What Drives Someone to Violence: A Behavioral Profiling Pioneer on Fifty Years of Criminal Research

Ann Burgess is a professor emerita at Boston College whose decades of work helped establish the scientific foundation for behavioral profiling — from her early research on rape trauma syndrome to her collaboration with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit on the original serial killer interview study. Her research shaped how investigators approach crime scene analysis, offender motivation, and victim impact, and her work continues to influence how violent crime is understood and prosecuted in the United States.

At ISHI 36, Burgess delivered a keynote presentation co-authored with her granddaughter, Alexandra Burgess, examining how artificial intelligence and algorithmic analysis can extend the behavioral research she began five decades ago. In this interview, she discusses the six-step pathway to violence, how social media posts and manifestos are changing the data landscape for prevention research, and what the FBI’s original 87-question interview protocol has to do with the way researchers are now training machine learning models. She also addresses the application of AI to physical evidence — including her analysis of childhood drawings from the Menendez brothers case — and what it means to translate that kind of evidence for a jury.

The conversation covers Burgess’s collaboration with three generations of her family — her daughter and granddaughter — each bringing a different disciplinary lens to shared research questions. She also reflects on expert witness testimony, the challenge of communicating complex behavioral evidence in court, and what she believes forensic scientists and analysts can learn from how DNA has navigated courtroom credibility over the past 30 years.

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