Inside the FBI’s Year-Long Profiler Training at Quantico | Carlo Schippers
Profiler: True Crime AfricaPlay episode
Show notes
What was it actually like to train as a criminal profiler at the FBI Academy at Quantico when profiling was still an emerging discipline?
In 1990, Amsterdam homicide detective Carlo Schippers was selected to spend an entire year at Quantico, training and working alongside some of the pioneers of modern criminal profiling.
John Douglas was running the unit. Carlo was taught by figures including Robert Ressler, Roy Hazelwood and Ken Lanning. His training included forensic pathology, abnormal psychology, studying solved murders and eventually working on real cases submitted to the FBI by police departments across the United States.
It was also a remarkable moment in profiling history. The Silence of the Lambs had been partly filmed at the FBI Academy and was released while Carlo was there. He remembers taking the same elevator seen in the film down to the underground Behavioral Science Unit, watching the media descend on John Douglas and attending a special preview of the movie with FBI Academy staff.
Carlo joins former head of the SAPS Investigative Psychology Section Dr Gérard Labuschagne and Paul Llewellyn to give a rare first-hand account of that year: how FBI profilers were trained, what the work actually involved, what Hollywood got wrong and how Carlo eventually took what he had learned back to the Netherlands and became the country's first profiler.
Carlo also discusses his new book, Denken als de dader — Thinking Like the Offender, looking back across his 45-year police career and the reality of working with homicide, serial murder, sexual offending, missing persons, stalking and coercive control.
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