John E. Douglas

John E. Douglas is an American author of true crime non-fiction books and crime thriller novels. He is a former FBI agent and one of the first criminal profilers. Douglas started out as a sniper, and later hostage negotiator. He was later transferred to the Behavioral Science Unit, where he taught hostage negotiation and criminal psychology. He began and managed the Criminal Profiling Program at the FBI, travelling the country in order to interview serial killers, assassins, and violent sex offenders such as David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Richard Speck, Gary Ridgway, and others. He has been the basis of several fictional characters, including Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and most recently Holden Ford in the Netflix show Mindhunter.