FBI agent who inspired Clarice Starling reveals what it’s like working with serial killers
nypost.comHearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, The Behavioral Science Unit and My Life as a Woman in the FBI” (Abrams Press), out Tuesday.Monroe, now 69, was in the middle of investigating multiple murders in Philadelphia that may or may not have been connected.
Kemper, calling from prison in Vacaville, California, was willing to share his expertise. She agreed to hear him out, “on the theory that it takes one to know one,” Monroe writes.She described the Philly investigation for him — what was known and unknown about the crimes — and Kemper, who decapitated most of his victims, tried to explain to Monroe the psychology of a killer. “That’s for control, the enjoyment,” he told her. “It’s knowing that you are totally in control, and they are totally petrified of you.”If this exchange sounds like something out of the 1991 horror classic “The Silence of the Lambs,” there’s a good reason.
Jodie Foster, who would go on to win an Oscar for her performance as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, spent weeks shadowing Monroe to prepare for the role.“In a way, that was inevitable,” Monroe writes. “Clarice was a fictional trainee at the BSU, and I was the sole woman in the unit, the only one who could walk Jodie through our peculiar world from a woman’s point of view.”The movie — and the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris on which it’s based — are fiction.
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