Mindhunters | Criminal Profiling

Losing It

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker On September 12, 2013 · 3 Comments

Steven Hayes

“I just started to lose it.”

“I just snapped.”

“I wasn’t thinking right; I don’t know what I was thinking. It was so unlike me. I’d never done anything like that.”

Are these the words of someone who threw a sucker punch in a bar . . . cut off another driver in high-speed traffic . . . a man horrified that he slapped his wife in the heat of a domestic argument . . . or maybe an honor student who inexplicably froze when he opened the first page of his SAT booklet?

No, these are the words of 50-year-old Steven Hayes who, along with his partner in crime Joshua Komisarjevsky, 33, in 2007 broke into the Cheshire, Connecticut home of Dr. William Petit, his wife Jennifer Hawke-Petit and their daughters Hayley and Michaela. William, the only survivor, was beaten nearly to death with a baseball bat. Jennifer and Michaela were raped, Jennifer was strangled to death and the two girls were tied to their beds just before the house was set on fire.

Really, though, it was all some big misunderstanding. “To this day I don’t know why it happened. I just wanted money. That’s all I was looking for.”

Maybe we can shed some light on that for you, Mr. Hayes.

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Prosecutorial Overreach?

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker On July 8, 2013 · 20 Comments

George Zimmerman

There is, perhaps, no single more important decision a prosecutor makes than determining what to charge a defendant with in a given action. With the lessons of the Casey Anthony trial still fresh in our minds, we wonder whether the decision to charge George Zimmerman with second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, was a strategic overreach that could doom the chances of obtaining a conviction of any sort.

We are not here to judge Mr. Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. That is up to the jury. But let’s take a look at what we know and don’t know.

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The Perfect Character

By Mark Olshaker On March 2, 2013 · 3 Comments

John Douglas

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I’d been looking for John Douglas my entire professional life.

I made my living as a documentary film writer-producer and happened into the thriller genre almost by accident. I saw a small article in the newspaper noting that when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain had been removed from his skull for scientific study, but after more than two decades, nothing substantial about the physical nature of genius had been revealed.

TheBigThrill.org

TSA: Security Theater?

By Mark Olshaker On February 22, 2013 · 2 Comments

TSA

The latest ham-fisted outrage from the Transportation Security Administration occurred February 8 when officers manning the security line at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport demanded that three-year-old, wheelchair bound Lucy Forck, who suffers from spina bifida, submit to a complete body pat-down and have her wheelchair screened separately. This was Lucy’s first flight, and she and her mom and dad were on their way to a long-anticipated trip to Disney World. First thing the officials did was take away her stuffed animal and make her cry. The reason we even know about this is because her mom Annie Schulte shot cell phone video of the incident and courageously posted it online. A TSA official at the scene told her it was illegal to tape the event. It is not.

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Dead Wrong

By Mark Olshaker On January 17, 2013 · 7 Comments

Robert Gleason, Jr.

A little after 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, forty-two year-old Robert Gleason, Jr. was executed at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. He opted for electrocution over the now more widely used lethal injection. He had murdered three men, the first in 2007 in connection with drug gang activity and the other two in prison – in 2009 and 2010, the second of those in the Red Onion “supermax” State Prison.

Capital punishment opponents declared that these two prison killings were a perfect example of why the death penalty should be abolished.

Huh? But wait. It’s a little more nuanced than that.

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