The beginning of each Mindhunter episode begins with a prelude before the real action kicks in. It's in these preludes that we met the BTK Killer (played by Sonny Valicenti), under the guise of an ADT Security installer. BTK is an acronym, for, ahem, "bind, torture, kill." Through each snippet of scenes with him, we come to understand that his killings are occurring concurrently with Tench and Ford's research.
Season 2 of Mindhunter is on its way, and we know that it will focus on more historic killings, such as the Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams. Will we see Tench and Ford follow the trail of the BTK Killer as well? Well, if we keep the focus on history, it's looking increasingly unlikely.
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Refinery spoke with Holy McCallany about the limits of procedural shows, and Mindhunter is freer of those conventions. He also speculates about the villain looming over the shadows — a villain our two FBI agents haven't even met, but may come to define their careers.
Refinery29: Did you guys watch any other FBI-centric shows, such as Criminal Minds?
Holt McCallany (aka Bill Tench): I was on Criminal Minds. I played a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. He is slowly losing his grip on reality, and keeps having flashbacks. But you're in the standard network procedural structure, where we have to solve the case by the end of the episode, before we cut to commercial. We don't have to do that on Mindhunter. I think that's one of the great luxuries that we have.
R29: And about that BTK Killer, do you think Ford and Tench will catch him?
McCallany: Who knows? [The BTK Killer] wasn't caught until 2005. He was literally at large for 30 years! We try to remain true to the details of the crimes... Let's hope to God that we get to do this for five seasons. [But] we may never catch the guy. Our journey begins in 1978, are we really going to go up to 2005? I don't think so. We'll span a number of years, but not all of those years. These guys don't solve all of their cases. You don't get to solve them all in real life, and you don't get to solve them all in Mindhunter. You would never see that on a network show.
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