A police officer out of Lake Charles, Louisiana
had seen the car
that matched the profile of the Ski Mask Rapist.
He said, "I saw the car.
"I saw the guy driving it.
No doubt it's him."
I had an LTD, which had a police interceptor motor in it,
and those things would scream.
We wanted to get this guy before he could find another victim.
Found the car parked in a hotel.
I got the license plate.
It allowed me to start investigating him.
This is the guy.
They scrambled an airplane.
They brought about 30 units,
and they descended on Lake Charles.
He came out of the house about30
and drove to a convenience store just around the street.
At55, Simonis comes walking out of the store
with a loaf of bread and two packs of cigarettes.
We got him.
I have approximately about 21 life sentences
plus addit-- an additional
2,386 and a half years to go.
The arrest of Jon Simonis,
the Ski Mask Rapist,
was really a win for the BSU.
It was also the first time I had listened to a recent offender.
It got to be a cat-and-mouse game with the police after a while.
I knew they were after me back in 1980,
and, uh, from there on, I figured all I had to do
was not to create a definite pattern.
I learned two really important things
out of the Simonis case.
One of course was signature.
The signature piece for him
was having witnesses there.
To induce fear or-or, uh, surprise
and to see how they responded to it.
And I would feed off of this,
this fear and it would--
It was like a, a source of fuel for me.
Simonis gave a lot of very good information
on method and how he played the police.
This was new information,
and I was just getting started.
I need that job as badly as any man, and I will work for my money.
Those times when one needs to be with one's family.
Certainly there was some negative feedback.
There was still some negative feedback.
But we've been seeing signs that family life is making a comeback.
We're remembering that with freedom comes personal
and parental responsibility.
She has a family as all of this is happening
and a whole separate career at the same time.
Yes, I certainly had other things going on in my life.
I was the dean of the School of Nursing,
and I headed up the National Center
for the Prevention and Control of Rape.
Research was being done,
publishing, traveling between Boston and Quantico,
and I was taking care of the kids.
It was pretty much a blur.
-She's not gonna make a risotto. -Right.
She doesn't have time for that.
So she could put something in the oven,
go upstairs, bang away on her typewriter.
That would burn or that would get lumpy.
And my father always saying,
"Your mother treats me like a God.
She gives me burnt offerings."
I was very, very fortunate in having a husband
that was very supportive of my work.
There was no question that I would have a career.
None of us would've had our careers
if there wasn't somebody that supported it.
You know, nobody does it alone.
They were dearly in love with one another.
'Cause he believes in his wife, and he adores her.
She was a bright woman
and to waste me as a brain was not gonna happen.
She enlightened the whole world.
Just quite proud of her.
I also remember a time when...
You can't do everything,
and I didn't do everything.
There were certain parts of our family life
that didn't get full attention.
It was hard. I admit it was very hard
to leave them.
So we began to travel as a family.
We took them to Quantico. They had to work, don't forget.
I remember phone calls
coming into the house from the FBI.
My mom saying, "I'm coming in."
Dad would be, "Okay, that's gonna be however many flight hours."
And you'd have to figure out how to get down there.
I have a flight instructor certificate,
an official flight instructor certificate,
a multi-engine pilot certificate,
a commercial pilot certificate.
So, yes, I'm a pilot.
We'd all pile into the plane,
and Dad would fly us to Quantico.
I've heard stories of people with famous parents.
They think every family's like that, and that's kinda like what we were.
This is what everybody does.
On top of all her activities,
my mom was learning how to fly.
I had to learn about flying,
and I was really good except on the landings,
which was kind of crucial.
I would bounce it in, and you're not supposed to bounce it in.
This is still the early days of the BSU.
The agents were working on a shoestring budget.
I think we must have had six profilers by that time.
They had multiple responsibilities.
Profiling was really a side part of their job.
The main goal that they had at that point was to show
that profiling wasn't a one-off success.
It wasn't a one-hit wonder.
There was pressure that we had to be good,
we had to be better than good.
That came down from the top.
We were very anxious about getting it right.
We would like to look at the cases that have been profiled
to see whether, you know, what has actually occurred...
Regardless of the success of the Ski Mask Rapist case,
Dr. Burgess herself was still not being fully accepted.
So, a lot of the agents keep her at arm's distance,
and they're not quite ready to fully listen to her.
And she feels that a little bit.
Everybody who comes into that environment
has to prove themselves.
Everybody.
But once a man has proven himself
and the rest of the team says, "Alright,"
that part of the process is done for them.
For a woman in that position, the test is ongoing.
Fear gripped Sarpy County and many surrounding communities.
Thirteen-year-old Danny Joe Eberle,
went to deliver papers early Sunday morning
about nine o'clock.
One of the search teams found what they hoped they wouldn't find.
Father identified that the young man was his son.
As of now, they have no time of death.
They have no suspects and no motive.
Sarpy County officials tonight
will only say that the evidence in the Eberle case
has been sent to the FBI for analysis.
Who could have done this?
I remember being very invested to see how they were going to profile this.
Ressler flies to Nebraska.
He's offering his expertise as a profiler
to the local law enforcement officers.
Ressler ends up creating a profile.
"Resident of Bellevue.
Single, lower education, low-income blue collar job."
Passes off this profile.
He was thinking of a pedophile.
They rounded up anyone that had
a prior sexual assault against a child.
They arrested a man who was known to pay for boys
to have sex in his car with him.
Ressler flies back to Quantico with another win for the BSU.
Case closed.
Another boy has gone missing
in Sarpy County.
Christopher Walden disappeared Friday morning
on his way to school.
One thing authorities did confirm today,
they definitely do not consider Christopher Walden a runaway.
Someone does have him.
We'd like to have him returned safely, please.
It was just devastating.
We thought it was over with.
But Ressler's profile was wrong.
From my point, I wanted to understand the case.
When I looked at it, first of all,
the most obvious is the first profile
was very, very, very vague.
It's only about seven lines.
Ressler acknowledges that there's not a lot
of information to go off of.
So, it's sort of basic.
It was just Ressler on that first profile,
which was part of the reason it failed 'cause profiling works best
when you have a group bouncing ideas off of each other.
Ressler was called up to the director of the FBI,
William Webster's office.
Webster chewed out Ressler saying,
"You've got the green light to do some profiling work,
"but, you know, you better figure this out and do it right.
It's my reputation at stake, too."
When I came in,
profiling was much more of an art form than a science.
And that was one of the things that made it
easy for people to criticize.
They needed help with methodology.
We need to back up why we do what we do,
that there is rationale and motive and science behind it.
I felt I needed to be an actual part of the profiling session.
That was another area that I could contribute.
The Simonis case,
she was brought in within the very narrow role
of being able to interview victims.
Going into this next case, she realized it was her chance
to have her methodology fully accepted.
Dr. Burgess was not an agent.
She'd be handling a lot of gruesome material,
and the agents had to know she could handle it.
The FBI was the boys club.
To have a woman must have been really hard for them.
It's so important for a woman in that position
to prove herself early and often.
Part of it was showing her
as many horrific photos as possible.
You know, "If she can't handle it, let's weed her out."
Being a nurse, you have to look at very difficult situations
and certainly you see people die.
Putting it in that perspective,
you have to neutralize the emotional reaction
and say, what can I learn from this data?
For the first time, Ressler brings Dr. Burgess
into the profiling session.
I started the conversation with victimology.
Why were they targeted? What were the similarities?
What were the differences?
The victims were Caucasian.
The serial killers that we analyzed
tended to kill within the same race.
What about the stature?
Are you dealing with a big guy like Kemper
or someone much smaller like Montie Rissell?
Targeting of victims is gonna be very different.
They're thin, sort of weakly built.
First, the boy was left by the roadside.
The second case was a little different.
His body's found deep into the woods.
There were two sets-- footprints in, only one set coming back out.
I realized that the killer marched the boy in
because he couldn't carry him in.
You're looking for a small man that's probably not very muscular.
He couldn't have been that much bigger than the victims.
She had an evidence-based approach
to the relationship going on
between victim and perpetrator.
They go with this person seemingly willingly,
which implies that they know this person.
He would be working with boys.
He might be a teacher.
Probably through an activity like being a soccer coach
or involvement in the Boy Scouts.
There was something about rope and binding
that was important to him.
The link there we felt was sexual.
The bondage element is something
that the agents had seen before from offenders
who fetishized over detective magazines,
which portrayed bondage and murder.
And all of that is what turns them on
and gets them worked up to go out and find a victim.
Once we had the profile,
we tried to see if we could use the media
to be on the lookout.
If you see a mysterious car following a kid around.
Anything suspicious, must call.
We need everybody to help solve this.
The suspect is described as a white male,
18 to 25 years old.
Five foot, eight inches,
160 pounds, dark hair.
They rounded up seven suspects.
It seemed like they were the wrong people.
They didn't fit the profile.
Parents were panicked because school was gonna be out.
They had a killer on the loose.
It frightens me. I have a 10-year-old son.
If they can get a child out here on our busiest street,
they can get them anywhere.
And I'd just rather be safe than sorry.
I sent my daughter to my parents in Des Moines.
I mean, this is our corner, not even our neighborhood, our corner right here.
Will you feel safe playing out in the streets now?
-No. -No.
They were still searching for who it could be.
They had no idea.
All signs were pointing to there will be more victims
and this will escalate quickly.
Nothing happens in December to January,
but I learned very early,
they cannot stop themselves.
He's gonna strike again.
One particular day
a teacher was out getting things ready
and this car pulls up,
looks to be suspicious.
He was sitting there looking into the window,
and I was trying to memorize the license number.
Five one five four. I'll never forget it.
At that point, he said, "Get into the building
or I'm going to kill you."
With all my might, I just pushed him and ran past him.
She was able to get inside and to call the police.
Police tracked the license plate number.
It was a rental vehicle for John Joubert,
a radar technician on the local Air Force base.
They found out where his real car was being repaired,
looked in the window, saw the very rope
that had been used on the Eberle boy.
They get an immediate warrant
to search Joubert's barracks.
And there they found all of this paraphernalia
that linked John Joubert to these two crimes,
including a detective magazine
that had been dog-eared to the abduction of a newspaper boy.
A young white male with a weak build.
21-year-old Joubert's physical appearance
checked all the boxes of the profile perfectly.
Why Eberle?
He was alone.
Why make him take off his clothing?
The only reason I could ever come up with was
to see the wounds and to make him more vulnerable.
So he was more vulnerable without his clothing?
Wouldn't you be?
It was interesting to talk with John Joubert.
It showed that we were very accurate on the profile.
It matched absolutely everything,
even that he might be a scout leader.
So you were the assistant Boy Scout master?
Assistant scoutmaster, yes.
We didn't know at that time that he had killed more...
...and they got another confession from him.
Ricky Stetson, an unsolved case.
You now had three young boys,
and I think that had a lot to do with his own upbringing.
We had the opportunity to talk with the mother.
She had been almost choked to death by the husband,
and she told us John had witnessed it.
He admitted to seeing himself in these young boys.
He knew that those years of his life were traumatic.
Dr. Burgess realized these serial killers
had a horrific thing happen to them when they were little.
And they would take that and they would almost try
and erase that by turning it into a fantasy
where they were the person in control of the situation,
they were the offender...
but this bad experience, they could never completely erase.
So, that would be the drive to go commit a second crime,
a third crime, a fourth crime.
Just is chilling to think of how close he came
to having another victim.
He was out looking for a victim that day
that the teacher found him.
What did you think when they handed down the death sentence?
Well, I wasn't all that surprised.
It was still, you know, "This is ridiculous." One of those things.
You thought they'd never go this far?
Right.
Says, "John Joubert is most deserving of the death penalty."
Yes, they say that.
The arrest and conviction of John Joubert
was a huge victory for the Behavioral Science Unit.
The whole team was elated.
We were up against a lot of skepticism.
They have proved the success of profiling.
They have got buy-in from William Webster himself.
The profile was so right
that it got written up in the Congressional Record.
All of that made the FBI look really good.
We didn't have to stay in the basement anymore. That was a big move.
There was a lot of media coverage.
It certainly captured national attention.
There was a magazine piece,
and it's this great shot of all these men in suits
standing around a desk...
and it is rage-making.
Dr. Burgess had done really important incredible work,
and yet the men in that photo did not see fit
to ask her to join them.
It was sexist, but that's their business.
You know, it wasn't like, I wasn't there to,
in any way criticize them or, or to say something.
Tha-that was not my style.
I had too much to do to-to get caught up in that.
It was a very careful separation
of what was talked about during the day
and what was the personal time with the family.
You can get PTSD from some of this,
and it is hard to separate out,
but you have to do that to be able
to focus yourself on something else.
Her work concerned us as children.
I think from her perspective,
the less we knew the better.
But when we did find out about things, it was scary.
There was a time where I went out to see her in, in action.
She was doing a seminar nearby.
This is a 1979 murder of Mary Frances Stoner.
And she gets up and she starts talking.
She's got the slides.
A rug was thrown over her so she couldn't see anything,
and the three men raped her.
My mom was involved with very awful people.
There were times you'd be sitting there thinking to yourself,
what else is there that we don't know about?
And she was hogtied
where her hands were behind her
and to her feet.
So when we got these dribs and drabs of information,
they were bad.
They were concerning.
We would worry that they'd go after my mom, of course.
Well, there were scary people, yes.
There's no question about it.
There was one particular time
I started to get letters
and threats against me.
Allen, my husband said, um,
"Maybe you should get a gun."
We bought a handgun for me.
I asked my mom, I'm like, why do you need that?
And she's like, "Well, I, I feel threatened."
She didn't outwardly exhibit any fear,
but for her to bring up the topic to me
signaled she was afraid.
And it's not just me,
but you always worry about your family.
You'd like to think you're safe,
and boy you're not.
It's a very difficult position to be in.
But I decided I was just going to stand up and just keep on going.
It's one thing to be a female FBI agent
back in the '80s.
It's an entirely different thing
to be submerged in the analysis
of violent crimes.
For years, I think there was this aura.
"Women need to be protected.
"We shouldn't talk about these kinds of things with women.
I mean, it's just too horrible."
And here was Ann Burgess
full speed ahead.
She really forged a path for the rest of us.
I joined the bureau when I was 30 years old.
It was 1980.
There were only seven women in my academy class.
I read everything I could find
that Ann Burgess had anything to do with,
and then the day came when I was told
my assignment was to work with her.
Yeah, so the first one is Melissa Ackerman.
I had been an agent six years
when Melissa Ackerman was kidnapped.
Dozens of police, firefighters,
and volunteers were on the search today.
Melissa was riding her bicycle with a young girlfriend yesterday.
A young unkempt man tried to abduct both of them.
It's not supposed to happen in a small town.
Just keep working, keep following up everything.
It's-it's discouraging, but we gotta keep going.
It's a call that you never want to get.
Seemed almost like slow-motion
and wishing and hoping that it was not real.
I had to walk down to City Hall
to make the phone call to the FBI.
It was a tremendous relief
to know that we weren't in this by ourself.
When I went to Somonauk to work on the case,
there was a level of anxiety and fear that was pretty high.
It was palpable.
And I had never worked a kidnapping case,
especially a witnessed kidnapping.
Missy's friend Opal was with her,
and he tried to kidnap both of them,
but she was able to get away from him.
8-year-old girl.
Anything that she said was really important
and could give us more information
into the offender we were looking for.
It's not easy getting someone to talk to you,
and Opal wasn't talking.
You always had doubts on a case like that.
You really wonder if there must have been something more
you could have said.
It's a case you never forget.
Rainy days?
Mm-hmm.
Her way of dealing with these horrific events
was by opening up herself even more,
by taking on some of their pain.
I think that was critical for Opal
and the help that she provided.
I-I-I don't know if anybody can measure that.
She started out slow and non-threatening
and took time to gain her trust.
I could have just gone in and said, "What do you remember?
What can you tell me?"
But we had a traumatized child here.
The task was to be able to utilize
something that would not traumatize her further.
'Cause you were gonna ask her to go back through a very distressing time.
The drawings tell the story from the child's standpoint.
I think Ann's patience and understanding
that Opal was a victim in Missy's crime as well,
created a connection and a bond between Ann and Opal
that allowed Opal to share her experience of the crime
in a way that could become useful for investigators.
She was so sad. And so forlorn.
So it made her feel that she was giving me something
that might help Missy.
LaSalle County deputy was just out patrolling
about 20 miles from Somonauk,
an area that had been searched.
You get these hunches and you say, "Well, maybe here."
And he was able to see two little feet...
under a heavy rock.
I felt awful.
Uh, you, you don't hear news like that
without, uh, feeling,
feeling it at an emotional level.
The key to the case was Opal
being able to give information to law enforcement
and then taking that information
and spreading it throughout the county.
The FBI this evening is charging
a 28-year-old Aurora man with the kidnap
and murder of 8-year-old Melissa Ackerman.
Police used Opal's description of the car
that Missy had been abducted in
to make their arrest.
They had a lot of information on Brian Dugan.
We learned how he had victimized between 1974 and 1985
at least a dozen girls, women, raping seven,
killing three of them.
Brian Dugan admitted killing Jeanine Nicarico back in 1983.
DNA evidence suggested Dugan was indeed the murderer.
Donna Schnorr, who was a nurse
and was the oldest victim, 27.
And of course, little Missy, age 7.
Ann and I did not discuss the emotional toll
that working a case like that has
on investigators that have children.
We didn't discuss the pain,
and we didn't discuss the fear.
It was unspoken.
Over the years, I've known many people
who've been exposed to these horrendous things,
and, um, almost uniformly
what they'll talk about in private
is that it isn't really possible to take all of these things
and completely and totally dissociate them.
Every once in a while, we pause and realize
what it is we're really looking at.
Someone's child was living an innocent life,
and then the family has to look at an empty seat
at the table forever.
Brian Dugan was asked,
"Why do you think you did it?
What compels you to rape and kill little girls?"
And he started crying. He said, "I don't know.
I don't know why I do the things I do."
I remember when I was a little boy,
I was in the backyard, and my mom came home.
I look over and we make eye contact,
and I start thinking to myself, I'm like, "Oh, my gosh,
I must have did something wrong."
And before I could get through the whole list of things, she's upon me,
and she kisses me on the forehead,
right smack in the middle of my forehead.
And I'm like, "Mom, what was, what was that for?"
And she's like, "Oh, I talked to a man today.
"He's a very bad man.
"And I had to ask him,
why did you do the bad things that you did?"
And he said to her that the reason he was so bad
was because his mom never kissed him on the forehead.
You don't forget these cases,
but you, you learn from it.
And you only hope that it in some way helps
and you've learned something that can help in the next case.
Our whole goal is, "How can we learn about it faster
so that we can prevent them?"
Every week, there are reports
of more killers.
Police are hunting a mass murderer.
There are reports of more victims.
Detectives have already dug up two bodies.
Three other young girls were murdered as well.
String of disappearance and rapes and murders.
We were falling behind.
The so-called Happy Face Killer.
-The Green River Killer. -BTK Killer.
I felt the pressure to do something.
It wasn't the aspect of killing them,
it was the aspect...
...and I raped her.
But it gave me an idea.