prone to serial crimes. “How do we get ahead of crazy,” one agent says, “if we don’t know how crazy thinks?”

Mindhunter presents itself as an account of profiling’s genesis. In fact, the FBI adopted profiling from a New York psychiatrist. Mindhunter, it turns out, has a prequel, which can found in my book, Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling.

You wouldn’t know it from watching Mindhunter, but profiling originated with a serial bomber loose in the streets of New York. For a long, harrowing stretch of the 1950s, a paranoid schizophrenic convulsed the city with terror. He planted 32 homemade explosives in public places—train stations, movie theaters, subway stops, the main branch of the public library.

In the early stages of his 16-year campaign, the mystery bomber—perpetually hidden in city shadows—shrewdly placed his devices to incite panic but not cause injury. One of his debut bombs, for example, exploded in a corridor beneath Grand Central Terminal. It blasted shrapnel through the concourse and filled the hallways with billows of black smoke at the height of rush hour, but it spared commuters harm.

Over time, the bomber turned more malicious. By 1956, he was doling out more powerful bombs and shrewdly placing them in crowded movie theaters and other places where dense crowds congregated. In a series of letters to the New York Journal-American—an afternoon newspaper of scrappy disposition—he threatened death and dismemberment.

By now, the vaunted NYPD looked like fools. The famously tough-minded New York detectives stumbled and fumbled, which a harassing band of newspaper reporters detailed at every turn. “Seldom in the history of New York,” wrote the Associated Press, “has a case proved such a torment to police.”


You wouldn’t know it from watching Mindhunter, but profiling originated with a serial bomber loose in the streets of New York.


With the manhunt reaching critical urgency in December 1956, Captain Howard Finney—bomb squad commander—took the unprecedented step of asking Dr. James Brussel, a psychiatrist, what the forensic evidence might reveal about the bomber’s troubled inner life. What strange sort of person was he, and what wounding life experience led to his murderous avocation?

Dr. Brussel, who ran the New York mental asylums, had a theory that he could define an unknown serial offender by their behavior. He called it “reverse psychology.” (The term profiling would not be coined for another two decades.) Years of work among the violent asylum patients had taught him that deviants had their own logic. If Brussel could enter into their mindset, he theorized, he could decode their behavior.

On a December afternoon, Captain Finney deposited two satchels of evidence on Dr. Brussel’s desk. Using a mix of Freudian theory, deductive reasoning, and intuition, Dr. Brussel described the fugitive right down to the cut of his jacket. A month later, detectives knocked on the door of a bedraggled house in Waterbury, Connecticut. The man who answered was, in fact, the bomber. He matched Dr. Brussel’s description almost exactly. This is profiling’s origin story, the critical event that launched an entire field of criminology. 

Dr. Brussel would employ his “reverse psychology” to help police in a string of subsequent high-profile cases, including the Boston Strangler. Newspapers called him “the Sherlock Holmes of the couch.” A young FBI agent named Howard Teten read the accounts of Dr. Brussel’s work with great interest. In 1973, he visited Dr. Brussel—by then retired—at his Greenwich Village apartment. Teten offered to pay Dr. Brussel a fee—whatever his hourly rate as a psychoanalyst might be—to share his methodology. The FBI couldn’t afford his rates, Dr. Brussel answered. So he helped Teten for free.

Dr. Brussel’s story ends where Mindhunter begins, with the FBI taking its first steps toward becoming a national clearinghouse for crime data and forensic analysis, translating autopsies and crime-scene photos into profiles of uncanny accuracy.

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Michael Cannell is the author of The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism. He was editor of the New York Times House & Home section for seven years and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.

Comments

  1. John Quiring

    Sounds interesting.

  2. John Smith

    Profiling is pretty amazing and cool!

  3. peter gladue

    Amazing to see the REAL people who started before all that CSI Stuff on TV

  4. Jennifer Hodges

    Fascinating subject. Looking forward to reading this!

  5. Gordon Bingham

    Took a class in kinesic interviewing techniques once…these guys are good…

  6. James Joyce

    Inside the minds of those who go inside the minds…

  7. Sally Schmidt

    Fascinating.

  8. Todd Henson

    Fascinating bit of history here. Would love to read more.

  9. Daniel Morrell

    looks interesting

  10. Carol Kubala

    Read John Douglas’ book years ago, am watching Mindhunter and like many have an interest in the history of profiling to solve crime. I’d love to win a copy of Incendiary.

  11. Jeanette Jackson

    This is a book I’d really like to read. Please enter me.

  12. Halil cakir

    I found it interesting, thanks for it.

  13. Susanne Troop

    Sounds great!

  14. berritt

    this looks fascinating. i have read many books about profiling. it is something i thought i would be good at. i would love to win this book!

  15. Esther Whatley

    This book sounds fascinating. Would love to win it.

  16. berritt

    i cannot log in. i even got a new password. i STILL wish to enter to win this glorious book. please. make it so. somehow? it looks so amazing. so very good. please. thank you very much.

  17. lasvegasnv

    looks interesting

  18. Carl

    Sounds fascinating. True crime at its finest. I’d love to have a copy. Thanks

  19. Jackie Wisherd

    I would thoroughly enjoy reading about criminal profiling. I must read this book.

  20. Karen Mikusak

    Would love to win!

  21. Karen Martin

    Very interested here in the originas of criminal profiling, so would love to read this book.

  22. Patrick Murphy

    This sounds fascinating

  23. Travis B. Donnelly

    Been interested in criminal psychology, forensics, forensic entomology, etc. for quite a while. Fascinated with sociopathic and psychopathic behavior as regards both criminal behavior and dealing with the unidentified sociopath down the street……Would love a copy of this new book!

  24. Travis Donnelly

    Been interested in criminal psychology, forensics, forensic entomology, etc. for quite a while. Fascinated with sociopathic and psychopathic behavior as regards both criminal behavior and dealing with the unidentified sociopath down the street……Would love a copy of this new book!

  25. MARGARET GAWLEY

    Love to learn about the history of criminal profiling….

  26. helen martin

    Very interesting. Love what he covers.

  27. Barbara Bibel

    This is a fascinating bit of history. I would love to read it.

  28. Lori P

    I wonder if my interest in criminal profiling was spurred by reading John Douglas’s memoir when it first came out. ‘Incendiary’ sounds like a fascinating dive into modern history, er, a blast from the past.

  29. Mary Gilles

    This book sounds fascinating. I can’t wait to read it. I keep wondering why so many of us are interested in this genre of literature. I haven’t figured it out.

  30. Ms Eddie Jenkins

    This subject fascinates me. Thanks for bringing this book to my attention.

  31. Vernon Luckert

    Very interesting. I would like to learn how criminal profiling works

  32. Michael Carter

    I’m on fire!
    Yes, please enter me in this sweepstakes.
    Thanks —

  33. Douglass Abramson

    Very interested in this

  34. Crystal Blackburn

    I’d never heard of Dr. Brussel until I read this article. Now I want to know more. I’d love to win a copy of this book.

  35. elsie321

    sounds like a good read

  36. elsie321

    sounds like a good read

  37. Janet Gould

    looks like a great book

  38. Janet Gould

    looks like a great book

  39. Desmond Warzel

    Count me in, please!

  40. Carole Knoles

    Fascinatin’ Stuff!

  41. susan beamon

    I tried to watch Mindhunter. I found it too dark, by which I mean the sets seemed to all be at night or deep in a coalmine. I could see next to nothing, so the story meant very little and didn’t keep my interest. I would rather read true crime than watch the stiff actors those shows love to use.

  42. Janice Milliken

    Genius!

  43. Rhonda Barkhouse

    I read Mindhunter years ago and loved it. I would love to read this as well.

  44. Rhonda Barkhouse

    I read Mindhunter years ago and loved it. I would love to read this as well.

  45. Samara

    This is what my daughter is studying in college. I think this would be a perfect book for her!

  46. vicki wurgler

    interesting about criminal profiling-love to read this book

  47. Robert Grieco

    I’m extremely interested in reading this book. Fingers crossed!

  48. Beth Talmage

    There are a lot of books on this topic, but I’d trust the one by Michael Cannell.

  49. Saundra K. Warren

    I’m all in!!

  50. Libraryman

    Sometimes I think in trying to show how smart we are getting and how we got there we tell the criminals too much.

  51. Jim Belcher

    Sometimes I think in trying to show how smart we are getting and how we got there we tell the criminals too much.

  52. john frost

    AS A TEENAGER IN THE 50’S I REMENBER THE MAD BOMBER VERY WELL HAVING BEEN TERRIFIED OF GOING TO MOVIE THEATERS IN NYC. WOULD LOVE TO READ THIS!

  53. Laurent Latulippe

    This sounds fascinating.

  54. Peter W. Horton Jr.

    I like to solve things! Yes!

  55. Barbara Bates

    Very interesting!

  56. Noel wheeler

    Very interested!

  57. Carolyn

    Would love to learn more about criminal profiling and how it developed!

  58. Karen Hester

    I would like to learn more about the history of profiling.

  59. Charlee

    We just finished watching Mindhunter. I’d love a copy of this!

  60. Charlee Griffith

    We just finished watching Mindhunter. I’d love a copy of this!

  61. Abigail Gibson

    Loved the Netfilx series. Looking forward to reading the book.

  62. Sandy Klocinski

    Sounds awesome! I am looking forward to reading it. Profiling has always been an interest of mine

  63. JAMES LYNAM

    “CANNELL” is one of my favorites.

  64. Kirsten Kimball

    Thank you so much for this opportunity. This is a subject that has fascinated me for a long time.

  65. HESTER MAYO

    Verrrry interesting…

  66. Shannon Baas

    I would like this.

  67. Tammy Z Evans

    Mindhunter is a favorite of mine, I can’t wait to read this.

  68. Veronica Sandberg

    fascinating…see how things work out

  69. Veronica Sandberg

    fascinating…see how things work out

  70. Susan Smoaks

    thank you for the chance to win

  71. Mallory Bailey

    Sounds interesting! Thanks for the chance!

  72. Mallory Bailey

    Sounds interesting! Thanks for the chance!

  73. Lorena Keech

    A very interesting subject, would love to read the book.

  74. Lorena Keech

    A very interesting subject, would love to read the book.

  75. Stephanie Liske

    Thank you.

  76. julie hawkins

    I’d like,to read this.

  77. Linda Leonard

    Profiling is all that! Would very much like to read this book.

  78. Ed Nemmers

    I would like to read the work of Michael Cannell.

  79. Lisa Pecora

    I would like to read this.

  80. Tricha Leary

    sounds great

  81. Leela

    Thanks for the giveaway!

  82. Linda Peters

    this would be an interesting read, thanks

  83. Brandy Schwartz

    Thanks for the giveaway. I would love to read this one.

  84. Sand Lopez

    Sounds facinating!

  85. Betty Curran

    This sounds like and very interesting book. I’d love to read it.

  86. Buddy Garrett

    It’s very interesting. Thanks.

  87. Heather Cowley

    This is a must-read, I’m sure!

  88. Richard Hicks

    Hope to read soon!

Comments are closed.