Dr. Ann Burgess is a mother of four from Newton, Massachusetts. She's also the expert who taught FBI agents how to profile serial killers.

Burgess is a psychiatric nursing professor and the dean at Boston College's nursing school. Her incredible story is now the subject of a .

Who is Ann Burgess?

She began interviewing rape victims in the 1960's at a time when that wasn't done.

"It was not popular. I was told not to stay with it, that this would hurt my career," Burgess, now 88, told WBZ-TV.

Her husband, who worked in the computer industry, got his pilot's license and flew her back and forth to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  

"Travelling between Boston and Quantico and I was taking care of the kids," said Burgess.

"Thoughts drive behavior"

But what she gleaned from those interviews, and what they revealed about how killers think, changed everything.  Burgess began to see patterns of behavior – men who began with petty crime then often committed rape and that often escalated to murders.

"Thoughts drive behavior, it's not the other way around. So, you have to get into what appears in thinking. And that's not easy," she said.

As media coverage of serial killers exploded nationwide in the 70s and 80s, from the "Son of Sam" to Ted Bundy, the FBI brought her in. Agents had been sticking to a "" style of investigation for decades, but now they needed Burgess and her academic expertise. What she got was access to hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with serial killers. Again, she began to see the patterns.

But speaking with authority in a room full of men presented a challenge at that time in history. How long did it take her to get them to listen to her theories?

"A long time. I don't think some of them even still get it," Burgess said, laughing.  She was trying to change a way of thinking about sexual assaults and murder that had lingered in many cases since the Victorian era. "They weren't ready for it," Burgess said.

Hulu documentary

The story of her work with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit is the subject of the Hulu documentary Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, which is streaming now.

She is frank about the kind of sexism she faced but she also admits that she was happy to let the FBI agents talk about profiling in public while she stayed in the background. 

"I liked staying behind the scenes, yeah, and that's what my job was down at the academy," Burgess said.

But it was also out of fear, that a serial killer might come after her, or her family. 

"I bought a gun. I practiced. I got perfect shot, I got the bullseye every time, so I felt good about that," said Burgess.

Her work led her to high profile cases. She was an expert witness in the Menendez brothers' first trial and she picked up on the behavioral patterns of Bill Cosby with women.

"She's had this vision for all sorts of different aspects of crime analysis," said Steven Constantine, the vice president of marketing and communications for BC's nursing school. "Well before it became popular to do so."

Constantine encouraged her to write a book about her experiences which lead to the documentary.  He said she's had a massive cultural influence.

Inspiring characters in movies, TV

"She's inspired a lot of those characters, (Law & Order) SVU as well," said Constantine. "So there's all these pop culture references to her that's haven't explicitly said they were her and so it's nice that she's had a chance to tell her story in her own words now."  

He points out that when you see a woman FBI agent of her era in a movie or TV series, that's Dr. Ann Burgess.

In "The Silence of the Lambs," the FBI agent who is Clarice Starling's boss is one of the agents Burgess worked with. She said Hannibal Lecter was a "combination of three of the worst serial killers that we had."

Now Burgess works with her granddaughter profiling school shooters. Together, they are compiling data based on what the school shooters have written in their manifestos. Burgess said the motivation always includes a grievance.

"What's the grievance? And then they start researching and developing their plan," Burgess said. "Law enforcement is onto this and I think that they are making great strides on the cases that don't turn out to be lethal."

She hopes the data can create a profile technique to help teachers and teams spot a student with troubling signs early on, before a tragedy occurs. She's also trying to resolve thousands of unsolved murders in the Indigenous population in the U.S. 

Burgess also trains nurses to look for the signs that women with dementia have been raped in memory and dementia care homes, which is a growing problem. She picked up on the fact that even if the women who are victims are non-verbal, nurses and families should notice when they stop coming to meals or participating in group activities. It could be a sign of abuse.

Still teaching at 88

At 88 years old, this legend still teaches and there's a waiting list to get in to her class.

"I said when my evaluations go down where I'm not over 'better than the average teacher' at Boston College then I better think about another line of work," Burgess laughed.

In other words, she's going to look for the patterns.

"I look for the patterns," said Burgess with a smile.

In:
• Boston College
• FBI