PERSON: James Fitzgerald

Profiler (retired)

James R. Fitzgerald (born June 24, 1953) is an American criminal profiler, forensic linguist, and author. He is a retired FBI agent and best known for his role in the UNABOM investigation, which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Ted Kaczynski.

Fitzgerald’s career in law enforcement began in 1976 when he was hired as a police officer by the municipality of Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania. In 1987, after eleven years of local police work culminating in his promotion to the rank of sergeant, he was recruited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Upon graduation from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Fitzgerald was assigned to the New York Field Division’s Joint Bank Robbery Task Force. In 1995, Fitzgerald was promoted to Criminal Profiler at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, which would later become the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, or BAU. Through myriad investigations of homicide, serial rape, extortion, kidnapping, and workplace violence, Fitzgerald refined his skills in text analysis and threat assessment, specialties that were used in the UNABOM investigation.

In addition to his duties as a profiler and forensic linguist at the BAU, Fitzgerald was also responsible for developing training programs and tools to improve the threat assessment capabilities of the FBI. Among these is the Communicated Threat Assessment Database (CTAD), an exhaustively indexed repository of data consisting of every communicated threat encountered in the course of FBI investigations.

Fitzgerald has remained active in the fields of criminal profiling and forensic linguistics since retiring from the FBI, holding positions as adjunct faculty at both Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York and Stockton University in Pomona, New Jersey. He also continues to work as a private consultant and technical advisor to media productions, such as Criminal Minds and Sleepy Hollow. James Fitzgerald served as a consulting producer in the Discovery Channel’s 2017 miniseries, Manhunt: Unabomber, which features actor Sam Worthington as James “Fitz” Fitzgerald, described by Fitzgerald himself as “a composite character” of many investigators in the Unabomber case.

— Wikipedia