‘Mindhunter’ Episode 4 Recap: Understanding in a Car Crash (2024)

After four episodes, Mindhunter‘s greatest accomplishment is turning me into an amateur serial killer profiler, the same way a lengthy marathon convinces you of your detective prowess, or how true crime docs like Making a Murderer and Serial made expert lawyers of us all. Calling this series a “fun” show would probably get me put on some sort of list, but it is, let’s say, enjoyable to apply the horrific insights gleaned from these interviews to everyone onscreen, criminal or not; call it a game of “spot the unhealthy mother-son relationship.” As these subtle signs of what exactly makes a madman become clearer to Holden and Bill by the hour, the horror of the show becomes about how familiar those signs really are. It’s almost like it’s not about what drives a person to commit murder, but what keeps the rest of us from…not committing murder.

As for all that mounting evidence for Holden’s study, Mindhunter Episode 4 offered up two new murderers—one behind bars, the other still at large and faceless—ripe for the researching. The first, Monte Rissell (Sam Strike), is the anti-Ed Kemper, a scrawny “sequence” murderer and rapist who is less articulate sociopath and more the unreasonably angry QuickChek cashier who makes you uncomfortable by staring while you browse. Where Kemper was polite, Rissell is antagonistic from the start, refusing to participate fully without a six-pack of Big Red soda (so hard to find on the east coast) and just generally pissing Bill off on several different levels. I mean, it’s not hard to piss Bill off, but Rissell is a pro. He’s exactly what law enforcement in the ’70s thought crime was supposed to look like, the quintessential little sh*t who probably smoked too much dope and threw his future away without remorse or understanding. Rissell describes his crimes not as carefully conducted urges but as sudden chaos. He recounts the idea of murdering his first victim coming to him out of the blue, how his anger only grew when a woman he intended to rape—a prostitute, unbeknownst to him—acted like a willing participant. “The idea of doing it pops into your head,” he says. “Like a sneeze.”

That is a deeply unpleasant analogy.

But finding the connective tissue between a mild-mannered corpse-violator and a homicidal twentysomething soda addict is what Holden and Bill are here to do. And, thanks to their traveling roadshow of horribleness’ growing reputation, they’re getting plenty of practice in the field. I love how naturally these two became a cross between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson driving a mobile 221B Baker Street and Shaggy and Scooby inside the most f*cked up episode of Scooby-Doo in existence. With each stop on their teaching tour, the local law enforcement is eager to share its most inexplicably gruesome crime; that True Detective season one sh*t, if you will. Here, it’s the murder of 22-year-old babysitter Beverly Jean Shaw, butchered and displayed like a department store mannequin on top of the local garbage dump. “We don’t get this kind of thing,” a local detective named Ocasek says, barely able to describe the unspeakable things done to Beverly’s body. (Actor Alex Morf is great here, an endearing blend of smalltown naivety and earnestness.)

The case itself is intriguing enough on its own—although, holy wow, somebody should probably look into the fiance who skipped town the very same day his wife-to-be’s defiled corpse was found in a garbage dump—but the real story is in the way Holden’s desire to dive headfirst into the absolute worst humanity has to offer is bleeding into his personal life, into his personality itself, whether he notices or not. Writers Joe Penhall and Dominic Orlando layer this episode with so many subtle parallels between Holden and the killers whose minds he is currently hunting. “Sometimes the killer will insinuate himself into the investigation,” he tells Ocasek, describing why a murderer would report his own crime. Days later, as they wait for Dr. Wendy Carr to arrive to a bar, Holden asks Debbie, “Would I have invited her to go out with us if I was interested in her?” Which is basically a boyfriend’s version of insinuating himself into the investigation. Reporting his own crime, so to speak.

It’s not always so subtle. Rissell describes to Holden and Bill how his murderous rage first bubbled to the surface after his long-distance girlfriend broke ties with him—”To ball other guys,” is how he puts it—after moving away to college. Just hours later, Holden is distraught with Debbie—”Honestly a little ticked off,” is how he puts it—for not driving several hours from her college to pick him up. “Because she doesn’t want to,” he says, struggling with the idea.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I highly doubt any character on this show is going to start casually dabbling in serial murder. The point Mindhunter is shooting for is that the capacity for great acts of evil isn’t exclusive to mustache-twirling villains and slasher movie monsters. It exists in your unassuming home invasion alarm installer, or hostage negotiator Holden Ford, or, clearly, in FBI Agent Bill Tench. This episode employed a jarringly sudden car crash—the third most effective jump scare, right under “phone suddenly ringing” and “quickly closing a medicine cabinet”—to expose some cracks in Bill’s steely outer shell. There’s a dark frustration growing in his home life; his adopted son refuses to speak and his wife has grown distant as a result. It’s a heartbreaking character note that adds a disturbing chill to a later scene, in which Bill explains why sketchy married local Alvin Moran couldn’t have killed Beverly Jean Shaw. “If Alvin Moran had a married man’s anger,” he says, “he’d have tortured that girl and then killed her. No doubt in my mind.”

The look exchanged between Holden and Ocasek is perfect. It is a non-verbal embodiment of the word “yikes,” one of many, many small signs that maybe this personal exploration into death and dismemberment isn’t exactly yielding the healthiest of results for those doing the exploring.

Unfortunately for them, it’s just beginning. Thanks to some maneuvering by Dr. Carr, Holden and Bill’s study is granted a combined $385,000 in funding from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and National Institute of Justice. It’s news that guarantees more one-on-one time with psychopaths, more butchered bodies, and the direct intervention and scrutiny of Congress itself. It’s chaos caused by approval. It’s, basically, the story of Monte Rissell, a man whose life turned extraordinarily violent at the sound of someone saying, “yes.”

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.