The FBI Behavioural Science Unit (BSU), established at Quantico, Virginia, in 1972, developed criminal profiling as an investigative technique through systematic interviews with convicted serial killers and rapists conducted between 1977 and the early 1980s. Agents including Robert Ressler and John Douglas interviewed offenders to build psychological profiles that could be used as evidence in identifying unknown suspects. The Unit coined the terminology of organised versus disorganised offenders, and their work became the template for psychological evidence in serial crime investigation.

The FBI's Behavioural Science Unit had an extraordinary influence on American crime fiction and popular culture. Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), inspired by the BSU's work and interviews with real agents, created the criminal profiler as a new kind of literary detective hero — one who reads psychological evidence rather than physical trace. These novels defined the serial killer subgenre and reshaped crime writing internationally, influencing a generation of crime poets and writers who engaged with the psychology of violence.