BC's Ann Burgess is a Mastermind

Ann Wolbert grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, back when girls who wanted a career after college had two choices: teaching or nursing. It was somewhat by default that she chose the latter, she told me, sitting back in her office chair. Three of her uncles had been doctors, and when she was just 10 or 11, one of them—Uncle Frank, a country doctor—began letting her help deliver babies. (“A couple of days later, he’d find a box of apples on his porch,” Burgess said. “That’s the way they did it in the country.”)

For college, she enrolled at Boston University. On her first day in the school’s nursing program, she recalled, “They’re saying, ‘Look to your right and look to your left. They probably won’t be here when you graduate.’” It was the clinical work—physically and emotionally grueling—that led many prospective nurses to quit, Burgess said. But she loved all of it, especially once her clinical work landed her in the psychiatric unit at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. It was a long way from delivering babies, or helping people recover from an illness. “I was fascinated by human behavior and the variations that you can have,” she said. “I could not learn enough.”

On a March afternoon in the basement of Cushing Hall, Professor Burgess was leading a roomful of students through a detailed PowerPoint presentation about the disturbing crimes of a man named Henry Wallace, who killed a number of women during the 1990s in Charlotte, North Carolina. Burgess laid out the facts of the case: Wallace had eleven victims, all single black women. One was a “date,” and two had children. Projected on the screen, photos showed the crime scenes as they were found, including the bodies of victims. Other slides listed Wallace’s confessed methods of murder and his motivations, which included “no reason” and “I got carried away.” Still others explored Wallace’s personal history, such as the facts that he was beaten daily as a child, was ridiculed by his mother, sisters, and neighborhood girls, and first had sex at age 4 or 5.

The presentation was part of a class Burgess teaches called Forensic Mental Health. The course, as it happens, is a lot like an episode of Mindhunter. Over the semester, students study the mindsets and personal histories of violent offenders through real crimes that Burgess worked on—and not always in the service of law enforcement. Burgess sometimes works for defense teams. In the case of Wallace, for instance, she acted as an expert witness on behalf of his lawyers as they argued that, given the facts of his past and the often-impulsive nature of his crimes, he should be sentenced to life in prison rather than death. “He did very well for a length of time, was a cheerleader in high school, was in the service,” Burgess told the class. “Everybody liked Henry. He got married and was doing well until something happened and he just deteriorated.” (Wallace received nine death sentences in 1997 and remains on death row in North Carolina. He sometimes sends polite notes and greeting cards to Burgess.)

The point of the lessons in Forensic Mental Health is to help students understand the connection between criminals and their crimes. “Forensics helps bridge the gap between the patient and the law using observation, evidence, any kind of incident that interfaces with the law,” Burgess told me later. “We teach students what is evidence, how to observe, how to assess. It’s useful for any student, even those who don’t go into nursing or medicine or law.” It turns out to be useful for non-students, as well. Wallace’s attorney, James Cooney, told me that he learned quite a bit from Burgess. “Ann taught me then and since to take a new approach to every case,” he said.  “There’s what your client remembers, or says, happened and then there’s what really happened. That’s where the profiling comes in.”

Of all of Burgess’s accomplishments, though, the most profound and lasting just may be the way she has expanded the definition of what it means to be a nurse. By the time the term “forensic nursing” was created in the nineties, Burgess had been practicing in the field for decades. “As a nurse coming up, it was very much stay in your lane,” said Annie Lewis-O’Connor, a former Burgess student who went on to found the C.A.R.E. Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which aids the victims of domestic and sexual violence and human trafficking. “Most people worked in clinics or hospitals. She really got me thinking about the work I wanted to do outside the discipline and helped give me the confidence to do so.”

These days, forensic criminal investigation is such a bedrock component of law enforcement that it has spawned an entire subgenre of movies, books, and TV shows. But back in the seventies, when Burgess and Holmstrom conducted their study of rape victims, the work was so revolutionary that it caught the attention of the FBI. In fact, when Burgess was contacted by the agency, it was then-Director William Webster himself who called. In 1978, he invited her to the FBI academy to teach agents about what talking to victims had helped her learn about rapists. So Burgess began spending time in Quantico, Virginia, leading classes about how to talk to victims and how to catalog and interpret the information that came out of those interview sessions. In the afternoons, after teaching, she’d sit around with agents who were working unsolved cases, and they’d use evidence collected from crime scenes to try to glean information about the offender, such as his age, occupation, place of residence, and mindset.

At the time, the FBI agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler had already begun trying to understand the criminal mind by conducting interviews with imprisoned serial killers. Douglas became interested in a study that Burgess had recently conducted, this one about predicting heart attacks in men with certain variables. Douglas wanted to know whether Burgess’s methods could be used to understand the variables that might contribute to the making not of a heart attack, but of a murderer. To Burgess, teaming up with Douglas and Ressler would mean the chance to expand on what she’d learned from her rape study about violent offenders and the victims they chose. The project would also allow her to contribute a much-needed female perspective to the world of investigating sexualized male-on-female crime. “There were victims that I wanted to speak for,” she told me, “because they didn’t survive.”

In 1995, Douglas wrote Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, a book that detailed the team’s work. Mindhunter is based on that book, and Douglas serves as a consultant on the show. (Burgess has had no involvement with the project.) Mindhunter is not the first time Burgess’s work with the FBI has been depicted on screen. The long-running CBS crime drama Criminal Minds centers on a group of FBI profilers, while the movie The Silence of the Lambs (and the book it’s based on) drew inspiration from cases Burgess worked on. But Mindhunter is, by far, the most true-to-life script.

Burgess said she’s looking forward to season two of the show, but, of course, she’s got more important things competing for her time. She’s working on compiling her recent research on dismemberment, and in October she’ll present some of the findings at a conference in collaboration with the authors of The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime, for which she wrote the afterword. There’s also another project she keeps in the back of her mind, one she started thinking about while corresponding with Henry Wallace, the serial killer awaiting execution in North Carolina. He ended up marrying a nurse while on death row, Burgess said, “someone who was very interesting to talk to. She told me I didn’t know the soft side of Henry.” Ever the data collector, Burgess keeps a PowerPoint about the women who marry death-row inmates and, if work ever slows, she said, she may someday seek to determine what these women have in common. ◽