Wendy Carr quotes from Mindhunter

Wendy Carr

Imagine, like truly imagine what it takes to bludgeon someone to death. The lust for control, the feeling of arousal, the decision to rape the severed head of your victim, to humiliate her corpse. How could you possibly get that from an ordinary police report? You know why it took me nearly a decade to publish my book? Because narcissists don't go to the doctor. Psychopaths are convinced that there is nothing wrong with them. So these men are virtually impossible to study. Yet you have found a way to study them in near perfect laboratory conditions.

Wendy Carr

I mean, if they admitted that they rape and murder for pleasure, it would destroy them. There's a tension. They need to be seen to have power over someone, and yet circumstance demands that they erase the only witness, which means they have to do the whole thing over again. It must be Hell.

Holden Ford

So you're saying you don't think this, us interviewing these killers, is crazy?

Wendy Carr

Just the opposite. I mean, crazy in the way that anyone with a truly new idea is crazy. But no.

Holden Ford

Wow, okay. That's a relief. That hasn't really been the feedback we've gotten so far.

Bill Tench

Actually, this is the only feedback we've gotten so far.

Holden Ford

So what are you teaching?

Wendy Carr

Um, I'm teaching a class on the intersection of sociopathy and fame. People like, um, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison. Their celebrity becomes the only thing they need to sustain their ego.

Bill Tench

Nixon was a sociopath.

Wendy Carr

Very similar.

Holden Ford

How do you get to be president of the United States if you're a sociopath?

Wendy Carr

The question is, how do you get to be president of the United States if you're not? That's why this work is so vital. It goes so much further than the FBI.

Bill Tench

All the way to the White House.

Wendy Carr

Perhaps, yeah.

Wendy Carr

Psychopaths are extremely skilled at imitating human emotions. It's how they manipulate other people, or how they gain power over their environment.

Holden Ford

How do they understand emotions if they don't have them?

Wendy Carr

Well, they have emotions. They just don't believe other people have them. Or, more specifically, they don't believe that other people have interior lives.

Wendy Carr

You know, you're going to see people present with similar pathologies, but the way a person kills is as individual and distinct as the way they have sex.

Holden Ford

And just as complicated.

When you go from an abstract idea of murder to the visceral reality, you can no longer be objective. Only when you feel the pain of those victims and their loved ones can you know the magnitude of the choice that killer made. And it's that choice that seals his fate.

Wendy Carr

There's no reason to kill people when we have the wherewithal to lock them up. These people spend the rest of their lives in horrendous conditions, which likely reflect the environments in which they were raised.

Wendy Carr

Not really, no. But if I did, if I did have a night off, is there a place? For us?

Kay Manz

Are you looking for a tour guide... or a date?

Wendy Carr

A date.

Kay Manz

Give me a second. The usual?

Wendy Carr

Please.

Kay Manz

Pretty soon, I'm gonna have to start calling you a regular.

Wendy Carr

Last time, I promise.

Kay Manz

People will talk.

Wendy Carr

In my job, I can't have people talking.

Kay Manz

I was kidding.

Wendy Carr

So, what does one do for fun around here?

Kay Manz

You still want to try Chinese? I can vouch for this place one way or another.

Wendy Carr

Yeah. I think we should be adventurous.

Kay Manz

Chinese in Suburban Virginia. Pretty adventurous.