The FBI had boxes full of serial killer confessions they couldn’t actually use.
Hours of interviews.
Detailed admissions.
Direct conversations with some of the most violent men in America.
And none of it was scientifically useful.
Then a 42-year-old psychiatric nurse walked into Quantico and changed criminal investigation forever.
Her name was Ann Burgess.
1975.
FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas had spent months traveling across the country interviewing imprisoned serial killers. They believed understanding offenders could help solve future crimes.
But when Ann Burgess listened to the tapes, she immediately saw the problem.
“This isn’t research,” she told them.
“These are just stories.”
The room went silent.
“You’re asking them to talk about themselves,” she said. “But every interview is different. There’s no structure. No methodology. You can’t compare one offender to another.”
Then she asked a question nobody else in the room had thought to ask:
“Tell me about the women they killed.”
Not the killers.
The victims.
Who were they?
How old were they?
Where were they approached?
What made them vulnerable?
How did the offender gain control?
The agents were confused.
Ann Burgess explained something revolutionary:
“If you truly study the victims, you’ll understand the offender.”
At the time, Burgess was already a groundbreaking trauma researcher. In 1974, she had co-authored one of the first major studies proving rape caused lasting psychological trauma — at a time when courts barely acknowledged it.
She helped create the term “rape trauma syndrome.”
Now she brought that same scientific rigor to the FBI.
She redesigned the interviews.
Created structured questionnaires.
Introduced victimology as the foundation of profiling.
Distinguished between a killer’s “MO” and their “signature.”
Mapped escalation patterns.
Explained that sexual violence was about power and control — not desire.
Suddenly, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit had something it had never truly possessed before:
Methodology.
And it worked.
In 1983, young boys began disappearing in Nebraska.
Using Burgess’s framework, investigators built a profile:
A young white male.
Slight build.
Someone trusted around children.
Likely connected to scouting or youth activities.
A person who kept souvenirs and detective magazines.
Police arrested John Joubert.
The profile was astonishingly accurate.
Almost overnight, criminal profiling became legitimate law enforcement science.
And yet most of the credit went elsewhere.
The public celebrated the FBI agents.
Books were written.
Movies and television series followed.
Ann Burgess became a footnote.
When Netflix released Mindhunter, they based a character on her — but changed nearly everything.
They made her a psychologist instead of a nurse.
Changed her personal life entirely.
Most viewers never even realized she was based on a real person.
Meanwhile, the real Ann Burgess kept working.
Teaching.
Publishing.
Consulting.
Testifying in court.
Training professionals around the world.
More than 150 academic publications.
Multiple landmark books.
Decades of pioneering work.
And through all of it, one truth remained:
Modern criminal profiling exists in large part because a psychiatric nurse walked into a room full of FBI agents and told them they were asking the wrong questions.
Not:
“Why did the killer do this?”
But:
“Who were the victims?”
That shift changed criminal investigation forever.
Ann Burgess is 88 years old now.
Still teaching.
Still working.
Still brilliant.
And finally receiving recognition not as a side character in someone else’s story —
But as herself.
The woman who taught the FBI how to truly understand predators by first understanding the people they harmed.
🚨 Trump's new Medicaid rules just made it official: having cancer is not enough to be exempt from work requirements. You have to PROVE cancer is stopping you from working. While you're in chemo.
This week, the Trump administration released its final 400-page rule on how states must enforce the Medicaid work requirements that were buried inside last year's "One Big Beautiful Bill." Starting January 1, 2027, most low-income adults on Medicaid must prove every single month they are working, volunteering, or attending school for at least 80 hours — or lose their coverage.
For months, advocates for cancer patients and people living with HIV had been pushing for a blanket medical exemption. What they got instead was a trap. The new rule ties the definition of "medically frail" — the exemption category — directly to a person's ability to work. That means cancer patients who are still capable of working, even in between chemo rounds, do not automatically qualify. A woman with early-stage breast cancer receiving radiation treatment? May not qualify. A man living with HIV who takes medication and still reports to work? No exemption.
And here's the part that should stop you cold: Harvard health policy professor Adrianna McIntyre told reporters that even cancer patients who ARE technically exempt could still lose coverage — because the paperwork process is so complex that "a recently diagnosed cancer patient who is employed might lose Medicaid coverage due to errors in completing the necessary paperwork." Cancer will not wait while a Medicaid office sifts through forms.
The American Cancer Society ran the numbers. Researchers at the University of Chicago published a study in JAMA Oncology projecting that over 1 million mammograms and colorectal and lung cancer screenings will be missed within the first two years of these rules. That translates to more than 2,300 undetected cancer cases — hundreds at advanced stages — and an estimated 155 avoidable deaths from just three types of cancer alone.
A coalition of 48 patient advocacy groups signed a joint statement calling the rule "life-threatening." The American Academy of Pediatrics said it will "harm those whom Medicaid is intended to support." The HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute's director said bluntly: "We will lose individuals from Medicaid, and many will become ill and die as a result."
68 million Americans depend on Medicaid. The CBO says at least 5 million will lose coverage. And Dr. Oz went on TV to defend it by saying Medicaid recipients watch too much television.
Constitution requires two-thirds vote from the Senate to bind us to another country.
They hid it in the bill because they knew it was unconstitutional.
It’s treasonous as far as I’m concerned.
Every single person who voted for this needs removed from office.
🚨BREAKING: The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) says it is “deeply alarmed” about the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) new rule created to carry out President Donald Trump’s plans for restricting mail-in voting. https://t.co/ZHYGFbkSCC
This Island deal of Kushner’s is far worse then I ever suspected. This is a fortified military installation with its own bunker city. This is not a resort.
266,000 jobs under Biden:
“slowed”
“muddled expectations”
“fell short”
172,000 jobs under trump:
“upswing”
“vigorous”
“strong sign for economy”
This is the double standard Dems have had to deal with for the past 10 years.
A whistleblower reports that the Trump admin planned to classify 2.7M living people as dead, nullifying their Social Security numbers, to force them out of the country.
I bet you didn’t know that Justice Gorsuch cousin sold an acre of land to Russian Oligarch Vladislav Doronin 2022 for $10 million. The same Doronin that the Kushner Albania Island is attached to.