Women with Criminal Minds: Part II

In Part One, writers discussed their paths to working on the shows, as well as their approaches.

In this segment, the women discuss the process for creating an “unsub” (unknown subject), in other words, the criminal subject for each week’s case, as well as how they address their fears as they write dark subject matter.

(In attendance: Erica Messer, executive producer and show runner for both Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (and creator of Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders); Karen Maser, co-executive producer of Criminal Minds, Kim Harrison, producer of Criminal Minds; Daniele Nathanson, supervising producer of Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders; Sharon Lee Watson, co-executive producer, Criminal Minds; Erica Meredith, and Ticona Joy, staff writers, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders.)

Okay, now opening it up to your processes again, where do you start when you’re crafting the unsub for an episode – research something you’ve seen, or have freaked out about – how does it happen?

Messer:  I’m sure you’ll get a different answer from everyone but initially when the show first started because like I said no one was writing what they knew – you’d read about Ted Bundy or Green River Killer or BTK who got caught when this show started. I remember that happening, in the early weeks of this show starting: he got caught and it had been an unsolved crime.

So, especially with that one, you start to think, they’re just human. BTK especially was this faceless monster for so many years, people thought he must have died because he was such a brutal killer. So when you see his face in court, you’re like, “Um, that guy could be my neighbor.” He’s just so normal. What drove him to get caught was his own ego.

Because somebody had written a book and he didn’t like what they said about him. He wanted to set the record straight. He sent them a floppy disc and the floppy disc could be traced to the church that he went to. The user name on the floppy disc the initials were DR – Dennis Rader.

It was like, oh, that doesn’t scare me now. That guy -- as dark and twisted as all he did -- he got caught because he’s a big old egomaniac. And it was kind of a relief because when you read about everything else, you’re like how can that happen? But I think I start with what would scare me and who would do it and why they would do it. So I think mine is different than where other people start.

Demystifying him or the serial killer “type” maybe took some of the fear out of it for you so did you also have to go to new fears, or the real simple scary stuff?

Messer: I’m a mom. I have two kids. So anything surrounding kids freaks me out. There’ s a story I wrote years ago that started because I’d taken my kids to a museum in Washington where I’m from – and this mom starts yelling, “Sophia! Sophia!” and I look away from my kids because there’s a mom in distress. And you look away to that mom in distress and you’re now distracted.

My husband was with me and his mom was there so there were more adults than kids with us but I completely probably a for a solid 30 seconds was more concerned with that mom looking for Sophia than I was with my own kids.

When I turned around, I didn’t immediately see them because my husband had them. Then the panic washed over me like “Holy crap, what if that woman was an unsub and she’s working with somebody and she did it to distract me and she’s working with someone else and they took my kids?”

Because it was long enough – it might not have been 30 seconds because that’s a long time – but when I get my eyes on my kids and one isn’t there I immediately went to “she’s been kidnapped and that lady was involved.”

So I cowrote that episode -- it was the first one Mathew Gubler directed -- and we weren’t at a museum but a county fair in Griffith Park and we used that same exact ruse. We had a mom screaming for her daughter, this mom looks away long enough and her daughter is gone.

Do you think that came from a natural mother’s fear or because you work on this show you had that fear? It seems maybe both.

Messer: I think it’s the perfect storm. (To table) Because I think you guys still have those fears even not being moms. There’s something about being on this show that makes you run with worst-case scenarios.

Watson: You get much more paranoid.

Messer: At a certain time in my life, I probably would have parked farther away from the mall entrance just for the exercise, now I park as close to the entrance as possible, I make sure I’m under a light. Is there a van parked next to my car right now, which side is it on? I think about it. I think that your (to Harrison) heavy security comes from this show.

Watson: Because of this show I took my home address off of my navigation system.

(Lots of nods and yesses)

Watson: We had the episode of the valet killer who was taking the addresses from navigation systems and then going to kill them later when they were home. So now I have mine programmed with an address that’s near my house but not my real address.

Messer: I have the Vons nearest my house.

If anything, viewers could potentially learn from Criminal Minds how to protect themselves.

Maser:  Do you ever get letters – on ER we got letters saying, “because of something Dr. Green you save my life” or I got this test because of your show.

Messer: No one is giving us those kinds of things but hopefully that’s happening as a happy byproduct of our paranoia. But we did get a letter not long ago from a woman who said her niece was abducted on a street and saw an ATM camera and mouthed, “Help me, help me.”

And they solved the crime. She said she learned that on Criminal Minds. I can’t point to an episode where we necessarily did that. But maybe she knew because of watching us that those bank cameras would get looked at and because whoever was abducting her was saying, “If you make any noise I’ll kill you.” So she mouthed “help me” to the camera.

You’re somehow training people to think that way.

Messer: I think people learn how to be smarter about their surroundings. But also this show opens people’s eyes to the other people in their world like, is that guy with the clipboard needing my signature like you see all the time at the grocery store – is it okay that he’s walking into the parking lot? 

Virgil [Williams] did that episode: “Hey, ma’am, can you save the whales?” and they’re getting in her personal space. At a certain point, you have to stand up for yourself. Bad guys often rely on your being kind.

(Murmurs around the table of ‘especially women’)

That’s what I wondering too, how your experiences as women may have influenced the way you approach episodes.

Maser: It’s what [Erica] Meredith was talking about – you don’t want to be rude, you don’t want to seem like a bitch.

Nathanson: I’m not a mother and that’s one of the reasons, because I’d probably be paranoid all the time. But growing up as a girl with a single parent in Los Angeles – I walked around, I was a latchkey kid. So as a girl and a woman, I was always aware of who was parking where.

If I was walking home and felt someone was behind me, I would go into a different doorway. I’ve been doing that for a long time so I think for me if there’s any connection between women and the super-sensitivity to those types of things – I don’t know if you call it micro-aggression in terms of a guy getting in your face  - well as a woman you’re sensitive to that already and then you push on that [as a writer]and make it into a  serial killer versus someone who maybe just wants to harass you.

You can make it bigger and bigger. But I’ve always been on guard.

Maser: It’s exhausting.

I think we often don’t want to say it because we deserve to be in the world as freely as any man, but we are more vulnerable.

Nathanson: I’ve been wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses from a very young age just so people can’t see me and say, “Why aren’t you looking at me?” “Why aren’t you smiling at me?” You know, it’s just like, leave me alone.

As you’re writing you can take those interactions to the next level.

Nathanson: Also in terms of where the stories come from, I like to think of our characters, like Jack (Gary Sinise) on Beyond Borders, what is a worthy villain for him? I like to think who’s really going to push his buttons.

So I sort of get into that and it’s my way of not putting myself in the victims’ shoes because that would make me uncomfortable. It’s the cat-and-mouse game that I get into .

And when the victims are women, it’s probably even more important to not let yourself go down that rabbit hole, because you could really mess yourself up. Crime statistics prove we’re more frequently victims of these kinds of crimes.

Messer: Yes, it’s not an editorial comment. There are three victim types, women, men and children – it’s all we can do. We try not to do children more than once a season because it’s just brutal.

But serial killers, especially, attack women. They attack physically weaker prey than them and they look for someone who’s not confident or aware – they won’t mess with someone who will give them a fight.

Some of these tactics for protecting ourselves, just sniffing when something feels off, they sound like things from the Gavin DeBecker book The Gift of Fear – is that something you read as research?

Nathanson:  I already read that before I got here and it taught me a lot. It was stuff I already had instincts about but it just really tells you to follow your instincts. Like if someone’s making you uncomfortable it doesn’t matter,  you just say get out of my face, it doesn’t matter.

Joy: It’s so interesting because I’m from Tennessee and a very small town in Tennessee. I’m from the country. So I grew up with guns in my house – I knew not to touch them. But I didn’t grow up with the fear of [this] stuff.

Maser: Did you lock your doors?

Joy: We locked our doors. My daddy was a hunter, is a hunter. It’s just like, I guess all my fear stuff came from watching TV. It wasn’t my environment growing up.

Now it’s worse because people are crazy. But when I’m thinking about stories and stuff I’m thinking about an idyllic thing that’s happening and f*ck it up. I’m also a big Hitchcock fan so I like that kind of stuff – you’re just driving to the grocery store and you got T-boned by a truck and then you’re in a ditch and you’ve gotta fight something that’s gonna eat your head off or whatever.

So it’s interesting, growing up I never had the fear of “Oh, I have to protect myself.” And in the south, you should be friendly. I still have that in me now. I get angry when people aren’t friendly and polite and don’t smile. That kind of triggers me – I guess that’s my unsub click.

There are a couple people at my gym and this is from working here for so long but they just don’t show emotion. I know you’re in there working out, but someone smiles and they don’t smile and there’s one dude who I know is a killer – he has no emotion, he rarely blinks.

Every time I see him, I get a chill.

Maser: You’re profiling.

Joy: Yeah, totally.

So, that’s interesting too, Karen you said working on this initially you had nightmares and Erica has had moments – and you might have had them anyway as a mother – where you think a person might abduct your child but have you gotten over the paranoia or do you feel it all the time?

Joy: I think I can outsmart them. You do think you have somewhat of the tools to get help or like the girl with the camera if I disappear I know to make sure someone knows I’ve disappeared.

I won’t go down without a fight, I’ll turn into dead weight. Or you let them get you to a second location or they’ll kill you for sure. I think we all think we’re a little more capable in these situations.

Watson: I’m much more aware of dangerous situations now. I think there are a lot of things that really never bothered me before until I started working here.

I actually made big changes – I moved to a  gated community. At my original house, anyone could come to the front door. But we had a whole spate of magazine sales people coming up who were clearly not the high school students they claimed to be. Then six months later the L.A. Times had a story about how these crews of ex-cons or felons or whatever were being coached to be magazine sales people.

They’d be loaded into vans and driven into neighborhoods to go out and sell things. At the time that it happened, I just thought it was odd that this guy is standing there telling me he needs to sell magazines for his high school baseball team but he looks like he’s in his 30s.

I didn’t think anything of it but then I started working on this show and I was living at my old house. I saw one of these people coming down the street going door-to-door and I walked out to go mail a letter. He saw me leaving so I thought, “oh good, he saw me leaving he won’t try to come here.” Five minutes later, I’d mailed the letter and came back to the house and he was coming out of my backyard.

(Chorus of “Noooo”s around the table.)

Watson: My reaction was furious, I was screaming at him. He got scared because I reacted so violently and said “I tried the front door and no one answered, so I went to check in the back.” But I think he was actually casing the place.

So after that I said we had to move. I have two small kids so that just raises the threshold for me.

Maser: I get paranoid myself for my nieces and nephew. Like worst-case scenario stuff. My sister would laugh at me because even when they were little kids and dive-bombing off the couch I’m like, “they could break their necks.” I’d always get fearful like that.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have kids because I would be so overprotective.


Nathanson: I’d put them in a bubble. They would be bubble kids.

Maser: Yeah, now it’s a joke with my nieces because if they would be going to a bar and I’d say, “Don’t accept anything from anyone.” Text when you get home, that kind of thing.

But you had this before working here.

Maser: Always, even in college. I was a journalism major so I worked on the college radio station and I did a morning news program from 6:30 in the morning to 9 a.m. so I had to get to the station at 4:30 in the morning.  I’m running across the campus and I had a little paring knife with me.

My friends would laugh at me saying, “Who’s going to get you?” and I’d say, “you never know!”

This was in college. But now I live with my boyfriend and if he’s not home overnight, I  keep a knife by my bed because I think if anyone’s coming in here, they’re not supposed to be here. My friends still tease me.

Nathanson: I was like this before. I live in a duplex and I was talking to my husband and the reason I don’t want to live on the ground floor is fear.

Watson:  You shouldn’t because we learned from Jim Clemente (a former FBI profiler, now Criminal Minds technical adviser and producer) that you should not leave second-story windows open – wasn’t there a second-story killer?

Messer: There’s a name for that kind of offender, not a climber but something like that.

Watson: They take advantage of you having windows open on the second floor because you think no one will try to come up there.

Maser: My first apartment in New York was on the 30th floor of the high rise and I felt safe. I never leave windows open. It could be really hot and I’ll crank the A/C.

Nathanson: Well, I’m not going to leave windows open now.

Do you think women’s minds have more of a gift to come up with every eventuality, like the same way we build a romance in our heads to think sometimes from the outset how great something will work out, we can likewise build a terrifying situation in our heads? And we’re crafting  fantasies either way but we have a natural ability to envision both best and worst-case scenarios?

Nathanson: I have to stop myself. With the guys I fantasize for days I’ve got a whole relationship set up. Personally, I can’t go down the same wormhole with the fear.

So, you have to stop to it to safeguard from fear.

Nathanson: Yes. It’s denial, it’s whatever it is. But in terms of writing the stories, to me it’s just that fascination with psychology but I don’t know if that’s specific to being a woman or just telling scary stories.

Maser: I think it’s just that you can write dark.

Nathanson: Yeah, and I go dark, my mind goes there. It doesn’t disturb me – I mean it’s disturbing to get in through the killer’s POV but then, I think this is very interesting and I intellectualize it so I’m not as frightened.

And you can pull the threads to imagine why a killer might do what they do.

Nathanson: Yeah, that is not a problem. But that’s not about the victim’s POV. That’s about this person who was probably victimized at some point in their life. It’s about them exerting control, it’s about them exerting revenge, it’s about them exerting a power and so if I lean into that, it makes me feel more controlled in general.

Watson: To me, it feels more human as opposed to gender specific, that we all are trying to not be as fearful and if we can find a relatable reason for why someone is doing something crazy, we automatically feel better I think. I can actually have an ounce of sympathy and empathy for that.

Messer: It just brings you back to that common ground, that they’re a person who does everything you do.

Watson: Yes, so I think everyone male and female, I think the whole staff for our show is probably searching for those reasons. And what’s scary – you talk to Jim, our profiler – there is rarely such a clean, logical reason for why people do these things . We’ve invented that.

Messer:  We’ve have to take sort of years’ worth of research and solve it every 42 minutes but in real life it’s rarely as clean as we have it.

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Read more: Part I; Part III