The Real-Life People and Stories That Inspired Mindhunter's 3 Core Characters

Mindhunter is an unsettling, simmering foray into the grisly world of serial killer psychology, and the newly arrived season two — which began streaming on Aug. 16 — is just as dark as the first.

Executive producer David Fincher's fingerprints are all over the show, which shares the same gloomy color palette and stylized dialogue seen in House of Cards, The Social Network, and Gone Girl. The crime drama's three main characters, however — Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), and Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) — are plucked straight out of real life.

Mindhunter itself is based on the 1995 book by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker called Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit (which also inspired characters in the films The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon). Although the show's core characters aren't exact replicas of their real-world inspirations, they're pretty damn close.