EDITOR’S NOTE: This article contains graphic descriptions of homicide and assault. Please read with care.
A month after Lyle and Erik Menendez were arrested for brutally slaying their parents inside their Beverly Hills home, Dr. Ann Burgess entered the Los Angeles County Jail with a stack of blank paper and a set of colored pencils.
It was April 1990, and the maelstrom around Jose and Kitty Menendez’s double murder – and the brothers’ forthcoming trial – had reached a fever pitch. News articles described the crime scene in gory, painstaking detail. Prosecutors and tabloids portrayed the brothers as greedy, calculated, cold-blooded killers.
But inside the jail’s visitation room, Burgess recalls she politely asked the prison guards to remove Erik Menendez’s handcuffs.
They hesitated before relenting.
Burgess, a psychiatric clinical nurse specializing in working with victims of trauma and abuse, cut a petite frame which was offset by her large-rimmed glasses.
She had spent decades studying, profiling and ultimately helping investigators stop some of the country’s most prolific offenders.
That expertise was why she was sitting across from Erik Menendez.
She had been hired by the defense team to uncover exactly what had happened on that bloody Sunday in 1989. And so, she asked Erik to start drawing.
Burgess was among the earliest women to work with the FBI and a key member of what was known as the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit in the late ’70s.
That team has since been dubbed “Mindhunters” because they willingly delve into the darkest parts of the human psyche to better understand what motivates a murderer. What they uncover could make even the most hardened detectives blanch.
And while criminal profiling is not an exact science, it is a method investigators increasingly lean on to identify warning signs of a would-be killer.
CNN spoke to former profilers – all women like Dr. Burgess who worked with the FBI – who have pioneered and practiced ways to connect the dots between evidence and psychology to help solve and prevent crimes.
“You start very slowly,” the now 88-year-old told CNN of her approach with Menendez. “You start with, ‘How far back can you remember?’ … and gradually get up to, ‘When did you first have this idea of what you wanted to do to your parents?’”
Burgess said she spent 50 hours interviewing Menendez and, as she recounts in her latest book, she was later called as an “expert witness” to testify about how Erik and Lyle’s decision to confront their father over what they alleged was years of sexual abuse could have provoked enough fear for them to commit a double murder.
She’s since been accused of profiling Menendez as a way to excuse or justify the brothers’ crimes, but Burgess staunchly rejects that characterization.
“You’ve got to do it for prevention,” she said. “You have to learn something from this.”
That, she says, is the question that drives most criminal profilers: How can we prevent the next murder?
The search for a silver lining
The trial of Bryan Kohberger – the man who brutally murdered four University of Idaho students inside their off-campus home – ended in July before it ever truly began when he accepted a plea deal that saw him sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of an appeal or parole.
Kohberger sat impassively throughout the hearing as the loved ones of each of the four students whose lives he so callously ended repeatedly asked him the same question: Why?
And when he was finally given the opportunity to answer their questions, he said, “I respectfully decline.”
That decision further fueled the mystery around his motive for murdering Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Kaylee Goncalves.
“There’s no reason for these crimes that could approach anything resembling rationality,” Idaho District Judge Steven Hippler said during Kohberger’s sentencing. “The more we try to extract a reason, the more power and control we give to him.”
But, he added, investigators and researchers may wish to study his actions – if only to learn how to prevent similar crimes from occurring in the future.
Indeed, academics and former FBI profilers told CNN the challenge of unravelling the criminal mind of a man like Bryan Kohberger is enticing. And while his trial may be over, in many ways, the story of what can be learned from his crimes may have only just begun.
“We want to squeeze any silver lining that we can out of these tragedies,” said Molly Amman, a retired profiler who spent years leading the FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center.
“The silver lining is anything we can use to prevent another crime. It starts with learning absolutely, positively everything about the person and the crime that we possibly can.”
Only Kohberger knows
Even seasoned police officers who arrived at 1122 King Road on November 13, 2022, struggled to process the brutality of the crime scene.
All four victims had been ruthlessly stabbed to death before the attacker vanished through the kitchen’s sliding glass door and into the night.
“The female lying on the left half of the bed … was unrecognizable,” one officer would later write of the attack that killed Kaylee Goncalves. “I was unable to comprehend exactly what I was looking at while trying to discern the nature of the injuries.”
Initial interviews with the two surviving housemates gave investigators a loose timeline and a general description of the killer – an athletic, White male who wore a mask that covered most of his face – but little else.
Police later found a Ka-Bar knife sheath next to Madison’s body that would prove to be critical in capturing her killer.
One of the surviving housemates told police about a month before the attacks, Kaylee saw “a dark figure staring at her from the tree line when she took her dog Murphy out to pee.”
“There has been lighthearted talk and jokes made about a stalker in the past,” the officer noted. “All the girls were slightly nervous about it being a fact, though.”
But after years of investigating the murders, detectives told CNN they were never able to establish a connection between Kohberger and any of the victims, or a motive.
Kohberger is far from the first killer to deny families and survivors the catharsis that comes with confessing, in detail, to his crimes. But that, former FBI profilers tell CNN, is part of what makes the prospect of studying him infuriating and intriguing.
Only Kohberger knows why.
Julia Cowley, a former FBI profiler who now hosts the true crime podcast, “The Consult,” has another theory for Kohberger’s courtroom silence: humiliation.
“He didn’t outsmart people like he thought he would,” she said. “He failed. And to talk about it, he’s talking about something that could be what he considers a pretty deep personal failure.”
Besides, she added, more often than not, agents are tasked with crafting profiles without direct input from the killer. In those instances, she said, they let his actions speak for themselves.
That’s the task Cowley said she faced when her team at the FBI set out to construct a profile of a serial offender who had eluded capture for nearly four decades:
The Golden State Killer.
Connecting the dots
California’s suburbs were terrorized for years by a series of crimes that graduated from ransacking to rape and then murder.
The Visalia Ransacker. The East Area Rapist. The Original Night Stalker.
Although investigators cycled through suspects and monikers, it turns out the crimes were all committed by the same man: The Golden State Killer.
But it would take decades for them to connect all the dots.
His first survivor would later tell the FBI she was startled from her sleep to find a man wearing a ski mask lurking in her bedroom doorway. He swiftly pounced on her bed, slashed her face with a knife, and tied her hands behind her back, she said.
Then, the assault began. It was June 18, 1976.
“After it was all over and done with, he went through the stuff in the room, took money out of my purse … and took a piece of jewelry,” the survivor told the bureau in a 2016 interview.
She lay there for hours after he disappeared, too scared to move in case her attacker was still nearby. Between 1976 and 1986, California investigators searched in vain for the suspect behind 12 homicides, 45 rapes, and 120 burglaries, according to the FBI.
But then, the murders abruptly stopped, and the cases remained unsolved for more than 40 years.
In 2011, investigators in Sacramento reached out to the BAU to construct a new criminal profile of the man who would come to be known as the Golden State Killer.
As the lead profiler on the case, Cowley said she and her team spent countless hours poring over police reports, timelines and victim interviews. And soon, they began to notice patterns.
The killer would often steal an earring from the pair and didn’t seem to solely target items of value. Then, as the assaults escalated to homicides, Cowley said his behavior led many on the team to suspect he had a background in law enforcement.
The suspect would often use a flashlight to blind his victims, she said, and he seemed comfortable putting them in restraints.
“He was able to escalate directly to deadly force without hesitation,” she recalled to CNN. “When he was met with resistance, it didn’t seem to faze him when he used a weapon.”
The proposed connection between a prolific offender and the police rankled some within the bureau, Cowley said, including her supervisor, who directed her to revise their conclusion.
“I did end up telling investigators that we believed he had some sort of ‘formal firearms training,’” she said of the team’s final report.
But it was the suspect’s more idiosyncratic behaviors that would ultimately prove to be his downfall. Over time, the team concluded the ransacking and burglaries were just as important to the suspect as the assaults and homicides, she said.
And that put her in mind of another elusive offender: The Visalia Ransacker.
In the mid-1970s, the tiny farming town of Visalia, California, was plagued by a serial ransacker and rapist. Cowley said investigators had dismissed the possible connection between the culprit in Visalia and the East Area Rapist, who began operating around the same time, because the composite sketches and descriptions from survivors did not match.
Still, “I just saw many behaviors that just seemed too similar to not be connected,” she said.
The Ransacker would construct makeshift alarms by placing objects on doorknobs. If someone came home, the objects would crash, alerting him to their presence. He also frequently stole one earring from the pair, and it appeared important to him that his victims knew he had been there – in one instance, Cowley said, he poured orange juice all over a bed.
And those bizarre behaviors also mirrored the East Area Rapist. He seemed to enjoy terrorizing couples, and he would break in and tie up his victims.
Then, “he often spent hours in the home. He would eat their food, he would go through their cabinets, he was very loud, gulping things – making his presence very known,” she said.
“He did things like put fragile objects on the backs of the male victims – cups and saucer dishes, things like that – so if the victims moved, the items would fall and break,” she added.
In 1975, a college professor named Claude Snelling was shot and killed in Visalia while trying to stop a gunman from kidnapping his teenage daughter.
Cowley said she was convinced the unsolved case was the Golden State Killer’s first homicide.
So, she and her team generated a profile of the killer based on the investigator’s evidence. They also performed what the FBI calls a “linkage analysis,” detailing all the ways the Visalia Ransacker and the East Area Rapist’s crimes could be connected.
And although it didn’t immediately point to a culprit, Cowley said it would ultimately help investigators find a break in the case.
“Profiling doesn’t identify offenders, and it doesn’t solve crimes. It helps to inform investigators … It helps to perhaps prioritize suspects,” she said.
On April 24, 2018, Sacramento police arrested Joseph James DeAngelo and charged him with 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 felony counts of kidnapping.
He did not face charges for rape because the statute of limitations had expired.
But Cowley and her team had been right about his law enforcement background – DeAngelo was a former California police officer and Vietnam War veteran.
Now 79, DeAngelo was captured, in part, because investigators matched DNA found at the crime scenes against DNA they’d found on the handle of a car door and a tissue in his garbage can.
“Because (we’d) linked certain crimes together, when (investigators) did the forensic genetic genealogy, they had more data points,” Cowley said. “So, they were able to identify him sooner than they would have.”
In 2020, DeAngelo pleaded guilty to 26 counts of murder and kidnapping and admitted to a further 161 crimes connected to 61 victims.
When she learned of his plea, Cowley said her first thought was of the investigators she’d worked with over the years.
“There had been so many times in the past where they thought they had the suspect,” she said. “So many of the investigators were very close with the victims and their families and I just thought about all the emotions that must be running through everyone.”
“I was just happy and relieved that there was an answer – that it was going to be resolved.”
‘The business of prevention’
But a profiler’s ultimate – and most elusive – goal is to recognize behavioral patterns and stop a crime before it even starts.
That was Molly Amman’s job at the Behavioral Threat Assessment Center within the FBI. Though she has since retired from the bureau and now works as a private consultant, Amman said that goal has never wavered.
“I’m in the business of prevention,” she said. “That’s all I do is try to assess, mitigate and prevent acts of targeted violence.”
Amman said her work focused on researching, analyzing and training the community to spot what the FBI calls “pre-attack behaviors” – the sometimes-subtle warning signs that a person could soon commit an act of violence.
Over the past four or so decades, Amman said, researchers have assembled “a picture of what we think more or less captures the universe of known pre-attack behaviors.”
Whether it’s a stalker, an active shooter, or a family annihilator, Amman said criminology researchers and the FBI have found that behaviors – like fixating on a perceived grievance or potential victim, or informing a third party of the intent to commit a violent crime – “hold true across multiple contexts of murder.”
“So now that we understand that, we are out training police departments and security people and school professionals – whoever we can get – on these pre-attack warning behaviors and what they mean.”
When a person of concern is flagged to law enforcement or consultants like Amman, they quickly assess the risk of imminent violence and look for ways to intervene to manage or reduce the threat, she said.
“The devil is in the details,” she said. “Some warning behaviors are more closely correlated with violence and even imminence of violence than others, and so that’s where your training comes into play.”
Options for intervention range from monitoring the person or hardening a target like a school, Amman said, or, in more extreme cases, invoking red flag laws or involuntarily committing someone.
But always, the goal is to intervene and interrupt the ramp-up to violence. And success is often inconspicuous.
“Your next question might be, ‘Well, how many times has that prevented violence?’ And my answer is always going to be, ‘I don’t know because we can’t prove what never happened,’” Amman said.
“My experience has been that … if we can identify those behaviors and recognize that this is someone who needs assistance … then we can change the course of events.
“And that’s what it’s all about.”
Not excusing, understanding
When she first met Erik Menendez, Burgess would later say how she was intrigued by the fact that he did not seem to fit the typical profile of what she describes as a “cold-blooded killer.”
“There’s a line people cross when they commit something horrific. It changes them,” she writes in “Expert Witness.”
“But Erik had none of that. He was different.”
Burgess would come to attribute that difference to the trauma Menendez and his brother say they experienced, claiming years of being sexually abused by their father.
That day in April 1990, as Erik sketched crude stick figures of his family’s life, Burgess says Menendez told her that – mere days before the murders – he and Lyle had confronted their parents about their father’s alleged sexual abuse and molestation. They later testified that they feared for their lives.
“I’m not going to let you touch my little brother … ever … again,” Burgess says Menendez scrawled beneath a hastily scribbled drawing of Lyle and “Dad.”
Then, “almost as if in a trance,” he mimed lifting a shotgun and opening fire.
During the first trial, Burgess’ testimony about the combined effects that sexual abuse, trauma and fear can have on both the mind and body helped underpin the defense team’s “imperfect self-defense” argument.
The brothers thought their lives were in danger after confronting their parents, their lawyer argued, and so they conspired to commit a murder.
“Obviously, it resonated with half of the jury, because that’s the way they voted,” Burgess said. “The women felt that the brothers were scared and felt that something was going to happen to them, whereas the men were just the opposite.”
The first Menendez trial ended with a hung jury. During the retrial, Judge Stanley Weisberg made the consequential decision to limit testimony about sexual abuse and prohibit the use of the “imperfect self-defense” strategy.
Lyle and Erik Menendez were both convicted of first-degree murder and have spent more than 35 years behind bars. Last month, they were denied parole.
In hindsight, some culprits seem obvious.
Kohberger’s classmates described him as “creepy” and “domineering.” He became known on campus for his unblinking stares, and multiple female students told investigators he would follow them after class.
“There’s been a sort of picture painted of him, of a controlled, sort of quietly narcissistic, mildly exploitive kind of guy,” Amman said.
And yet, the gruesome attacks on King Road were the exact opposite.
“Once he got in their bedroom, I would not call those crimes terribly controlled – they were quite savage,” Amman said.
The contradiction, she added, speaks to a deeper truth about the human condition – we’re all far more nuanced and complicated than we seem – and that’s why criminal profiling is key.
“It’s not about excusing, it’s about understanding,” Amman said. “I can understand it, and that is what gives me the power to do what I do, which is to try to stop them, catch them or prevent them.”
Inevitably, Burgess said, after the battery of lawyers have disappeared and the camera lights have faded, the reality of life in prison sets in for many convicts.
That, she said, is when a killer like Bryan Kohberger will be primed to speak.
And he may provide a detail that could help stop the next killer.
“This is not the first time a mass murderer has carried out a plan,” Burgess said.
“You want to compare this with other cases to see, ‘Where could he have been stopped earlier?”