Hulu Doc Mastermind Investigates the Minds of Serial Killers

The founding mother of the #MeToo movement is the subject of a new Hulu documentary.

Brainwhich begins streaming on Hulu today (July 11), profiles Ann Burgess, a professor and forensic nurse at Boston College who, in the 1970s, launched one of the first studies on sexual violence and rape victims and helped to establish one of the first rape studies. US crisis centers at Boston City Hospital.

“When the FBI academy was tasked with going into the field and teaching local law enforcement about rape, they did not have the experience to do so. So they brought in Dr. Burgess to talk about it,” Steven Constantine, who appears in the document and co-authored the book with Burgess A killer by design, says TIME.

Burgess taught the FBI to approach victims of rape and sexual assault with more sensitivity. Burgess also helped the agency improve its study of crime victims so that agents could better understand the perpetrators of a crime, especially serial killers. As part of a behavioral sciences unit, she was an expert in profiling. Her first big success came when she profiled the killer in the 1983 murders of three boys in Nebraska who were tied up, raped and killed. The profile said it was looking for someone the boys could get to know, like a teacher or a scout leader. The media published the profile so that the general public could keep an eye on it, and sure enough, a teacher noticed a suspicious car parked near the school and reported the license plate number. The car belonged to John Joubert, a scout leader, who confessed to killing the boys. Joubert was executed in 1996.

Looking back at trends in serial killer motives over the years, Burgess says, “the motive is still dominance, power, control.” Shepherd dog, if you can, to be able to combat dominance,” says Burgess.

Due to his decades of research into victims of trauma and abuse, Burgess has served as an expert witness in high-profile trials. His participation in two helped change the way people thought about victims of sexual assault and rape.

See more information: The true stories behind the serial killers in Mindhunter season two

When the Menéndez brothers, Erik, 18, and Lyle, 21, tested for the murder of his parents in 1993, Burgess got Erik to open up about how his father sexually abused him. She testified, as a defense expert, that he killed his father in self-defense. The discovery came after Burgess met with Erik and had him draw what was going on in the house. She noticed that he was drawing dolls of himself and his father in their room, which led her to ask more questions about what they were doing in her room. The Menéndez brothers are still in prison for their crime, but the case changed the way people thought about victims of rape and sexual abuse by showing that there are also male victims.

Burgess was also an expert witness in the trial of Andrea Constand, whose account of sexual assault resulted in the conviction of artist Bill Cosby. The 2018 case was the first high-profile conviction since the start of the #MeToo movement and was a landmark for victims of rape or sexual assault who have often struggled to be believed by authorities and prosecutors.

Burgess gave Constand a questionnaire to document everything that happened before, during and after the traumatic incident so the prosecution could back up its story. In Brain, Constand says the care Burgess took to understand what she went through gave her the courage needed to overcome the ordeal of her 2018 trial. “I got 300 questions about how you sleep, eat, live, love – I was able to understand the that night did to me”, says Constand in the documentary series. “She believed in me.” (After Cosby’s initial conviction, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his sexual assault conviction in 2021 and he was released from prison.)

At 87, Burgess still works to help victims of abuse and their families. She is a professor at the Boston College School of Nursing and her research focuses on rape in Indigenous communities and abused nursing home residents. Brain comes out at a time when there are more platforms than ever for sharing true crime stories, from streaming sites to podcasts. Burgess herself is the real-life inspiration for Netflix Mindhunter and her character Wendy Carr, a psychology professor who fights crimes. Burgess generally thinks the trend is harmless as long as shows don’t romanticize or sensationalize the killers. And she still thinks there are useful life lessons that can be learned from true crime shows. As she says, “A lot of people are armchair detectives, and that’s a good thing. I think we should be suspicious and ask questions.”