Getting a phone call from a serial killer is the sort of thing most individuals would find unsettling.
For Jana Monroe, it was just one other day at work.
It was the early Nineties and Monroe, who had been an FBI agent for just over five years — and was the one woman within the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, Virginia — picked up her office phone to be greeted by Edmund Kemper.
The notorious serial killer, nicknamed the Co-Ed Killer, had slaughtered eight people within the Seventies, including a teenage girl and his own mother.
It wasn’t Monroe’s first prison chat with a sociopath, however it was the primary time a killer had called “offering his help,” writes Monroe in her recent memoir, “Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, The Behavioral Science Unit and My Life as a Woman within the FBI” (Abrams Press), out Tuesday.
Monroe, now 69, was in the course of investigating multiple murders in Philadelphia that will or may not have been connected.
Kemper, calling from prison in Vacaville, California, was willing to share his expertise. She agreed to listen to him out, “on the idea that it takes one to know one,” Monroe writes.
She described the Philly investigation for him — what was known and unknown in regards to the crimes — and Kemper, who decapitated most of his victims, tried to elucidate to Monroe the psychology of a killer.
“That’s for control, the enjoyment,” he told her. “It’s knowing that you simply are totally on top of things, they usually are totally scared of you.”
If this exchange seems like something out of the 1991 horror classic “The Silence of the Lambs,” there’s a superb reason.
Jodie Foster, who would go on to win an Oscar for her performance as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, spent weeks shadowing Monroe to arrange for the role.
“In a way, that was inevitable,” Monroe writes. “Clarice was a fictional trainee on the BSU, and I used to be the only real woman within the unit, the just one who could walk Jodie through our peculiar world from a lady’s standpoint.”
The movie — and the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris on which it’s based — are fiction.
However the real-life inspiration for Clarice isn’t all that different from what we saw on screen.
Monroe, who investigated or consulted on greater than 850 homicide cases during her 22-year-old profession — including serial killers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Kemper — has experienced firsthand what it’s wish to try to outsmart a cold-blooded killer.
“I never felt physically afraid in any respect, like they were going to bust out and grab me,” Monroe told The Post about her frequent prison interviews. “What made me nervous was how smart and manipulative they might be. It was at all times, how can I stay one step ahead of them? Because they’ll attempt to trick you or get inside your head.”
Born in Long Beach, California, to a housewife and movie projectionist dad, Monroe grew up falling in love with “Dirty Harry” movies at her dad’s theater; her first ambition was to turn into a police officer.
After majoring in criminology at Long Beach State and a temporary police profession in Chino and Upland, she set her sights on joining the FBI and focusing exclusively on violent crimes.
“I had seen enough dead bodies laid out on slabs with health workers probing them to know that each my stomach and my psyche could handle violent death and its aftermath,” Monroe writes.
She arrived on the FBI Academy at Quantico in 1985 and in lower than a yr, had her badge.
After a stint in Tampa, she returned to Virginia to hitch the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, “one in all the Bureau’s truly elite units,” she writes.
Monroe soon proved that she not only had the brains for the job however the stomach.
“One afternoon I may be consulting a manual on the varied ways by which flesh decays,” she writes. “The subsequent day I could be comparing decapitations with my morning coffee.”
She became exceptionally expert in victimology, the science of reading a body for clues, and uncovering not only how someone died by why.
“Let’s say you found a lady strangled to death in her house,” Monroe told The Post. “Was it manual strangulation? Was there a cord round her neck? If her body was found wearing a negligee and all our friends insist she was a really modest, safety conscious person, she wouldn’t have invited someone in dressed like that if she didn’t know them.”
Monroe once investigated a murder scene where the victim had been stabbed 76 times.
“And several other of them were to the hilt of the knife,” she said. “That’s a cut of anger. And overkill. That was not just a few random guy.”
Monroe had a special talent for locating details in a criminal offense scene that illuminated a killer’s personality—and possibly his motivation.
“Dead and mutilated bodies will not be silent,” Monroe writes. “Did the killer leave a signature that will help tie victims together? Did he sever their heads? Open up their chest cavities and examine the organs? Did he keep a selected body part or similar body parts as souvenirs of his crimes?”
It wasn’t long before Hollywood got here knocking, and it wasn’t just Jodie Foster who wanted to observe and study Monroe in motion.
In 1992, Demi Moore was planning to star in a movie adaptation of one in all creator Patricia Cornwell’s bestselling crime novels and got permission from the FBI to follow Monroe for research.
But she proved to be a less-than-enthusiastic student.
“How long is that this going to take?” Moore asked after being invited to take a seat in on a consultation about an open murder case.
“Probably 5 – 6 hours,” Monroe told her. “It’s a triple homicide.”
Moore rolled her eyes, and made it lower than an hour before slipping out.
Later, when practicing on the shooting range — Moore “had little or no experience with firearms,” Monroe writes — the actress allegedly became enraged while Monroe tried to snap a couple of photos to memorialize the event.
“Demi was fiercely protective of her image and threatened to sue if any of the photographs I had just taken ever saw the sunshine of day,” Monroe writes. “Actually, she didn’t put it quite that nicely. Miss Congeniality, Demi was not.”
The movie never got made.
Foster was way more engaged and desirous to learn, even agreeing to participate within the FBI’s Yellow Brick Road obstacle course for brand spanking new recruits.
The course features a 6.1-mile run over uneven, hilly terrain that requires participants to scale rock faces, jump through fake windows and crawl under barbed wire through mud.
Although Foster wanted to take a seat in on an actual prison interview — a serious plot point in “Silence of the Lambs” — she needed to suffice with Monroe’s stories, which might be harrowing.
“You may have to know, moving into, that 100 hungry male eyes are looking at you, all at the identical time, boring holes in you, tearing your clothes off with their eyes,” Monroe writes of going into prison. “You may have to expect hooting, whistling, lewd comments, all that, and you’ll be able to’t expect the guards in most prisons to do lots to assist you.”
One in every of the main points that Monroe shared with Foster — an incident by which a male prisoner threw a fistful of ejaculate at her as she passed within the prison hall — ended up being included within the film, which Monroe says “was almost as repulsive because it was when it happened in real life to me.”
When Monroe saw the finished movie, she was surprised at how much the filmmakers got right about her world.
Even the long-lasting scene within the film’s tense third act, when Clarice knocks on the door of Buffalo Bill’s home, not knowing what horrors awaited her inside, was all too familiar to Monroe.
“I seek advice from myself as an adrenaline junkie,” she told The Post. “I enjoyed the ‘knock-and-announce,’ as we call it. It was at all times stressful since you knew whatever was on the opposite side of the door probably wasn’t going to be good, but you probably did it anyway.”
Monroe is now retired and lives in Arlington, Texas, working part-time on a cyber security engagement for a big company.
The one a part of “Silence of the Lambs” that actually scared her, she said, was Hannibal Lecter.
Although she never met Alfredo Ballí Treviño, the Mexican surgeon/ serial killer who inspired the character, she claims that, on the FBI, charming sociopaths like Hannibal Lecters “were our day by day eating regimen, no pun intended. We saw echoes of him always — through in-person interviews we conducted, by studying their victims’ stays and by poring over case studies of earlier serial killers to hone our understanding. Most of us had seen our own Hannibal Lecter face-to-face in a single form or one other.”
The one detail of “Silence” that also chills her blood is Hannibal’s voice.
“Anthony [Hopkins, who played Hannibal] had that flat, soft voice,” she said. “Edmund Kemper sounded similar to that. He was very robotic.”
She remembers once meeting with Kemper in prison, and the way, during a lunch break, she and one other agent rode with him on an elevator.
Kemper checked out them and, in an atonal voice devoid of any emotion, muttered, “I could kill you each right away if I desired to.”
It was the identical voice she heard in Hannibal Lecter, and to this present day it still makes the hair stand on the back of her neck. “
They don’t have feelings or emotions like the remainder of us,” she said of serial killers. “In order that they don’t recognize that the majority people have some sort of inflection or intonation once they speak.”
She pauses to shake off the heebie-jeebies. “It still freaks me out.”