Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes

John E. Douglas, Ed.D., entered duty with the FBI in 1970 after serving four years in the U.S. Air Force. He received investigative experience in violent crime in Detroit and Milwaukee field offices and also served as a hostage negotiator. In 1977 Douglas was appointed to the FBI Academy as an instructor in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), where he taught hostage negotiation and applied criminal psychology. In 1990 he was promoted as unit chief within the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). Serving in that capacity, he had overall supervision of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), Criminal Investigative Analysis Program (better known as criminal profiling), and the Arson and Bombing Investigative Services Program. Douglas was a coparticipant in the FBI's first research program of serial killers and, based on that study, coauthored Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. The University of Virginia awarded Douglas the prestigious Jefferson Award for academic excellence for his work on that study. In 1992 Douglas coauthored the first edition of the Crime Classification Manual (CCM), the first study of violent crime to define and standardize techniques and terminology to be used by the criminal justice system and academia. Douglas again received the Jefferson Award for this research and the publication of the CCM. Douglas has consulted on thousands of cases worldwide providing case analysis, interview and interrogation techniques, investigative strategies, prosecutorial strategies, and expert testimony. Included in the list of Douglas's cases are Seattle's "Green River Killer," Wichita's "BTK Strangler," the O.J. Simpson civil case, and the JonBenet Ramsey homicide. Since his retirement in 1995 from the FBI, Douglas has been providing pro bono assistance whenever possible to police and victims of violent crime. Douglas has coauthored both fiction and nonfiction books, including two New York Times best sellers, Mindhunter and Journey into Darkness. He also has coauthored Obsession, Anatomy of Motive, Cases That Haunt Us, Anyone You Want Me to Be, Broken Wings, and his newest book, Inside the Mind of BTK. Douglas does numerous public presentations yearly, belonging to the Greater Talent Network (GTN) agency in New York. His personal Web site, johndouglasmindhunter.com, contains crime information as well as an active online discussion board. Ann W. Burgess, R.N., D.N.Sc., is professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College Connell School of Nursing. She received her bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Boston University and her master's degree from the University of Maryland. She, with Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, cofounded one of the first hospital-based crisis intervention programs for rape victims at Boston City Hospital in the mid-1970s. Her work expanded into the offender area when she teamed with special agents at the FBI Academy to study serial offenders of sexual homicide, rape, and child sexual offenses. This work advanced an understanding of the importance of the behavioral footprints in crime scenes and the profiling process. Burgess served as the first van Ameringen Professor of Psychiatric Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing for seventeen years. She has been a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) since 1994 and continues as codirector of the SANE Training Program at the university. Burgess served as chair of the first advisory council to the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape of the National Institute of Mental Health (1976-1980). She was a member of the 1984 U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Family Violence and the planning committee for the 1985 Surgeon General's Symposium on Violence, served on the National Institute of Health National Advisory Council for the Center for Nursing Research (1986-1988), and was a member of the 1990 Adolescent Health Advisory Panel to the Congress of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine in October 1994 and chaired the 1996 National Research Council's Task Force on Violence Against Women. She was a member of the 2003 Archdiocese of Boston's Commission on the Protection of Children and is a member of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and the Law. Burgess has been principal investigator of many research projects and has written textbooks in the fields of psychiatric nursing and crisis intervention and texts from her research in the crime victim area. She has coauthored over 160 articles, chapters, and monographs in the field of victimology. She also has testified in criminal and civil cases in over thirty states. In 2000 she was appointed Professor Without Term at Boston College. She has received numerous honors, including the Sigma Theta Tau International Audrey Hepburn Award, the American Nurses'Association Hildegard Peplau Award, and the Sigma Theta Tau International Episteme Laureate Award. Allen G. Burgess, D.B.A., is president of Data Integrity. He is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. He served in the U.S. Air Force and was assigned to the National Security Agency. His career spans thirty years beginning with computer design at Honeywell Information Systems, where he designed four computer systems and rose to the rank of chief engineer. He left Honeywell to join Raytheon, where he served as computer and displays laboratory manager and supervised the design of military computers. He left Raytheon to start Sequoia Systems, a manufacturer of fault-tolerant computers. In 1984 he started Data Integrity, where he holds a patent for a solution to the Y2K problem. In addition to his industrial experience, Burgess has taught at Northeastern University, where he was an associate professor, and at Babson College, Boston College, Bentley College, and Boston University as a visiting professor. Robert K. Ressler, M.S., is a criminologist in private practice and the director of Forensic Behavioral Services, a Virginia-based organization dedicated to training, lecturing, consultation, and expert witness testimony. He is an expert in the area of violent criminal offenders, particularly serial and sexual homicide. He is a specialist in the area of criminology, criminal personality profiling, crime scene analysis, homicide, sexual assaults, threat assessment, workplace violence, and hostage negotiation. He is a twentyyear veteran of the FBI, serving sixteen years in the Behavioral Science Unit as a supervisory special agent and criminologist, retiring in 1990. He developed many of the programs that led to the formulation of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Ressler became the first program manager of the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program in 1985. His academic affiliations have been as an instructor of criminology while at the FBI Academy, adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia, research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and adjunct assistant professor at Michigan State University's School of Criminal Justice. He is a clinical assistant professor in psychiatry in Georgetown University's Program on Psychiatry and Law. He is a visiting instructor with the Department of Forensic Pathology at Dundee University, Dundee, Scotland. He received the 1991 Amicus Award from the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the 1995 Special Section Award from the Section of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and two Jefferson Awards in 1986 and 1988 from the University of Virginia. Ressler is a member of the American Society for Industrial Security, the International and American Academies of Forensic Sciences, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Homicide Investigators Association, the Vidoqu Society, and other professional organizations. He originated and directed the FBI's first research program of violent criminal offenders, interviewing and collecting data on thirty-six serial and sexual killers, resulting in two textbooks: Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) and the Crime Classification Manual (1992). He also coauthored his autobiography, Whoever Fights Monsters (1992), Justice Is Served (1994), and I Have Lived in the Monster (1997). Ressler's books and life experiences have been the inspiration for many books authored by Mary Higgins Clark and other authors and the films The Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Copycat, and The X Files. He has testified as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases. He has lectured at and consulted to law enforcement agencies, universities, writers, television networks, and corporations in the United States and abroad. He has appeared on many major television and radio networks and has been featured in numerous printed media articles in major newspapers and magazines worldwide. Ressler has served with the U.S. Army, ten years of it active duty during the Vietnam era. He served in the military police and as a criminal investigation officer (CID), with the Army CID Command Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He retired at the rank of colonel with thirty-five years of service.