Top 60 John E. Douglas Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are certain crimes that are simply too cruel, too sadistic, too hideous to be forgiven.”

— John E. Douglas

2. “An investigative interview is a meeting with one or more persons who may have information relative to a crime or the perpetrator of that crime. We try to find out as much of the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible. That person is not treated as a suspect.”

— John E. Douglas

4. “One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life.”

— John E. Douglas

5. “A typical behavioral pattern of overkill is multiple stab wounds in a tight pattern on the neck or chest, and severe damage to the face. It is a murder in which the primary goal is punishment fueled by rage.”

— John E. Douglas

6. “We think of young, beautiful women as the targets of these men, but vulnerability, more than anything else, is likely to lead to someone’s becoming a victim. That’s why children, senior citizens, prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless, and other marginalized groups are prime targets of serial killers.”

— John E. Douglas

7. “As with all of the killers profiled here, nature versus nurture will always be the central tension in this debate about what could produce such monstrous and unnatural acts, but the exploration cannot end there. Inevitably the question eventually comes down to moral agency against inborn determinism. And that leads to a single word: choice.”

— John E. Douglas

8. “Lesson learned: Everyone is a potential suspect, and don’t let looks or behavior fool you.”

— John E. Douglas

9. “But what my colleagues and I have found and have tried desperately to get across to others in the business of correction and forensic psychology is that dangerousness is situational. If you can keep someone in a well-ordered environment where he doesn’t have choices to make, he may be fine. But put him back in the environment in which he did badly before, his behavior can quickly change.”

— John E. Douglas

10. “Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet.”

— John E. Douglas

11. “An offender who kills someone close to him is usually motivated by a great sense of perceived betrayal, revenge, or anger, often fueled by jealousy and outrage. We saw this with the O. J. Simpson case, in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.”

— John E. Douglas

12. “If a man fails at home, he fails in his life.”

— John E. Douglas

13. “But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.”

— John E. Douglas

14. “Serial killers who claim revenge as a motive are usually manifesting some form of emotional displacement.”

— John E. Douglas

15. “Behavior reflects personality.”

— John E. Douglas

16. “Dennis Rader quoted Harvey Glatman as saying, ‘It was all about the rope.’ What exactly does that mean? The rope symbolized total control. The ultimate fantasy would be to keep these victims alive and dominated indefinitely, although both men knew that wasn’t possible.”

— John E. Douglas

17. “By studying as many crimes as we could, and through talking to the experts – the perpetrators themselves – we have learned to interpret those clues in much the same way a doctor evaluates various symptoms to diagnose a particular disease or condition. And just as a doctor can begin forming a diagnosis after recognizing several aspects of a disease presentation he or she has seen before, we can make various conclusions when we see patterns start to emerge.”

— John E. Douglas

18. “We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how much you know, how experienced you are, how many suspect interrogations you’ve handled successfully. It doesn’t matter if you understand the technique. Each of us can be gotten to – if you can just figure out where and how we’re vulnerable.”

— John E. Douglas

19. “The more I questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the successful criminals were good profilers.”

— John E. Douglas

20. “As with everything else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor.”

— John E. Douglas

21. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.”

— John E. Douglas

22. “No matter how careful their planning, for most violent and predatory criminals, since crime is essentially an irrational act in any society that prohibits it, there is often a point in which logic and reason breaks down.”

— John E. Douglas

23. “You can tell by how an offender manually strangles his victim if he genuinely intends to kill, and if there are any reservations, moral hesitation, or empathy.”

— John E. Douglas

24. “Manipulation. Domination. Control. These are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders.”

— John E. Douglas

25. “As I told the New Jersey Parole Board in the McGowan case, my cardinal rule is that to understand an artist, you have to view his art. Likewise, with a predator, to understand him, you have to understand his “art,” because that’s what it is to him.”

— John E. Douglas

26. “Predators may look and sound and often act like we do, but they don’t think like we do. Their logical process is completely different.”

— John E. Douglas

27. “If a bank robber tapes over the lens of a surveillance camera, that’s MO. If he feels a need to tear his clothes off and dance naked before that same camera, that’s signature.”

— John E. Douglas

28. “One of the hallmarks of narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic personalities is the unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.”

— John E. Douglas

29. “My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.”

— John E. Douglas

30. “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.”

— John E. Douglas

31. “More police and courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates... Crime is a moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level.”

— John E. Douglas

32. “My role is to get these guys to talk, to find out what is, and was, going on inside their minds. Confrontation and moral indignation do not achieve that. In the end, talking to killers is about playing the long game, with every move a deliberate one – outrage, anger, these emotions are ever present in the background, but they work against you only if they come to the surface.”

— John E. Douglas

33. “The interplay between the agent and the violent offender needed to be informal and not overtly structured. What we were looking for was not so much the facts of the case, which were already established, but the motivation, the pre- and post-offense behavior, the victim selection process, and then the big question of why, without being too assertive, directed, or leading – the opposite of what we’d try to do in a suspect interrogation.”

— John E. Douglas

34. “Dr. Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor whose book Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the great moral and philosophical documents of our age.”

— John E. Douglas

35. “Bundy was probably as close to the archetype of one species of serial killer as you could get: handsome, intelligent, charming, glib, and resourceful. And he brutally killed at least thirty young women from Washington State to Florida during the 1970s.”

— John E. Douglas

36. “In our research, there is a strong correlation between domineering mothers and men who grow up to be predators. Though the vast majority of those with such mothers do not grow up to be offenders, of those who do, the domineering mother constitutes a significant influencing factor.”

— John E. Douglas

37. “One of the things that is interesting and pretty consistent among serial predators is that two emotional concepts are constantly warring within them. One is a feeling of grandiosity and entitlement. The other is a deep-seated and pervasive sense of inferiority and inadequacy.”

— John E. Douglas

38. “My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.”

— John E. Douglas

39. “This is probably the most common theme that has emerged in all of my confrontations with killers across the table. There is almost always an external reason the killing started. As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable. They perceive themselves as the true victims – yet another manifestation of their extreme narcissism. And if a prison psychiatrist happens to hand you the excuse – well, so much the better.”

— John E. Douglas

40. “Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that have filtered down about witches and werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. They couldn’t be just like us.”

— John E. Douglas

41. “As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable.”

— John E. Douglas

42. “I am much less interested in giving a convicted sexually motivated killer a second chance than in giving an innocent potential victim a first chance.”

— John E. Douglas

43. “Whatever my personal feelings, what is important to me in all prison interviews with violent offenders is not to express my own moral outrage, which accomplishes nothing, but to learn as much as I can by establishing a connection with the subject.”

— John E. Douglas

44. “She was a large woman, probably tipping the scales at 160 pounds. She wasn’t the type whom most people might assume a serial killer would target. Rader seemed to pride himself in that fact.”

— John E. Douglas

45. “Could newspapers now be held hostage by any dangerous lunatic who wanted his opinions heard?”

— John E. Douglas

46. “Many killers would have it that their murderous actions were not their own choice at all, that killing was a fixed, nonnegotiable action for them. Yet nothing I have seen in all my years of criminal investigation leads me to accept that premise, except in the most extreme cases of mental illness.”

— John E. Douglas

47. “The term serial killer designates a predator who murders repeatedly and with a certain general periodicity. And after each crime, there is a “cooling-off” period. If the killer stops without being caught, it is almost always for one of three reasons: He has died; he has been arrested for an unrelated crime and is in prison; or he hasn’t actually stopped, but has merely moved to another area and law enforcement has not connected his new crimes with the older ones.”

— John E. Douglas

48. “Even though their crimes were completely different, the one thing the maladjusted genius Ted Kaczynski and the sadistic but banal underachiever Dennis Rader shared was a monumental sense of ego. Neither one of them could bear to let his brilliance go unrecognized by the public, and that was their downfall in both cases.”

— John E. Douglas

49. “Normal people find it difficult to grasp the reality that predators really do think differently.”

— John E. Douglas

50. “I wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.”

— John E. Douglas