Mindhunter

Mindhunter is John Douglas's own account, written with Mark Olshaker, of his twenty-five years as an FBI special agent and of how the Bureau learned to profile violent offenders. Douglas helped build the behavioral science work at the FBI Academy, interviewing imprisoned killers such as Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper and David Berkowitz to understand how they thought and chose their victims.

The book follows him from his early years with the Bureau through the cases that made his name: the Alaska hunter who stalked women in the wilderness, the Atlanta child murders, and Seattle's Green River killings, the investigation that nearly cost him his life. Along the way he explains how a profiler reads a crime scene, puts himself in the place of both offender and victim, and predicts what a killer will do next.

First published in 1995, it was later the basis for the Netflix series Mindhunter.