History Characters / MindhunterInterviewSubjects

* RedBaron: Known as "The Candy Man" due to managing a candy factory and given free candy to children. And offering free drugs to boys that they called candy. He is the historical inspiration of the {{Film/Candyman}} UrbanLegend.

* ImplausibleDeniability: Brudos keeps denying guilt even when presented with a photo of himself with a dead body. Holden works this to his advantage in their second interview by framing it as him asking what Jerry would have done if he had been "the killer," thereby allowing Brudos to fulfill his narcissism and explain his crimes and the mentality that went into them in the third person as opposed to directly admitting to them.

* ImplausibleDeniability: Brudos keeps denying guilt even when presented with a photo of himself with a dead body.

* JerkassHasAPoint: Speck raises an official complaint against Holden for "fucking with his mind". From a certain point of view, this is exactly what Holden is doing.

* MedicalHorror: Invoked by Wendy, who points that his work in a hospital could have taught him how to stab and dismember people better. He replies that he was not a surgeon.

* AttentionWhore: He was outraged when his murders were initially reported as simple sex crimes, and created the Son of Sam persona to gain control over his image.

* AffablyEvil: Berkowitz is surprisingly forthcoming about his murders and methods with Holden and Bill, helping them to understand BTK. He's not exactly genial or charismatic, but he's not antagonistic.

* EvenEvilHasStandards: He makes a point of clarifying that he is not a rapist and his crimes were not sexual in nature.

* IJustWantToBeSpecial: Yet some others believed that he did it for the wealth and notoriety, leading to the passing of a law that bans criminals from profiting off their crimes.

* BerserkButton: His failed suicide, and apparently, women crying. Either one makes him become violently defensive and angry.

* CommonalityConnection: Holden tries to connect with him by calling the victims "eight ripe cunts." It backfires on an epic scale and causes problems for both him and the unit. For Speck's part, his reaction is the only time he displays anything other than bitterness or fury: he actually ''laughs'', and looks a little shocked by Holden's language.

* {{Jerkass}}: He's the least personable of all the killers interviewed. Kemper was polite and accommodating, Brudos was chummy in an AffablyEvil way and Rissell wasn't anywhere near as volatile as Speck.

* MoralityPet: He has a pet bird he fed while it healed a broken wing. But the trope is subverted when he [[KickTheDog kills it]] in front of the FBI agents during a fit of rage.

* TattooedCrook: "Born to Raise Hell" on his forearm, even discussed as a part of his journey to becoming his criminal persona.

** He is right in pointing that he didn't seek followers nor did he force them to take drugs or murder people. At most, he just encouraged people who already had it in themselves.

* AcceptableTargets:
** Discussed when talking about the Hudson Bag Murders. Bateson claims that the gay community would never admit that the murderer was one of their own and insisted it had to be a hetero homophobe, but at the same time he points that no gay man would fail to recognize such and leave a bar with him.
** Referenced again when he claims that police blamed him for the Bag Murders purely because he was "a gay guy in leather".

* NiceJobFixingItVillain[=/=]VillainBall: The police wasn't even aware that a crime was committed until he contacted them, then basically pointed to himself in the most stupidly obvious ways. He could just have shut up and let his victims's bodies remain undiscovered. He could also have contacted them, but somehow blamed his victims on the Stocking Strangler (an unrelated African-American serial killer, and at the time of the show, still at large) and it would have worked better than making up a conspiracy of white vigilantes.