03/20/2026
From my friend Diana Mason. about another nurse super hero Ann Burgess, who I worked with during my tenure at ANA. She also served on ANA ‘s scopes and standards committee, and co- authored ( with the committee), the scope statement and standards for psychiatric nursing. When I think of nurses, she is one of many faces of the profession.
1978. FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia.
Two FBI agents sat across from Ann Burgess and pressed play on a cassette tape. The voice that filled the room belonged to a serial killer. For months, Robert Ressler and John Douglas had been driving to prisons across America, sitting across from the most violent men in the country, and recording their confessions.
They had boxes of tapes. Hours and hours of interviews. And they had no idea what to do with them.
The agents thought they were collecting groundbreaking research. Ann Burgess listened to one interview and said: "This isn't research. This is just... conversation."
The two FBI agents stared at her. She continued: "You're asking them to tell you stories about themselves. But you're not capturing data. You're not following any methodology. You can't compare one interview to another because you're asking different questions every time."Silence.
"You're sitting on something extraordinary here," Burgess said. "But the way you're doing this? It's useless."
Ann Burgess had not planned to become the person who taught the FBI how to think. She was 42 years old. A professor of psychiatric nursing at Boston College. A mother. A researcher who studied trauma.
The FBI called her because of a magazine article.
Not a dramatic exposé. Just a clinical piece she'd published in the American Journal of Nursing in 1973 about treating r**e victims in emergency rooms.
An agent named Roy Hazelwood read it and thought: We need this woman. At the time, the FBI had just started sending agents to training on s*xual assault. The women's movement had forced the issue. The director of the FBI, William Webster, decided his agents better learn something about r**e victimology.
So they invited Burgess to Quantico to give a lecture.
She showed up expecting to teach a class and leave.
Instead, she walked into a revolution that didn't know it was happening yet.
The Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI was a rogue operation. A handful of agents who believed that if you studied violent criminals systematically enough, you could predict behavior. You could profile offenders you'd never met based solely on crime scene evidence. In the 1970s, this was considered pseudoscience by most of law enforcement. But Ressler and Douglas were obsessed. They'd started a side project: interviewing serial killers in prison. They wanted to understand why these men killed. What drove them. What patterns existed. They were convinced the answers were in those interviews.
They just couldn't figure out how to extract them.
When Burgess listened to those first tapes, she heard something the agents didn't. The killers were performing. They were telling stories designed to shock, to impress, to control the narrative. They were feeding the agents exactly what they thought the agents wanted to hear. And the agents—brilliant, intuitive investigators—were so focused on the killers that they'd forgotten the most important part of every crime. The victim.
"Tell me about the women they killed," Burgess said.
The agents looked confused. "Who were they? How old? Where did the offenders find them? What were they doing when they were approached? What did the killer say to them? How did he convince them to go with him?""We asked about that—" one agent started.
"No," Burgess interrupted. "You asked the killers to describe their victims. That's not the same thing. The killer's description of the victim tells you about the killer's fantasy. I'm asking: who were these women as actual human beings?"
She paused.
"Because if you study the victims—really study them—you'll see the pattern. You'll see what kind of woman this particular offender targets. You'll see how he selects. How he approaches. How he gains control. And that will tell you more about him than anything he says in this room."
This was the insight that changed everything.
Burgess brought her work on r**e trauma into the FBI's serial killer research. For six years, she'd been interviewing r**e survivors. She'd documented how trauma actually worked—the acute phase, the reorganization phase, the coping mechanisms, the nightmares, the fear responses. She'd proven that r**e wasn't about s*x. It was about power. And she'd shown that if you studied the victim's experience carefully enough, you could understand exactly what the ra**st was trying to accomplish. Now she applied that same framework to murder.
Burgess redesigned the entire interview protocol.
She created structured questionnaires. She identified specific data points to collect from every interview. She taught the agents how to ask follow-up questions that would yield comparable data across different subjects.
She insisted they study victimology. Who did this offender kill? Young women? Older women? Prostitutes? College students? Children? Where did he find them? How did he approach them? What did he say?
Because the victim selection wasn't random. It revealed the offender's psychology, his access, his comfort zone, his fantasies. She introduced the concept of "signature" versus "MO." MO—modus operandi—is what the killer does to successfully commit the crime. It evolves. It gets more efficient over time. Signature is what the killer does to fulfill his psychological needs. It's the violence beyond what's necessary to kill. It's personal. It's consistent.
Understanding the difference meant understanding the killer's mind.
Burgess explained escalation. Serial killers don't wake up one day and commit murder. They rehearse in fantasy. They start with smaller crimes—peeping, burglary, s*xual assault. The violence builds over time.
If you mapped the progression, you could identify offenders earlier in their criminal careers. Before the body count got too high.
She explained trauma bonding and victim compliance.
Why didn't the victim scream? Why did she get in the car? Why did she go to the secondary location?
Because trauma shuts down the nervous system. Because compliance is a survival strategy. Because the offender manipulated the situation in ways that made resistance feel impossible. Understanding victim behavior wasn't about blaming the victim.
It was about understanding the offender's skill set.
In 1983, everything Burgess taught the FBI got tested in the real world.bBoys were disappearing in Nebraska. Young teenagers. Murdered. The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit was called in to develop a profile.
Burgess led the analysis.
She looked at the victims: young, pubescent boys. Not s*xually mature adults. Not children.vShe looked at where they were taken: while jogging, while walking home from school. Public places, but isolated moments. She looked at the wounds: stabbing, biting. Close-contact violence. Rage mixed with s*xual gratification.And she built a profile.
The offender would be a young white man, slight build, in a position of trust with children. Likely a teacher, coach, youth leader, or scout master. He would keep souvenirs. Possibly detective magazines. Things that let him relive the crimes. He would have a history of voyeurism or minor s*xual offenses that had been overlooked.
The profile led police to John Joseph Joubert IV.
He was 20 years old. An assistant scoutmaster.
In his possession: a detective magazine with a dog-eared page showing a boy being abducted.
When they searched his home, they found evidence linking him to all the murders.bHe was convicted. Sentenced to death. And the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit went from fringe operation to legitimate investigative resource overnight.
The case made national news. It was entered into the Congressional Record. Newspapers called it a breakthrough in criminal investigation.
And in nearly every article, the credit went to FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas.
Ann Burgess's name appeared once, maybe twice, buried in paragraphs near the end.
This became the pattern for the next four decades.
Burgess and the agents published groundbreaking research together: Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988), Crime Classification Manual (1992).
Academic papers. Books. Frameworks that law enforcement agencies around the world adopted.
But when the public story got told, it was about the brilliant FBI agents who'd cracked the code of the criminal mind.
The psychiatric nurse who'd taught them victimology, who'd designed the methodology, who'd provided the scientific rigor that made profiling credible?
Footnote. Maybe.
In 1995, John Douglas published Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit. Bestseller. Cultural phenomenon. In 2017, Netflix adapted it into a critically acclaimed series.vThey created a character based on Burgess: Dr. Wendy Carr, played by Anna Torv.
But they made her a psychologist. Not a nurse. "Because audiences wouldn't understand nursing," they said.
They made her a le***an. Childless. Someone who moved to Quantico and gave up her career to join the FBI full-time. None of that was true. Burgess was married. Had children. Consulted from Boston while maintaining her academic position. When her son first watched the show, he called her and joked: "What haven't you told me, Mother?"
Most viewers never knew Dr. Wendy Carr was based on a real person. And most of those who did know assumed the show was accurate. For years, people approached Burgess at conferences and asked if it was hard being closeted in the FBI in the 1970s. She'd smile and explain: "I'm not gay. I didn't move to Quantico. I'm not a psychologist. I'm a psychiatric nurse. And I have three children." They'd look confused.
As if the real story wasn't interesting enough.
Here's what Ann Burgess actually did:
She proved that r**e causes lasting psychological trauma—something the legal system had denied for centuries. She created the term "r**e trauma syndrome," now recognized in over 300 appellate court decisions. She taught the FBI that understanding victims is the key to catching predators.
She developed the methodology for criminal profiling that's still used today.She testified as an expert witness in hundreds of cases—including the Menendez brothers trial. She trained thousands of nurses, investigators, and prosecutors. She published over 150 articles and numerous books. She served on the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine.
She chaired the National Research Council's Task Force on Violence Against Women.And for most of her career, when people thought about criminal profiling, they thought about men.
It wasn't until 2021—when Burgess was 85 years old—that she published her own account: A Killer by Design.
Finally, the full story. Not as a footnote in someone else's memoir. Not as a fictionalized character. Not erased. In 2024, Hulu released Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer—a docuseries that placed Burgess at the center of the narrative where she'd always belonged.
And people were shocked.Because they'd watched Mindhunter. They'd read the books. They thought they knew the story. They had no idea a woman had been there the whole time.
Ann Burgess is 88 years old now. Still teaching at Boston College. Still publishing. Still consulting.
And finally—finally—getting recognized for what she built.Not as inspiration for a character.
As herself.
