Review: Mindhunter

If you want to watch something intelligent, well-acted and directed, tune in to Mindhunter.

Season 2 of this Netflix original dropped last week, and it’s, well, compelling, creepy, captivating, horrifying, and just as riveting as a train wreck you can’t help but watch.

Mindhunter, the Netflix series, is based on the book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, first published in 1998.

I read the book when it first came out, and it scared me because of how easily sexual psychopaths caught and killed their prey.

Make no mistake, people were prey to the serial killers discussed in the book and now in the Netflix series.

A Little Factual Background

To answer your question, “Is this a true story?” in advance, here’s a little history.

In 1972, the FBI established the Behavioral Science Unit in response to the rising wave of sexual assault and homicide.

In 1976, Supervisory Special Agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler, members of the Behavioral Science Unit, began compiling a centralized database of serial offenders. They did this by travel across the U.S. and visiting prisons to interview incarcerated serial predators.

Mindhunter, the Netflix series, is faithful, for the most part, in telling Douglas and Ressler’s story of
obtaining information and classifying it by:

* Motives
* Planning and preparation
* Details of the crimes
* Disposal of evidence (bodies, murder weapons, etc.)

After interviewing 36 incarcerated serial predators, they completed their database, and FBI profilers began working in the field and providing consultations to police on active cases.

If you’re a crime fiction reader, you probably know that the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) no longer exists within the FBI.

It was folded into the Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) and renamed the Behavioral Research and Instruction Unit (BRIU). Now it’s called the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU-5) and is part of the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

BAU-5 works on developing research and using evidence-based results to provide training and improve consultation in the behavioral sciences—understanding who criminals are, how they think, why they do what they do—for the FBI and law enforcement communities.

It’s All Mostly Real

Douglas and Ressler are portrayed by Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany who seem made for these roles of dedicated agents. Anna Torv is Dr. Wendy Carr, a psychologist who specializes in deviant behavior. As always this Australian actress is perfect.The time is the 1970′s.

They struggle to get inside a killer’s mind and figure out how he thinks so they can catch him or, if he’s already incarcerated, figure out how to identify these individuals in the hope of getting them early in their “killing career.”

FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench (characters taking the place of Douglas and Ressler) have their own problems which are highly fictionalize and dramatized in the Netflix series. What is true are the cunning psychopaths. The actors are chilling in their portrayal of killers from Richard Speck to Charles Manson to Ed Kemper.

The crimes as told in the series are factual. If you want the unmitigated truth, get Mindhunter, the book.

What’s Totally Wrong in the Show

There was a glaring mistake in the show. I can’t believe the show’s writers didn’t fact check better. They called serial murderer Dean Corll of Pasadena, a suburb of Houston, Texas, the Candy Man.

Wrong! And it’s wrong on the Dean Corll Wikipedia page too.

The Candy Man was Ronald Clark O’Bryan, also nicknamed The Man Who Killed Halloween. He’s the reason parents began checking the Trick or Treat candies received on Halloween.

O’Bryan lived in Deer Park, another Houston suburb. In 1974, he gave cyanide-laced Pixy Stix to his own children and some neighbor children. His young son ate the candy and died. O’Bryan did it to collect on a life insurance policy.

The other children with the poison-laced candy in their treat collections didn’t eat the Pixy Stix. O’Bryan was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 1984.

Dean Arnold Corll was a monster who, with his teen recruits Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least 28 teenage boys and young men between 1970 and 1973 in the Houston area. The agents in the film interview Elmer Wayne Henley.

Takeaway Truth

Riveting stories, great acting, and subject matter that’s compelling even as it’s stomach-turning—that’s Mindhunter. It will creep you out far more than the fictional TV series Criminal Minds.