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Montie Ralph Rissell is an antagonist in the Netflix original series Mindhunter. Like his real-life counterpart he is a serial rapist and killer who raped a number of women and murdered five when he was a teenager.
He was portrayed by Sam Strike.
Biography[]
Rissell's parents divorced when he was seven and he moved to California with his mother and her boyfriend Hank. His mother paid little attention to him and his siblings and Hank was an abusive brute who once beat him so badly he was left deaf in one ear. Rissell began acting out as a result of the abuse, shooting his cousin in the buttocks with a BB gun when he was nine; by his teenage years he had escalated to burglary and car theft. At age 14 he was convicted of two rapes and a series of petty thefts and sent to a juvenile institution in Florida, where he spent the next three years. A skilled liar, Rissell easily manipulated the psychiatrists at the institution into releasing him on probation and proceeded to rape four more women in Florida while he was supposedly under observation.
Rissell went to Virginia after his release, where he managed to get a job and a girlfriend. However, his girlfriend broke up with him after going to college; when Rissell went up to confront her, he saw her with another man. Angered, Rissell went on a drugs and alcohol bender before driving back to his apartment building in the early morning. He then noticed a prostitute in the parking lot, and, drunk, high, and angry, got the idea to rape her. He held her at gunpoint and tried to force himself onto her, but when she pretended to like it, Rissell became angry and ended up chasing her into a nearby ravine, where he bashed her head into a rock and drowned her.
A few months later Rissell raped another woman at gunpoint and forced her to drive him around in her car. She was scared and kept asking him what he was going to do to her, and Rissell was so annoyed that he eventually stabbed her to death to make her shut up, then drove around with the body for several hours until he found somewhere to get rid of it. He would go on to murder three more women over the next two months, who he stalked, kidnapped, raped, and then either stabbed or drowned. He also abducted one woman intending to rape and kill her but ended up letting her go after she mentioned having to look after her father who was dying of cancer, as Rissell's brother had died of cancer. Rissell was eventually apprehended and, at age 18, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Mindhunter[]
Special Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench of the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit get permission to interview Rissell in prison in order to help build a profile of killers like him. Rissell's interest is piqued when Bill mentions their study and he tells Bill he hopes they can find a cure for people like him, then starts trying to bargain with them by refusing to talk unless they get him some Big Red soda, which he can't get in prison. Bill manages to browbeat him into talking about his crimes, at which point he begins bragging about how many women he raped under the noses of the psychiatrists in Florida. Rissell provides Holden and Bill with a cursory description of his first few attacks and how they were triggered by his girlfriend leaving him, but when he gets to the girl he spared because his father had cancer, Bill antagonizes him by telling him what he did wasn't mercy. Annoyed, Rissell refuses to talk to them anymore until they get him a Big Red.
Holden and Bill later talk to Rissell again, having gone to significant effort to find him a Big Red. Rissell explains his family background in detail, talking about how he was neglected by his mother and abused by his stepfather, and describes how nobody in his life ever wanted him. He laments that he wasn't allowed to stay with his father when his parents divorced, telling Holden and Bill that he never would have hurt anyone if he had been raised by someone who actually cared about him, and proceeds to ignore the rest of their questions as he becomes wrapped up in fantasizing about his hypothetical life with his father. The BSU later conclude that Rissell, in contrast to other killers they've interviewed, killed impulsively without planning his crimes, leading them to draw a distinction between "disorganized" killers like Rissell and "organized" killers like Edmund Kemper.