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Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer

Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer is a 2024 American three-episode documentary series for Hulu about Dr. Ann Burgess, the psychiatric nurse and Boston College professor whose research on sexual assault victims and serial offenders helped shape the FBI's modern approach to criminal profiling. The series traces her career from the 1970s, when she taught FBI agents how to interview rape victims, through her work interviewing imprisoned serial killers at Quantico and her later involvement in high-profile cases such as the Menendez brothers trial and the prosecution of Bill Cosby.1 • 2

Key factDetail
FormatThree-episode documentary series, about 42 minutes per episode, rated TV-143
PremiereJuly 11, 2024 on Hulu; also streaming on Disney+2 • 4
SubjectDr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, professor and forensic nurse at Boston College, pioneer in victimology and serial-killer profiling2
DirectorAbby Fuller; produced for Hulu by Campfire Studios in association with Lewellen Pictures1
Executive producersDakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Ross M. Dinerstein, Rebecca Halpern, Lesley Chilcott, Dani Sloane, Rebecca Evans, and Abby Fuller1
Source bookBased on Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine's A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind (2021)5
Reception83% Tomatometer and 94% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 75 on Metacritic4 • 6

Spoilers

Episodes

The three episodes follow Burgess's career in sequence. In "To Listen to a Killer," Burgess is drawn into a sexual assault investigation involving more than 20 women. "To Hunt a Killer" follows her deepening study of serial killers' minds while she balances her life as a mother. "To Defend a Killer" covers the publication of her study and its effect on serial crime.7

Subject: Ann Burgess

Burgess is a professor and forensic nurse at Boston College. During the 1970s she began one of the earliest research projects on sexual assault and those who survive rape, and she was instrumental in creating what became one of the nation's first rape crisis centers, located at Boston City Hospital.2 When the FBI Academy was tasked with teaching local law enforcement about rape, it had no expertise in the subject and brought Burgess in; she taught agents to approach rape and sexual assault victims with more sensitivity and helped the agency improve its study of crime victims so agents could better understand perpetrators, especially serial killers.2

In the series, Burgess recalls addressing an audience of 40 FBI members, all of them men, and finding that agents believed rape was simply sex and that victims had invited it. She describes the FBI agents of that era as not knowing what she was doing; her own children learned the nature of her work only when they were in high school or college.8

Working with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Burgess helped develop the agency's modern playbook for profiling serial killers. She and the unit identified, tracked down, and interviewed dozens of notorious killers, including Edmund Kemper ("The Co-Ed Killer"), Dennis Rader ("BTK"), Henry Wallace ("The Taco Bell Strangler"), and Jon Barry Simonis ("The Ski-Mask Rapist").8 She helped produce a 57-page interview guide that included information on the victim.8 The series also covers her work on cases from Ted Bundy to the Menendez brothers.9

Burgess's victim-centered method extended beyond serial crime. She gave Andrea Constand a questionnaire documenting everything that happened before, during, and after the assault so the prosecution could support her account; Constand says in the series that Burgess's care gave her the courage to endure the 2018 trial, the first high-profile conviction since the start of the #MeToo movement. (The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the conviction in 2021 and Cosby was released.)2

At 87, Burgess was still working at Boston College's nursing school, researching rape in indigenous communities and the abuse of nursing home residents.2 In an interview around the release, she said that paying attention to victims teaches more about offenders, and that prevention and education about warning signs in young men's behavior is where the work should go.10

Production and reception

The series was directed by Abby Fuller, an Emmy-winning director known for work on Chef's Table, and produced for Hulu by Campfire Studios in association with Lewellen Pictures, with Dani Sloane as showrunner and Burgess herself as a consulting producer.1 • 11 Fuller told Ars Technica that she wanted something more elevated and cinematic than standard true crime, a character-driven piece about Burgess with true crime elements.12

Mastermind premiered as an Official Selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, was nominated for a 2025 Emmy Award for Outstanding Crime and Justice Documentary, and was nominated for a CrimeCon Clue Award for Outstanding Docuseries.13 Critics were broadly favorable: Rotten Tomatoes recorded an 83% Tomatometer and a 94% audience score, and Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 75 based on four positive reviews.4 • 6 The A.V. Club praised the series as being as much about listening and breaking the FBI's boys club as about crime itself, while TheWrap criticized the storytelling as surface-level, arguing that the series asserts Burgess's breakthroughs without showing how she reached them.6 • 14

Connection to Mindhunter

Burgess is the real-life inspiration for Wendy Carr, the psychology professor played by Anna Torv in Netflix's drama Mindhunter (2017), which dramatized the early work of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit.2 • 15 Reviewers of Mastermind noted that her contributions to the unit had rarely been publicized to the degree of colleagues such as Robert Ressler and John Douglas, and that the documentary gives her the first-person account that the drama compressed into a fictional character.16

References

  1. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, Hulu Press
  2. Hulu's Mastermind Tells the Story of the Woman Who Pioneered Profiling Rapists and Serial Killers, TIME
  3. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, JustWatch
  4. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, Rotten Tomatoes
  5. Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer, Campfire Studios
  6. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer critic reviews, Metacritic
  7. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer, Disney+
  8. They couldn't stop themselves: what do we really know about serial killers?, The Guardian
  9. New this week on Hulu, Prime Video and Apple TV+, Axios
  10. A Conversation with Dr. Ann Burgess, A Study in Crime transcript
  11. Abby Fuller bio, Hulu Press
  12. Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers, Ars Technica
  13. Mastermind, Rebecca Halpern
  14. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer Review, TheWrap
  15. Reel Rundown: Mastermind far more than a biography, The Spokesman-Review
  16. Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer review, Leath Group

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

© 2026 Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Embed a reference card.

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