Photo courtesy of Jim Clemente
As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.”
He had no idea he would someday become an FBI profiler, then a writer and producer for Criminal Minds, the most streamed show in the world.
Clemente’s interest in criminal justice was deeply personal: as a boy, he had been sexually abused at a Catholic youth camp. He brushed the horror aside and kept silent, figuring he had somehow done something to bring it on. Years later, he learned that others had been abused by the same man. By then, he was a prosecutor in New York State. He contacted the FBI and told agents he was willing to wear a wire. Six times, he met with his abuser, and he gathered enough evidence to convict.
His cool instinct also earned him an invitation to join the FBI. This was the 1970s, and the Behavioral Science Unit (now the Behavioral Analysis Unit) was just beginning. To discover typologies and methodologies, he says, “they were studying thirty-eight serial offenders. By the time I left, the number was over fifteen hundred.”
The unit’s charge was to educate law enforcement, but the general public has also grown more sophisticated, with amateur internet sleuthing emerging as an obsessive, consuming hobby. “The information available to people has multiplied many times,” he remarks. “And the ability to do deep dives on this kind of information—once AI gets to chew all this stuff up, it’s going to be able to spit out all the information any profiler needs.” Clemente does not worry about lost jobs for the humans, though; AI will not provide the nuanced interpretation, the intuitive weighting of tiny, significant details.
By now, he has done hundreds of podcasts detailing past cases. His audience—and the audience for all true crime—is largely female. Though I am part of it, the gender imbalance puzzles me.
“Women generally are more nurturing and empathetic than men,” he says. (Thinking of some notable exceptions, I try not to snort.) “I believe they have an innate desire to find out as much about a violent crime as they can, so they can protect the ones they love.” I want to agree with him. But there is an intense fascination I sense in myself and several of my friends that does not feel like an impulse to protect. Maybe, though, to understand. Or to defend ourselves?
“Women have to go through life worrying much more about being the target of violent crime than men do,” Clemente continues. “There’s genetic memory. And with the proliferation of internet and social media we are exposed to so much more violent crime than previous generations. That reaches the most primitive parts of our brains, and we are drawn to try to figure out how to avoid things that are violent and how to protect others from them. It’s similar to rubbernecking with a bad traffic collision—we literally can’t look away. Again, the primitive part of our brain is trying to take in as much information as possible so we can avoid being in the same predicament. Sure, there are some people who take it to an extreme. Some have mental disorders and get fixated on certain levels of violence. There are also people who suffered tremendous trauma who may get fixated. But in general, I think it’s an altruistic desire to learn as much as they can.”
We are all sitting in Times Square, studying one another.
Unfortunately, Hollywood messes up our analyses. With his brother, who also became an FBI agent, Clemente has consulted on dozens of crime shows, correcting biases, worn tropes, and sloppy assumptions. “Some are soap operas in a law enforcement setting,” he says with a sigh. “Some set up an absurd premise at the beginning—a serial killer is allowed to go to the local library to use the internet and is able to create a cult following online of people who will murder for him.” Some shows listened and restored a little reality. Others insisted on going their own way.
Consulting has its satisfactions, but Clemente also writes and speaks. His new thriller, Bluebeard, based on the true story of L.A.’s first known serial killer, made the Associated Press’s Top 10 list. And with Kathy Canning-Mello, an FBI profiler who worked with him in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, he does the podcast FBI Profilers: Criminal Archives.
For previous podcasts, Criminal Minds, and other projects, he was allowed to write about “the entire spectrum of cases we dealt with. We had to tone the violence down for TV, but I wanted to use those cases to educate the public on who the real victims were, what the signatures and M.O.s were, and what the offenders were like. They are not just guys with serial-killer glasses who live with their mothers and spend all their time in the basement. We spent a lot of time working with the casting to cast the offenders as some average joes and some weird people and a lot of people who were unexpectedly, in the privacy of their own brains, violent criminals, but on the outside looked like your dad or your brother.”
He also bristles at the term “predator.” “People don’t understand that grooming, especially in child sex cases, is the number one tool, and grooming can be targeted not only at the child but at parents or the community as a whole. These people are pillars of the community. We trust them implicitly. And they are the ones doing the most damage.” As examples, he lists a few “family annihilators” who were “handsome, articulate, well-spoken men,” thus people never dreamed they could have killed their wives and children. “People believe they will recognize an offender. That’s garbage.
“I’ve studied some extreme examples of the worst things humans do to one another,” Clemente continues, “but it’s all human nature. Mean girls in high school? Smaller scale. Some people are born without empathy and choose to mimic others in order to become a good person; others who are born without empathy embrace the dark side and mimic in order to do bad things.” In three terse sentences, he boils down causality: “Genetics loads the gun. Personality and psychology aim it. And experiences pull the trigger.” How many discussions did that just erase? I can hear myself quizzing all sorts of smart people over the years: is it temperament that pushes people toward violence? Are sociopaths born or made? Are there brain structures, biochemical patterns, defects in inhibition that—
“If I believed that it was predetermined, or they didn’t have the capacity to make such a decision, then there’s no way I could justify throwing them in jail,” he says. “But millions of tiny decisions snowballed into the person you see in front of you.” He offers a hypothetical: “You could have one twin saying, ‘Look how our parents struggle. When I grow up I want to help them,’ and the other saying, ‘They are failures. I want to kill them.’” A trail of tiny decisions led them to those separate destinations.
And then he adds a line that chills me: “What we do in the privacy of our own brains, the stuff we choose to hide from others, is what makes the difference.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
