Dayle Hinman doesn’t look like a former, gun-totin’ member of the Florida State Police, nor does she resemble one of the most astute profilers the FBI has ever produced. Yet, she was both for many years; she even hosted “Body of Evidence” on TruTV for nearly a decade. This Southern Belle wouldn’t be where she is without the educators who made a difference in her life. We caught up with her to ask about her thoughts on serial killers, cops, and what happens when a teacher believes in you.
The Forensic Teacher Magazine: When you got into college, and you got a degree in criminology, I understand that after that you went to work for the FBI profiling unit.
Dayle Hinman: Yup.
FT: Did you get into it with that goal?
DH: No, and I’ve never worked for the FBI. Ever. And I never intended to be a police officer, ever. It’s just a bizarre chain of odd events that led me to where I turned out to be. My mother was a teacher. She was a phys ed and health teacher, and I had gone to her classes from time to time, and I just didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher because I felt like a lot of the students didn’t want to be there.
FT: Oh yeah.
DH: They weren’t looking up front, and I wanted to go over and give them a little shake and say, ‘look, this woman is amazing and she has incredible information to impart to you. Why are you not looking in her direction, why are you braiding somebody’s hair?’ And I never thought I wanted to be a teacher which is really interesting because I’ve done such a turnabout in this. I graduated from college with my criminology degree, and I intended all along to be a juvenile counselor, like a crisis counselor. I wanted to specialize in addicted youth. In my internship in my last semester of college I knew this was not my calling.
FT: Ok.
DH: I had majored in the wrong thing. So, it was a friend of my father’s, we were at a little event right after I had graduated, and I said, “Emory, I don’t know how to tell my parents I majored in the wrong thing.” He said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “My mother went back to work after having children with the goal of being able to put four kids through college, because my parents’ education was paid for. So it was expected that I was going to college. It was never, ‘do you want to go to college,’ it was, ‘what colleges are you considering?’ It wasn’t even an option for me.
FT: That was my folks too.
DH: Yup. And I always intended to go to college, and I had majored in the wrong thing. So I asked him, “What do you think I should do? I don’t know how to tell my parents I need to go get another degree.” And Emory looked at me sort of stunned for a minute and he said, “Well, go over to FSU police and apply for a job.” And I said, “Emory, I don’t want to be a pig,” and he said, “No, no, no. FSU police is a salary incentive position. You can get a job there and be a police officer and you can major in whatever you want and they’ll pay for it.”
FT: Ahhhhh.
DH: “So it will be a free degree. You can get a master’s in another subject, major in something completely different, have a full time job, a full time salary, and you won’t be a drain on your parents anymore. You’ll be able to pay for everything yourself and go to college and they’ll rearrange your schedule to let you go.”
FT: Wonderful!
DH: And I went, “Ooh, that’s an idea.” And he said, “Look, you just graduated from college and you’re smart, and they can’t make a physical agility test that you can’t pass and that the men can pass. It’s not possible.” I’m a career runner, cyclist, marathon runner, triathalete, you know, I’m really very athletic.
FT: Wow.
DH: So, I went over and applied for a job. And, of course, breezed through the physical agility, breezed through the interview, and a short time later here I am in the police academy. And it was all with the goal of getting a free education in something else.
FT: (laughs)
DH: I put the uniform on and I loved it! It was amazing. I mean here I was with a pile of people who were smart and educated and they were cops, and I looked nice in the uniform, and people would walk up to me and talk to me with this great respect, and I thought, ‘well, this is fun!’
FT: Yes.
DH: I was going to get another degree so I started working on a masters in speech/communication because I could do something else with that. Then a new sheriff came into town. By then I was the vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police. We invited the three candidates and I was completely enamored with Ken Katsaris. He was educated, modern, progressive, he wanted to be fair to women and any minority that came down to apply for a job. So, I changed my political affiliation, got people to the polls to vote against the old guy that was in there. Ken Katsaris came into office, I went over there and applied for a job, and he gave me a job.
FT: Great!
DH: I was in court now as the Leon County deputy sheriff. A short time later I was promoted to detective, then the state police recruited me. So, I went from being on the campus to being in the county to being in the whole state of Florida.
FT: (laughs). This from a girl who didn’t want to be a cop.
DH: Yeah! And I loved it! The idea of being in homicide, of being a diver, of interviewing people, and making arrests. I took out my VISA card and my checkbook and I went to every school imaginable to get every bit of education that I could that would help me be a better detective.
FT: Wow.
DH: There I was at the state police in Miami, just really having a ball, and the director came to me and said the FBI had an opportunity for one person to live there for 12 months in the Behavioral Science Unit. He knew I had a homicide background and was interested in profiling. I told him sure, but they weren’t going to pick me because I was a woman and I was new at the agency. And he said I was his pick and urged me to go up there and give them heck.
FT: What year was this?
DH: 1985.
FT: And when did “Silence of the Lambs” come out?
DH: Oh, right around that time.
FT: Aaaahhhhh!
DH: Yeah. And so I flew up to Tallahassee and competed for the position and I won it. I lived at the FBI for all of calendar year 1986. After that I graduated and with the FBI’s blessing I went back to Tallahassee where I had been living before and started the program in the state of Florida.
FT: Terrific!
DH: I’m really a subscriber of the each-one-teach-one philosophy, so I thought each one should teach as many as possible. I chose a partnership with Wayne Porter. He and I worked the entire state of Florida, and we picked Tom Davis, and we picked Larry Ruby, then we picked Wesley DiAmbrosia. We had more people in the state of Florida as profilers than the entire country of Australia or Canada at that time. We were amazing, we were a team.
FT: I bet that made for some pretty fierce poker games with everyone looking at everyone else’s body language.
DH: (laughs). You know what? That’s not what profiling is. Profilers are historians of crime information. So, each time we look at a new case we remember every case we’ve ever studied or worked on in our whole lives, and we compare all the crime scene information and all of our education and training to look at what happened in other cases that were similar. So, the type of person who committed that crime for that reason is the same kind of person we have in this case. We develop an investigative strategy with the local police to help them eliminate all the other unrealistic targets and focus on the realistic targets.
FT: Ah…
DH: Are they a stranger to the victim? The majority of people are killed by someone they know. There are not that many random, marauding serial murderers, there’s just not. It’s most likely going to be someone that knew the victim who knew they were there, knew they were alone, and went and killed him or her. And then we can understand the motivation in cases like that in the past.
FT: And they may have had an emotional attachment or relationship.
DH: It could have been. Or it could have been that the victim left him or became angry or rebuffed his advances. It could have been that person had money and it’s a robbery that turns into the homicide. So, we’re looking at all information, not just what we think, but based on all of our education and training, and a little bit of intuition. Profilers are really homicide investigators with special dreams.
FT: I watched the movie “Citizen X” [about the most prolific Soviet serial killer in modern times, ed.] and at one point Donald Sutherland’s character reveals to the lead investigator that in the US the FBI rotates people on and off the Behavioral Unit because otherwise they face burnout. Is this true?
DH: I don’t think so. The people they’re putting in that unit now are people that were hired by the FBI because they were homicide investigators. And the people who are really good at this type of investigation are cared for emotionally by all their friends. I did this for 26 and a half years as a sworn law enforcement officer with the State of Florida, and never, ever felt burned out because when people would watch me in a crime scene they would make sure I was fine emotionally with what was going on or they’d help me out.
FT: Wonderful.
DH: We supported each other in ways that people don’t understand. The nature of police work is different which is why it’s difficult to work around people who are not one of us because of the way we deal with the bad situations. We expect that when we show up people will look at us and wonder who died. I used to say, “Why do you think someone died?” and they’d say, “Well, you’re here. And you wouldn’t be here if somebody didn’t die.”
FT: (laughs)
DH: I am here for another reason; I’m here to see somebody for another reason. You don’t see me just because somebody died. And they said, “Well, we don’t expect that.” And the people who are really good at this are the ones who have done it for a really long time and developed their own levels of comfort. I think we all support each other in ways that keep each other healthy. Most of us, when we shut off the office light we’re done for the day. I don’t think about these cases, I don’t dream about them, I don’t dwell on them. And the person who really turned me around was John Douglas.
FT: Oh, yes? [Douglas pioneered behavioral profiling at the FBI, has written several books on the subject, and was the inspiration for Crawford’s character in “The Silence of the Lambs” –ed.]
DH: He was the unit chief when I was at the FBI, and one of the people who really started profiling from the FBI’s standpoint. He walked into the room I was in and stood behind me. I had a case laid out on the desk. He picked up a picture of a victim and said, “Don’t feel sorry for her.” And I said, “Why would you say that? She died a terrible death.” He said, “If you’re standing around ever feeling sorry for the victims and there’s tears in your eyes, you don’t see what you’re supposed to be looking at. You have the ability to prevent this from happening to someone else.” Then he dropped the picture on my desk, turned, and walked out.
FT: Wow.
DH: Yeah, wow. We’re intrigued and interested and focused, and we can prevent these crimes from happening to someone else. We travel as a pack and we work as a team.
FT: That brings me to something else. Speaking of traveling in a pack, supporting each other, and the more you do the better you get, what do you think about the TV show “Criminal Minds?” It’s a show about an FBI team that travels around the country solving a different serial killer mystery every week.
DH: It’s really far-fetched. There’s a big difference between television entertainment and reality. A huge difference. I think CSI has done really an amazing amount of good and damage at the same time. The things they do are completely unrealistic. There’s a ballistics expert, Kara Tollman that I like to work with who is with the State Police office in Tampa; she never goes to crime scenes at all. What happens is they pick up all the ballistic evidence and bring it back to her and she sits in the lab and gives them a report. On CSI Miami they solve everything in the same day. It’s just not realistic. Detectives can have 50 cases on their caseload and they go from one to the next. They don’t have TV resources and nothing gets solved in the same day.
These shows make people interested in joining the field because they think it’s going to be like it is on CSI and it’s not. Crime scenes can be really stinky and awful. There’s maggots and bugs and a stench. When I’m in an active crime scene I have a pocketful of rubber gloves in my jumpsuit and my hair is in a paper hairnet and I have shoe-booties on. Not hip-hugger pants, or spiky sandals because there will be maggots between my toes and bugs all over me. And every time you change rooms you pull off the gloves and put fresh ones on to avoid cross contamination between rooms.
The TV shows are unrealistic, but they’re getting young people interested in the field. If they pursue it they’ll find out soon enough if it’s for them or not.
FT: Speaking of young people, who was your favorite teacher when you were in high school.
DH: Actually, my whole life turned around when I was in the sixth grade. I was a marginal student. I was very athletic; I played a lot of games and sports, and just wasn’t that interested in school until the sixth grade. That’s when I had a teacher named Ray Buck. I don’t know anything about him as a person, but he turned me around 180 degrees. He was interested in teaching the children the way each needed to be taught. He would go around the class and ask things about your life. I told him in the first week of school that I could jump on a pogo stick, hold it with my knees, and jump rope at the same time.
FT: And you could do that?
DH: Oh, yeah.
FT: Whoa.
DH: He believed I could do it so he challenged me to bring it to the classroom and do it in front of the class. And I did.
He was amazed. And the look of pride on his face was amazing. He was interested in me as a person and he wanted to teach me the way I wanted to be taught because he cared to ask me about what was interesting to me. During that year I built a mini-astronomy thing for my science projects. One had the constellations with Christmas lights and dyed fabric on a frame I built. I built a volcano that exploded and a topographical map of the US with modeling clay and paper mache. I couldn’t do enough to please him. Every day I couldn’t wait to get to school and see what challenge he was going to provide for us, and encourage and approve. Everything he did was better than the first five years of my education. He looked a little like Richard Chamberlain who appreciated everything everybody did, and he challenged you to go way past what you thought you could do. He changed my life from the way it was the first five years of school; that made me want to be different when I lectured too. I wanted to know what they wanted to know and I taught them that.
FT: That’s neat. Did you ever have another teacher like Mr. Buck?
DH: Yes. Gordon LeMaster, my firearms instructor. He was exactly like Mr. Buck. When I was in the police academy everybody but me had already had some military or some training with guns. When it came to firearms we provided our own. I had already bought mine; it was beautiful and I was all excited, and I brought it to the range. I opened the box and looked at the person next to me and asked where the bullets went. I’d never seen a gun up close other than in the police academy.
He took me aside and within 15 minutes had me qualifying. My first score was an 89. A lot of people were shooting in the low 80s, and they were people who had been shooting for years. And I had never shot a gun, and then I got that score.
He looked at me and said, “You can do this. This is not difficult. Just pay attention and listen to what I say, and you won’t have any problems.” He convinced me that I was good at this, and I have loved to shoot firearms ever since.
FT: Darn those teachers who treat their students like people and take an interest in them!
DH: Yeah! Oh, yeah. For me, I couldn’t wait until range day. I’m small enough that everyone can carry me which is great. A lot of the firearms stuff we do is live action with paintballs, so if you get shot somebody has to carry you. When I would show up at the range the men would come running up asking to be my partner. Each said they’d carry me and I could shoot. So it was great to have the confidence of everybody I was working with that they would trust me to be able to shoot.
Although I started my law enforcement career by sitting down with myself and saying, ‘This is serious. You have a gun. If something happens, can you, in your heart of hearts, shoot somebody and live with it?’ And I realized that to save my life or somebody else’s I could do it. I hoped I would be able to go through my entire career without ever shooting my gun in the line of duty. And, in fact, I did it.
FT: So, what advice do you have for our readers? How can they inspire their students?
DH: Well, if it’s in the law enforcement arena they need to understand what it is they’re teaching. And really know it, be with people who actually do it because it rubs off on everybody. Instead of just learning about it in books, they need to be able to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. If you have a lecture to give and it has to do with some specific subject go watch the person do it who can do it.
FT: What about teachers in general?
DH: Trying to do what Ray Buck did to inspire me to be interested in how it was that I could learn. I learn and I perform my best by being with someone who appreciates me. So the bosses that have gotten amazing amounts of work out of me told me to do things not because it was required or part of the job. My boss in Tallahassee was the best boss I ever had because he used to play me. He’d walk in and say, “Look, I know you’re busy, but you’re the best we have, and I’m going to ask you to do this because you’re going to do the best work on this project of anyone in the department.” And I’d say, “Sure, what is it?” Even though I was overwhelmed, because he would come to me and tell me he knew I could do this, or the governor or commissioner needed this done, and he knew I could do it.
FT: It’s quite a feeling when someone has high expectations and you don’t want to let them down.
DH: Oh, yes. So, no matter how tired I was or how many hours I’d worked I was up for it. He knew in a pinch he could ask me to go home at the end of the day when we had an emergency, take a nap, and then work the evening shift because he’d say he’d know then that everything would be done right if I were on board. And I would do it.
When you tell people you believe in them and you inspire them because you’re giving them an assignment because you know they can handle it. People like me, that’s how we learn. Some people, you gotta just snap your fingers and point to them and say, “Get it done.” But I’m not that kind of person. When teachers take the time to get to know their students they can teach the students in the way they need, that’s when they can get the most out of them.
Ray Buck—any project he assigned us—I couldn’t wait to get involved in it, I couldn’t wait to be the best because of the level of approval I would receive. It wasn’t just getting an A on a paper, it was the look of admiration on his face when he handed it back because he knew I had given it 150%. And seeing that look of ‘I’m proud of you, I knew you could do it.’
FT: Do you have any tips for students who are interested in a career in forensics?
DH: The thing about a career in forensics now is that it’s so wide open, both for the male and the female students than when I first started in law enforcement it was just an absolute rarity. I mean the idea of a female walking up [in an official capacity], their mouths would just drop open. I mean, a chick deputy? But now we’re accepted in all the different units. Look at what happened in Texas at Fort Hood. The person who challenged the shooter was a female. She ran at him and did what her training required her to do. She figured out who the offender was and immediately ran at him, shooting. So, we’re everywhere. We’re in the military, in all walks of forensics, not just the secretaries or the complaint-taker at the desk. People are coming to the realization that women do things differently, and viva la difference.
Having the different perspectives come to the table, people are amazed that women can do the jobs we do, and we’re proving it every single day. Everything is wide open: men make fabulous nurses and women make fabulous cops. We don’t have to fit into what was previously thought of as the box. There are women astronauts and women dentists and women everything. The more women know about these different types of jobs, you get the wrong idea from television, but seeing shows like “Criminal Minds” and “CSI” are giving women the idea that ‘this could be fun.’
FT: When I have a girl in my classes and I discover she has a talent for science or math, not that females don’t, but she would go out of her way to be a beacon, my go-to person for answers or getting a job done well, I would take these girls aside and ask if they knew what happens to females who are good at science and believe in themselves? And they’d ask, what? And I’d tell them, “Anything they want.”
DH: Absolutely. My husband’s daughter from his first marriage was really good at math and she went into the air force. After her aptitude test they told her she could be a linguist. She asked what they meant by that because she only spoke English. And they told her that people who were good at math like her would be good with another language. She went to the Defense Language Institute and now speaks Arabic. She was deployed to the NSA and when her four-year hitch was over they hired her. Being smart in math told them she could figure out the language and do security work for our nation.
She would never have thought this was something she could do. And she was open to the idea of doing so many jobs that people haven’t thought of.
FT: So, for students, male or female, who want to get into some branch of forensics, what would be your advice to them?
DH: I would advise them to find a police agency that does the job they think they might want to do, and sit down with the person doing it and what they do day to day instead of just wondering what these people do. In every area there is some big-city police or sheriff’s department that would have people who do all of these jobs. I used to speak at colleges all the time and give a lecture about what I do. Being a profiler—it all depends on whether you like to drive or not, and that’s my assessment of people’s personalities. I want to drive, I want to be in charge, I want to call the shots, I want to have all the education and training, and I want to do the best job. You need to the with police in order to get behind the yellow crime scene tape. Having some skill that doesn’t take you behind the crime scene tape isn’t going to get you there. The only way to get them to lift the tape and let you in there is because you have something to offer. At a crime scene a uniformed officer is standing on the inside of the tape. You walk up to him and say, “I’d like to go into the crime scene.” He’ll ask your name and rank and reason for going in. Wanting to go look around or learn something is not going to get you into the crime scene. You have to have something to offer; you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Nobody is going to hire anyone out of college with a criminology degree and make them a profiler. Nobody.
FT: What if there’s a student who wants to work in a lab?
DH: Spending time with the people who do it will let them know if it looks like fun. The majority of large police departments will take someone in for a few hours or a day or an internship. Sitting down with the person and seeing what it’s like to have that job might persuade that person to go 100% toward it or not.
FT: Right.
DH: Crime scenes are really stinky and if you don’t have a strong stomach you don’t need to be in the crime scene.
FT: I’ve heard that.
DH: You’re not allowed to throw up at a crime scene. You’re not supposed to wince and say, “Oh, no! Oh, gross!” You’re supposed to look at it and say, “Wow, I bet I can figure out how that happened.” Being able to look at it and lean in and get your camera out, take measurements, and really be in it.
FT: It’s not for everyone.
DH: It really isn’t for everyone. But people who are really interested in crime and cases might want to consider a career as an analyst. The analyst can change the whole face of the investigation. I was working on a crime in northwest Florida and an analyst was walking down the hall with me, telling me she found out this and that about the victim and other things she thought I should know. I invited her into the room and she said, “No, I’m just the analyst; the detectives won’t let me.” I said, “You know more about this case than everybody in the room. Can you please join us?” She said, “They won’t let me.” I told her, “I’m in charge here, and if I say you’re welcome you can come.”
We were trying to figure it out. It involved an infant and a mother who were murdered in a high drug crime area. The victim was a military person who had no toxicology to indicate any type of drugs in her system at all. And she had a footprint on her back. My opening comments were that I thought we had two different offenders because there were two different knives involved. I said I didn’t know why the victim had a shoe print on her back, and the analyst raised her hand and said, “I’m a mom,” and I began to think I’d made a mistake by allowing her into the meeting. And she said again, “I’m a mom. The victim had the [car] doors locked from the front, and the offenders were in the car with the baby in the backseat. They were trapped and couldn’t get out so they had to climb over the seat and step on her back.” It would have taken me hours to have figured that out.
FT: Did you realize what you did in that situation? You took somebody who thought they didn’t have anything to offer. You showed them you believed in them, and they rose to your expectations.
DH: The same way I did to Ray Buck. That’s how I like to work with people: I like to give them a chance. My wings are wide and a lot of people fit under them.
FT: (laughs)
DH: Inviting someone in and letting them have a chance. It could have been that she didn’t say anything, but she could have learned something from the amazing talent sitting around the table. And everybody looked at her and said, “Wow, that was good!” She felt really proud, and I was really proud of her. She was somebody I’d relied on in the past and I thought she’d rise to the occasion and she did.
FT: You worked for law enforcement in Florida for 26 and a half years, and then you had the series on TV [Body of Evidence on Court TV, now called TruTV; the series is in syndication—ed.]
DH: I did. Eight seasons. That’s the longest static character that CourtTV ever had on any of their programs.
FT: There was such an element of mystery on that show because I’d think, there’s nothing there. And you would come on and say, “I think the individual who did this was this kind of person who did this and likes that, and I’d wonder where you got that information. And sure enough, BAM, you’d be right on the mark. I understand what you said about having experience with other cases to draw from, but it was still fascinating to watch.
DH: Thank you! I wanted it to be a lesson on what all the different people do because you saw bloodspatter people, you saw ballistics people, fingerprint technicians, you saw all different kinds of sciences woven into my show. It wasn’t the Dale Show. They were all my friends, people I’d worked with; it was no mystery some people appeared over and over again. It was because I worked a lot of cases with them, and I wanted them on over and over again. If somebody had said, “We have 5000 suspects in this case,” we had to have some criteria to whittle them down, if it took us 23 years for us to solve it, that makes it real for everybody and help them understand what all these different people are doing because it’s not just one person who’s the homicide investigator in there running all the leads. It’s a whole team of people that are working together. The show could have just as well have been the CSI people, by the way, who are not investigators, just working with the evidence, not doing the police interviews and making the arrests. And canvassing the people, which is never going to happen because they should be focused on photographing and documenting and collecting the evidence. So each person has their own job.
And those 100 episodes [of Bodies of Evidence] —I tried to get a selection of all those people in there, and have the prosecutor and the medical examiner and the different people talk about what it was they knew.
FT: Well, it made for a good show.
DH: Thank you!
FT: Did you ever get teased by folks you worked with back in your office when there were no cameras, about being on TV?
DH: Yes. Oh, yes. I would show up at the offices and they’d say, “Oh, it’s Hollywood.” And plus all the detectives when they went back to their respective police agencies. Because we were really filming on location and those are their real offices in the real agencies with the real crime labs. We didn’t fake anything. There were only a few things that were not exactly real. In the Ralph Backer case the ship sank so we had to rent a ship, but the crime scene pictures were real. Another time a house had burnt down and it wasn’t available, so we found one that looked just like it. But when we were saying to a detective where was the body found and he pointed to the side of the road and said, “The body was found right here,” the body really was found right there. We didn’t stage anything. Nothing was pretend; those were the real detectives, the real crime scene technicians, those were the real lab people, and those were their real police agencies. The only thing that was pretend was that wasn’t my real office.
FT: Did you really dress at crime scenes the way you dressed on the show?
DH: No. I wore suits all the time and I didn’t wear my hair down. I had it up mostly in a French twist or French braid so my hair was really tight to my head so it wasn’t blowing in the wind and I wasn’t contaminating the crime scene. So, when I went to a crime scene I would wear the suit and I left the jacket on. And if it was an active crime scene then I would slip away somewhere and put on a jumpsuit, and my shoe booties and my hairnet. Though, most of the time when I was in a crime scene it was going back and looking at it and they were already finished by the time I got there. If we were working a serial murder, and they had determined it was a serial murderer then we would go back and look at other cases we thought might be involved, so it was days after and the scenes had been released. But I wore a suit all the time to work; I didn’t wear the pants and the polo shirt [as she does on the show—ed.].
Dressing the part and looking professional was the way I did business with the state police and that was the expectation. People expected me to show up in a suit with a briefcase and be professional and that’s how it was.
The only thing that would change is that I would take off the high heels and I had a pair of sneakers in the trunk of my car, and I’d put the sneakers on to walk out into the woods to look at the scene. But it was laughable because they were having me wear the polo shirts and the slacks, and I got out at the case that was the serial murders that Fredrick Peacocks was responsible for. And Angelo Kyoto from Orange County came toward me looking at me strangely. And he said, “Wow, so that’s what your hair looks like. You know, I’ve never seen your hair down.” And the producer said, “Really?” and Angelo said, “No. Her hair is always up and tight, and she always looks professional. And what’s with the pants? I’ve never seen her in pants. She always wears a suit. As a matter of fact, when she was here last she wore this really attractive gray suit, and I asked her where she got it, and I bought one for my wife.”
FT: No kidding.
DH: So the producer looked at me and said, “You really didn’t wear slacks and polos.” And I said, “No.”
FT: Now when you say a suit you mean a jacket, blouse, and skirt?
DH: Yup. And I left the jacket on. It got really hot in Florida, but I didn’t care.
FT: I was just thinking of the stinky crime scenes.
DH: You know, women come in at a disadvantage. If you show up in a pink dress nobody believes you, so you can’t be casual around the men. You can’t laugh and joke with them; you have to present this aura of being in charge and that you have something to contribute. I’m not somebody’s cute sister. You need instant credibility. It was a dark suit, neatly buttoned, hair up, high heels, looked like I could do the job, looked professional all the time.
FT: The reason I brought up your years of service was because you are retired now.
DH: Yes.
FT: But it sounds like you’re still plenty busy.
DH: Oh my gosh, I am! I’m working as many cases now as I did when I worked for the state police.
FT: Are there any plans to slow down?
DH: No. And I think that none of us really do. I was flipping channels the other day and I saw John Douglas on an MSNBC special on interviewing serial murderers. He’s still involved with it, he’s writing and lecturing. All the old guys that started the program are still doing it. I think that when you have something to offer, why not keep offering it?
FT: Absolutely, as long as you enjoy it.
DH: I do. And so I work cases, I still lecture, but only on the side of good. I lecture to law enforcement, coroners, prosecutors, people who are fighting for the victims. And I train people, and I’m writing a book about how I got to where I got to.
FT: We’ll keep and eye out for it. Thank you so much for talking with me today.
DH: I’m really happy to participate and I want to encourage kids to, once they think they know what they want to do, to go try it on. And most police departments have a deputy ride-along program as long as we’re not talking about too young where they can go to see what it’s like to do the different jobs. Most crime labs have programs where students can go in and watch people do what they’re doing. It was really sad that I went to school for four years to be something I had no interest in. It was amazing that I was able to parlay it, to turn that degree around and do something that I found challenging and wonderful, and I look forward to going to work every day.
As a juvenile drug counselor I wouldn’t have been good and I wouldn’t have been effective. Most people in these [law enforcement] jobs are excited to have them and want to share and want to encourage people to join them because when I walked away from FDLE [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] I left the program solid and strong. All the people were encouraged to train people because I knew I was going to retire someday and I wanted great people to take my job. I didn’t want to take all my knowledge and hoard it.
Most people who go into the teaching profession do so because they want to share knowledge. And people who are good at what they do want people to replace them when they’re done.
FT: Well, from what I’ve heard you’re very lucky. If you find a job you love you’ll never work a day in your life.
DH: That’s true. And public speaking, getting up in front of a crowd is terrifying. God bless those of you who do it every day.
FT: Thank you. Though I doubt you’ll ever find a teacher who’s afraid of public speaking. Because they have to do it.
DH: And all the people who are profilers, we tell them they have to do it too. Because if you have the knowledge and you hoard it you’re not being true to what we feel our true purpose was: to do it, to do research about it, and to teach about it. Those are our three plans when we choose somebody to become a profiler and start getting them in line for the education, which at this point is five to seven years of law enforcement experience as a detective, a college degree in anything, you have to have a teaching certificate because you have to be able to get up in front of groups and you have to have instructor techniques, and you have to agree that once you receive the training you will do it for five years. Oh, and you also have to be able to speak English. This is because we’re a world-wide organization and all the tests are given in English.
FT: Is that the FBI?
DH: It’s the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship. It’s the 33 people the FBI trained. The Fellowship only lasted from 1984 to 1991, and during that time they trained 33 of us in the whole world. Then they pulled the plug on the program because they couldn’t control us. After we graduated we could go back and do whatever we wanted, or promote out. After they decided they couldn’t provide the training to non-FBI employees the 33 of us went to Wemberly, Texas and decided how it was that we could continue training people in what we do.
We decided we could do it in a two-year long program, that we would train them for two years. Clearly, I can’t train someone to do something I don’t do well myself. So I would train people for two full years, then I would give them to other people for four to five weeks apiece somewhere in the US because we can’t send people to Australia. Then we would send them to the FBI for about four weeks, and then we’d give them an exam. We’d send them a case and have them profile it, and their answer had to be right. After that we’d strike a committee with people from the FBI and people from the Fellowship for six to eight hours. Once they passed we’d give them a conditional pass for a year, and monitor them for the first year. After that we would take a vote to give them full Fellow status. It’s a very rigorous program, very expensive, so we expect at least five years after our two year effort. And we’ve gotten it from everybody we’ve ever trained.
FT: How many fellows are there now?
DH: I’d have to count, but I’d say at least 150 people worldwide. Plus, we’re all continuing to train and monitor other people. And then we have a lot of people as consultants to our group. All of us have a psychiatrist or psychologist that we work with routinely. We present them to the membership to be voted in and then give them access to our online forums where we discuss cases on an encrypted internet site. So if I have a case I’m working on and I’m troubled by something I can put it to the group, and everybody will look at it and respond back to me.
We go to training every year and we try to hold it in different countries all over the world. We encourage all our members to come and we have breakout groups and we present cases to each other. We always seek each others’ opinions.
The hardest thing for me to learn was to take criticism. And once I got it I opened up my cases to other people to have a look at it. And they’d say, “Did you think of this?” and I’d say, “No, but that’s a good idea.”
FT: That same thing happens in teaching. If you can’t think of a way to present new material and you’re banging your head on the wall, often all you have to do is ask another teacher how they do it or approach it.
DH: That’s so true.
Interview
