The Real-Life People and Stories That Inspired Mindhunter's 3 Core Characters
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Mindhunter is an unsettling, simmering foray into the grisly world of serial killer psychology, and the newly arrived season two — which began streaming on Aug. 16 — is just as dark as the first.
Executive producer David Fincher's fingerprints are all over the show, which shares the same gloomy color palette and stylized dialogue seen in House of Cards, The Social Network, and Gone Girl. The crime drama's three main characters, however — Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), and Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) — are plucked straight out of real life.
Mindhunter itself is based on the 1995 book by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker called Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit (which also inspired characters in the films The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon). Although the show's core characters aren't exact replicas of their real-world inspirations, they're pretty damn close.
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Holden Ford
Jonathan Groff's character, Holden Ford, is based heavily on Mind Hunter author John E. Douglas. The Brooklyn-born former FBI agent, now 74, went on to write a slew of other books on similar topics after spending years traveling around the country interviewing prolific serial killers and violent criminals like David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Sara Jane Moore, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Dennis Rader. Like Holden does in the show, Douglas also spoke to the Co-Ed Killer, Ed Kemper III. He interviewed him many times, later calling him one of the "brightest" inmates he had ever spoken with.
In addition to Mind Hunter, he penned the famed book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and later the Crime Classification Manual, both with Robert Ressler and Ann Burgess (aka the inspirations for Bill Tench and Dr. Wendy Carr). Douglas's work was so legendary that he was given two Thomas Jefferson Awards for academic excellence from the University of Virginia. He retired from the FBI in 1995 but has popped up on TV to discuss his career multiple times over the years.
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Bill Tench
Like Holden's character, Bill Tench (Sully actor Holt McCallany) draws many traits from a real-life FBI agent and author: Robert K. Ressler. Before his passing in 2013, Ressler — who was born in Chicago and joined the FBI in 1970 — played an important role in pioneering the psychological profiling of violent offenders (just as Bill and Holden do in the show). He's also credited with coining the term "serial killer." Although he left the FBI in 1990, he continued to help authorities catch criminals all over the world and gave frequent lectures on criminology until he began battling Alzheimer's. He was survived by his wife, Helen Grazer Ressler, and their three children.
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Dr. Wendy Carr
Dr. Wendy Carr, played by Fringe alum Anna Torv, has one seriously kickass real-life counterpart in Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess. In the 1970s, Burgess quickly became a trailblazer in research surrounding the treatment of trauma and abuse victims. She cofounded a hospital-based counseling program for rape victims at Boston City Hospital with sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, which was one of the first of its kind, and later the pair introduced the phrase "rape trauma syndrome" into the medical lexicon.
Like Wendy, Burgess worked with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit to do landmark research into serial killers, helping to link their crimes to instances of past trauma. She worked closely with Agent Douglas, and together with Ressler they were able to write Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (among other books).
Today, Burgess teaches at Boston College in the Connell School of Nursing, where her curriculum puts an emphasis on forensic science, forensic mental health, and victimology. In 2013 and 2016, she was deemed a living legend by the New England Chapter of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, distinctions which joined a long list of other selected appointments and awards.