Happy International Women’s Day! Today we’re celebrating by highlighting three women who have changed the true crime space forever. Their influence is felt in all fields and they continue to be an inspiration to all. Keep reading to learn more about these amazing women.
Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess
No list of influential women in the true crime space would be complete without Dr. Burgess. She is an internationally recognized pioneer in the assessment and treatment of victims of trauma and abuse, and author of A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind.
Not only is she the co-founder of one of the first hospital-based crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital, but Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess also worked with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. There she worked to develop and create a criminal profiling framework that revolutionized the way criminals were identified, interviewed and tracked. If you’ve seen the Netflix Original, MindHunter, you might think this sounds familiar. The character Dr. Wendy Carr was loosely based on D. Ann Wolbert Burgess.
It’s safe to say that she is a living legend and you can still find her in classrooms at Boston College teaching courses in Victimology, Forensic Science, Forensic Mental Health, Case Studies in Forensics, and Forensic Science Lab.
Isabella Goodwin
Originally hired by the New York City Police Department as a police matron, which mostly meant cleaning jail cells and supervising inmates rather than solving crimes, Goodwin eventually became a first-grade detective.
After a perpetrator of a bank heist eluded the NYPD, Goodwin was asked to pose as a maid and infiltrate a boarding house where the suspect would frequent. While she scrubbed floors and cooked meals, she collected information that led to the arrest of a gangster named Eddie (the Boob) Kinsman. For her work, the department rewarded Goodwin with a first-grade detective shield, making her its first female detective.
In the 1920s, she would go on to help oversee the police department’s newly created Women’s Bureau to handle cases involving prostitutes, runaways, truants, and victims of domestic violence.
Kathy Reichs
Not only is Kathy Riechs a New York Times Bestselling author, but she is also one of only 119 forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology.
Riechs is a multifaceted person who has taught FBI agents at Quantico how to detect and recover human remains. She consulted the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec, and even traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. As part of her work at JPAC (Formerly CILHI) she aided in the identification of casualties from World War II, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Reichs also assisted in the recovery of remains at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
From her years as a forensic anthropologist, she has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers, which have been turned into the TV series Bones.