How Robert Ressler Changed the Way We Catch Serial Killers

The Emergence of the Serial Killer Concept

Today the concept of a serial killer, and even the very term itself, is so ingrained in our cultures and in our minds that it’s almost impossible to imagine a point in time when we weren’t constantly talking about notorious murderers in podcasts and learning about them in videos. But the term “serial killer” has actually only been around since the 1970s, and before then, it wasn’t even really a thing that investigators even thought about.

Before the Term: A Time of Ignorance

Hard to believe, but true. Before then, anyone who went on a killing spree went widely unnoticed or was at the very most believed to be a particularly deranged criminal and sort of a one-off situation. The closest we’d come to thinking about the concept of potential “serial killers” was when the British were calling a string of murders “crimes in series.” As we all know, that barely scratches the surface of what the term serial killer means today.

Developing the Criminal Profile

Today, we have the general knowledge of whom serial killers tend to be, what kind of childhood they usually tend to have, and what kind of lives they usually live as adults. But where did all of the facts and statistics for that particular criminal profile come from? Who was the man who coined the term “serial killer?” Well, his name was Robert Ressler.

The Early Life of Robert Ressler

Robert Ressler grew up on North Marmora Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1940s and 50s. From a young age, he found himself drawn towards the sensationalized stories and news articles about killers, rapists, and other violent criminals. Far from terrorized or even repulsed by the men who seemed to make things go bump in the night, Robert wanted to know what made them tick. This urge to understand the very people who seemed to be wanting to tear civilized society apart at the seams only grew stronger when Robert found out that he actually knew a real-life serial killer.

The Personal Connection: John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy had grown up in the same neighborhood as Robert Ressler. They were even in the Boy Scouts together. When Robert realized that he had been face to face with a man who would later be convicted of a whopping thirty-three murders, he knew he had found his true calling.

The Journey into Criminal Profiling

Robert Ressler would do what he could to piece together the puzzle that was murderers and other violent criminals. They weren’t being called serial killers just yet, but society was beginning to understand that these murderers had things in common with each other, and if they had things in common, then maybe there was a way to pick up on their trails sooner rather than later and potentially stop future killings.

Education and Military Service

Robert set out on his journey. He first joined the army, where he was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, for two years. He then enrolled in the School of Criminology and Police Administration at Michigan State University. With this degree under his belt, Robert Ressler was one step closer to becoming the man who would forever shape criminal profiling all over the world.

From Military Service to the FBI

Rather than jumping straight into a career in law enforcement, Robert first returned to the army. He served as an MP from 1957 to 1962 and then was the Commander of a Criminal Investigation Division. It was then his job to solve homicides, robberies, and arson cases, and here we see the start of Robert’s burgeoning criminal profiling career.

The Behavioral Science Unit

Robert was finally getting hands-on experience, chasing, capturing, and interviewing the criminals that had fascinated him since he was a child. It was only the beginning of what was to come. The army then paid for him to return to Michigan to finish his master’s degree in police administration, and after two more years of service, Robert retired. Retired perhaps not being the correct term in this case because it was more like Robert retired from the military only to head straight into the FBI.

The Birth of the Term "Serial Killer"

You see, the FBI was putting together a new unit: the Behavioral Science Unit. This elite team of investigators were to go right to the source of some of the biggest and more heinous crimes across America and try to get to the root of the terror. They were charged with the task of gathering as much information and data as possible and putting together criminal profiles on some of America’s most dangerous criminals.

Interviewing Notorious Killers

Robert found himself staring down the rap sheet of men who had killed and killed again. They weren’t standalone instances of a deranged criminal simply being more cruel and more dangerous than the others. These killers usually struck seemingly at random and usually in a burst of violent activity. This sudden spree of murders that came out of nowhere reminded Robert of movie serials he’d watched as a child, and then everything seemed to click. He started calling these criminals “serial killers,” and the rest is history.

A Life in Danger: The Ed Kemper Interview

Between 1976 and 1979, Robert and his partner John Douglas began the unenviable task of sifting through data and statistics, so that they could put together a criminal profile for what a serial killer would typically look like. To do that, they had to speak with known serial killers themselves. Robert Ressler and John Douglas found themselves sitting across the table from infamous men like Charles Manson, Robert Speck, and “Son of Sam” himself, David Berkowitz.

Robert claimed that during these interviews, where they were left alone in a locked room with these men, most of the time he didn’t feel unsafe or uneasy when talking with them, even though they were known and convicted serial killers. But in his book Whoever Fights Monsters, Robert does recall one incident where he felt like his life was actually in danger.

It was during his third interview with notorious Ed Kemper, a serial killer who was over six feet nine inches tall and had decapitated his own mother. Over the course of this interview, Robert discovered that the buzzer to call the guards wasn’t working. This alone would be enough to shake most people, but Robert quickly found himself out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Not only did he notice that the buzzer wasn’t working, but Ed Kemper did as well. According to Robert, Ed then stood up and grinned. “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you?” he asked Robert. “I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

Robert left the interview shaken but otherwise unharmed and continued his work—work that has, needless to say, shaped the course of American investigative processes forevermore.

Creating Vi-CAP: A Revolutionary Tool

But that wasn’t all that Robert did. Now armed with all of this new information and a criminal profile for serial killers that could potentially help catch an untold number of serial killers in the future, Robert needed a way to share it with as many investigative agencies as possible.

He and a retired detective from the LAPD named Pierce Brooks set up Vi-CAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. This is a centralized computer database for information on ongoing or unsolved homicides across the country. Again, this may sound almost like common sense or that it should be a given that law enforcement offices would have something like this, or even just share information with each other, but for America, this was a first.

The Impact of Vi-CAP

Up until this point, it was incredibly common that serial killers would evade capture by committing crimes across multiple jurisdictions, like we saw with people like Ted Bundy. Law enforcement from these jurisdictions would then individually investigate the killings, not knowing that their counterparts across state lines were doing exactly the same thing and could potentially move the investigation along quicker.

Vi-CAP not only helped law enforcement offices communicate on ongoing investigations, but it then helped piece together vital information on killers’ modus operandi and where they were likely to strike again.

Legacy and Later Years

With this new program, Robert made history yet again and became known as the father of modern criminal profiling. He worked on several huge cases, like Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard Chase, and was asked to confer on several others, like the ABC murders in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the ongoing femicide murders in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Final Years and Death

He officially retired from the FBI in 1990, but his work still continued. As well as giving advice and counsel where he could, Robert wrote several books, gave lectures, and traveled internationally to aid in ongoing investigations. That was until 2013. Robert, unfortunately, had Parkinson’s disease, which had severely hindered his ability to travel and work in his later years. He eventually died because of this condition at his home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, at the age of seventy-six.