What Rex Heuerman Will Lie To The FBI About!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
Rex Heuermann, pled guilty to the murders of eight women, Melissa Bartholomew, Maureen Brainerd Barnes, Amberlynn Costello, Sandra Costilla, Valerie Mack, Jessica Taylor, Megan Waterman, Karen Vergada.
17 years of killing from 1993 to 2010 Three consecutive life sentences plus four consecutive terms for 25 years to life. He will never leave prison. That part, I can tell you, with certainty, is finished. But as part of the plea deal that ended this case, Heuermann has agreed to something else. He agreed to sit down with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, the people whose entire job is to get inside the operational mind of someone who kills repeatedly and doesn't stop, and walk them through everything. How he chose them, how he planned it, how he hid it, how he went home to his wife and children afterward and carried on like a man who had nothing to answer for.
A lot of people hear that, and their gut reaction is, why? He's done. He's sentenced. Why give this man a room with an audience? Why let him sit across from federal agents and revisit what he did like it matters?
That reaction makes sense.
And the answer is 50 years of evidence. It says the FBI needs what's inside his head, not for Heuermann, but for the people who haven't been found yet. Robin Dreeke, my co-host on the show, and former FBI counterintelligence behavioral analysis chief, has said publicly here on the program, on the likelihood Heuermann killed only eight people over that span, is limited to none.
And if that's right, the FBI isn't just studying a convicted killer. They're looking for names.
We don't have. I don't understand why the FBI does this, why they've been doing it for decades, and why they built it into this plea deal. You need to understand how the whole program started. And you need to understand that there's a case where a single interview subject's confessions led the FBI to confirm 93 murders across a dozen states, cold cases that had been closed for decades. We'll get to how that happened in just a few moments, because that's the answer to every objection anyone has about what the FBI is doing with Rex Heuermann. In the mid 1970s, two FBI agents named Robert Ressler and John Douglas started doing something the Bureau had never systematically attempted. They walked into prisons and sat across from convicted killers and asked them to explain themselves, not to get confessions. The convictions were already done. They wanted to understand the architecture of these crimes, the planning, the victim selection, the escalation, the evasion, why some killers stopped and others couldn't. Between 1979 and 1983, Ressler and Douglas conducted structured interviews with 36 convicted murderers, Edmund Kemper, who killed 8 women and his own grandparents, John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 young men, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy. These weren't casual conversations. The FBI developed a detailed questionnaire with hundreds of questions covering childhood, family structure, relationships, the specifics of every crime. They walked through each killing individually. They checked what the subject said against the case files, looking for where the stories matched and where they didn't. Set it up plain, Robert Ressler sat across from Ed Kempner, a man who stood 6'9 and had already told another interviewer he could twist someone's head off.
Ressler asked him to explain step by step how he chose his victims. There was a moment when Ressler hit the buzzer to call the guard. It didn't work.
Kempner noticed. He smiled and told Ressler exactly what he could do to him before anyone came.
Ressler kept asking questions. That's the kind of nerve the program required. And the payoff was worth it. The data from those 36 interviews became the foundation of modern criminal profiling. Ressler literally coined the term Serial Killer during this period. The phrase didn't exist in law enforcement vocabulary before the program put it there. If you watched Mindhunter, you know what I'm talking about. The interviews produced the organized, disorganized defender classification, which is still the most widely used framework for analyzing violent crime scenes anywhere in the world. The premise is straightforward. An organized crime scene, planning, a targeted victim, a concealed body, control maintained throughout, tells investigators one thing about who they're looking for. A disorganized scene, impulsive and chaotic, with no attempt to hide anything, tells them something entirely different. That distinction, which helps narrow suspects' pools and links cases across jurisdictions, came directly from killers explaining how they operated.
That's what the criticism of these interviews misses. The framework that allows investigators to look at a crime scene and make informed assessments about who they're looking for. It didn't come from textbooks or academic theory. It came from someone sitting across from a convicted killer and asking, walk me through it. And the program didn't stay academic. These interviews led directly to something called VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which the FBI launched in 1985 It's a national database of violent crimes built on the behavioral patterns identified through those killer interviews. The idea was simple but revolutionary. If investigators in different jurisdictions could compare the behavioral signatures of unsolved crimes, they could link cases that would otherwise stay isolated. How a killer selected victims, how the crime scene was staged, what was done, what was taken. Those behavioral fingerprints could cross state lines. And even when physical evidence couldn't, a killer operating across three different states where no single police department knew about the other cases could be identified through behavioral patterns rather than physical evidence alone. VICAP now contains approximately 85,000 cases and remains the only national law enforcement database that includes both investigative and behavioral information. That database exists because Ressler and Douglas sat in rooms with monsters like Heuermann and built the behavioral vocabulary to populate it. And none of this is abstract. In 2001, the Green River investigation in Washington state finally produced an arrest. Gary Ridgway, a truck painter who had been a suspect for years, was linked to victims through DNA evidence that hadn't existed when the killings began in the early 1980s. Ridgway agreed to a plea deal, confess and cooperate with the investigators in exchange for being spared the death penalty. FBI profiler Mary O'Toole was brought in to work with him. Ridgway wasn't forthcoming. At first, he never is. None of them are. O'Toole has described the process as building up his sense of importance, making him believe the FBI found him uniquely fascinating. Worth studying, she used his vanity as a lever. Over six months of interviews, Ridgway started talking. He categorized his own victims. Some were what he called special, the ones who fought back, who didn't die easily, those he buried individually, the ones who died quickly. He grouped together. Eventually, Ridgway led investigators to the remains of four previously unidentified women, families who had spent years not knowing where their daughters were, finally got to bury them. Again, not because of DNA, not because of a tip line, because a profiler sat in a room with a man who killed at least 48 women and used his ego to extract the location of bodies he'd hidden for nearly 20 years. That's what cooperation looks like when the FBI controls the process and the single biggest payoff in the program's entire history makes Ridgway's case look modest. In 2018, a Texas ranger named James Hotland sat down with a 78-year-old named Samuel Little. Little had already been convicted of three murders in Los Angeles based on DNA evidence, but VyCAP analysis, the people running the very database, those original killer interviews built, had noticed something in the data, an alarming pattern linking Little to far more cases than anyone had realized. Hotland used interview techniques refined over the decades of the VAU program and started asking questions. Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders across more than a dozen states over 35 years. The FBI confirmed him as the most prolific serial killer in the United States history. VyCAP matched his confessions to cold cases stretching from California to Georgia to Tennessee, and many of Little's victims had been written off. Their deaths were ruled overdoses, attributed to accidental or undetermined causes. They were overwhelmingly black women whose disappearances had generated sustained investigation. Without those interviews, every one of those cases stays closed. Every one of those families keeps waiting for a phone call that never comes. Little drew portraits of his victims from memory. Those drawings were published by the FBI and are still being used to identify remains. An FBI crime analyst who worked the case put it simply. For many years Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was according to his victims. The interviews proved him wrong.