Mary Ellen has spent her career studying the criminal mind. One of the most senior profilers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI until her retirement in 2009, Mary Ellen has helped capture, interview and understand some of the world’s most infamous people. During her time in the unit, Mary Ellen developed an expertise in Criminal Investigative Analysis (CIA) as well as offender behavior. She has provided assistance to law enforcement and prosecutors on a wide range of violent and criminal behavior including serial and single homicides, sexual assaults, kidnappings, product tampering, school shootings, arsons and bombings and extortions. Watch now to find out what REALLY goes into the life of an FBI Profiler!
Transcript
>> My name is Mary Ellen O'Toole and my career is, was as an FBI agent and ultimately as an FBI agent profiler. Some of the cases would include Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, the Baton Rouge serial killer, two of them. I worked on the Unabomber case, the Elizabeth Smart case, the Natalee Holloway case. I consulted on the Casey Anthony case, Monster Florence case in Florence, Italy. So those would be some of the highlights. My typical day as an FBI agent, FBI agent profiler was to get up maybe about 5 o'clock in the morning and get dressed, bring all, get all my materials together, drive into the office and our offices were just a plain, bland business building close to the FBI Academy and to go into the office and maybe talk a little bit to my colleagues, have a cup of coffee and then go into my desk, my office and to go through my files and see which case was, based on a priority system, required immediate attention. Or maybe pick up from a case I was working on the night before, certainly return phone calls and begin though to look at those most pressing cases. And it may require sitting at the desk quietly for hours reviewing the case, maybe reaching out and talking to the investigators across country, getting information. It may mean having a consultation with visiting police officers that traveled to Quantico to sit down and talk about a case but constantly reviewing cases, gathering information and getting assessments both in person and on the phone. And my days would last upwards of 10 hours. The interviews with serial killers, you just, you don't. It doesn't get any better than that. I can just tell you from my perspective that is the, I'm passionate about that aspect of the work. Some of the interviews I conducted before the person was charged, so my role would be to assist the agency in extracting information about where the bodies were located and that was really most of the interviews that I did. It was the pre-charging phase so it was really part of the law enforcement effort. There were interviews that we did after the whole case was what we call adjudicated. It had gone to court. The person had been sentenced and then we go in and do the interview. But the ones that are the most challenging are the ones that I did as part of the active investigation to get them to tell me why did you do it? How did you do it? Who were some of your victims that we have not located? Because it's not unusual in a serial murder case to not have all the victims. What was your motive? How did you dispose of the bodies? All of those questions would have been part of my interview repertoire with these offenders.
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