She Talks to Killers, Lives to Tell About It : Crime: FBI agent, like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ character, collects information to help the agency build a file of characteristics and methods of offenders.

FBI Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, a real-life version of the investigator played by Jodie Foster in the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” says she never met a killer she didn’t like.

“They’re very bright, and in some cases they can even be really helpful to give you more insight to them and to that (criminal) phenomenon,” said O’Toole, who interviews about 50 convicted murderers and rapists, suspects, and witnesses yearly.

The interviews of convicted murderers and rapists are used to help the agency build a file of typical characteristics and methods of violent offenders to help solve current crimes.

Foster won an Oscar for best actress for her portrayal in “Silence of the Lambs” of a rookie FBI agent who interviews an imprisoned cannibalistic killer to help apprehend a similar killer.

Foster’s character works for the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit, which is modeled after the Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, O’Toole’s employer.

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Although O’Toole has never encountered a cannibal, she has interviewed some colorful characters in prison.

“If you can keep an open mind . . . (they) can be extremely interesting and entertaining to talk to,” she said in a recent interview in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco office. “I can’t think of one person that I would place in the ‘I don’t like them’ category.”

O’Toole does not lose sight of their horrible crimes; she just tries to understand the complete picture of why they do what they do.

“This one was a serial sex offender, (with) hundreds of sexual assaults,” she said. “He was one of the brightest men I’ve ever spoken with, very polite. I got a card from him over the holidays.”

The red-headed O’Toole does not look like the usual image of the drably dressed federal agent. She appeared for one interview dressed in a long black dress with floral prints, a pearl necklace and large pearl earrings.

Her piercing blue eyes remained fixed on her interviewer throughout the 90-minute conversation.

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Her soft-spoken manner makes her an effective interviewer, said O’Toole. Her supervisor at the Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Va., concurred.

“Her ability to interview people is excellent,” said Jim Wright, who consults daily with O’Toole, a field coordinator for the center based in San Francisco.

With 11 agents in Quantico and 50 field coordinators, the center assists local police and FBI offices on particularly complex cases and interviews convicted offenders in prison.

“It often takes a tremendous amount of patience to interview these people,” Wright said. “You’ve got to . . . be flexible with them and coax information out of them, and she is very capable of doing that.”

Agents from the center conducted 1,100 interviews last year, resulting in a case load far higher than the 75 interviews per year Wright said each agent is capable of handling.

The case overload may explain why O’Toole puts in 15-hour days, although there’s another reason.

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“I really like my job,” she said. “The scary part is that I like it probably way too much. I can’t imagine doing anything else. But I have to be careful about turning it off, because I found myself on the subway the other day looking around and sizing people up and staying away from some people and going up closer to others.”

O’Toole has had this curiosity since she was 10 years old, making her mother stay up late with her watching horror films.

“I’ve been interested in this kind of thing since I was in grade school,” she said. “What goes on in the mind of somebody that would kill another person? I can recall vividly wondering why people would do that.”

The violence in those old monster movies has been dwarfed by the real-life evil she encounters every day in her work.

“It’s been a hellish day,” O’Toole said at the end of one recent day. “Today I have three homicides and one sexually sadistic case and a series of murders so it’s just a series of bizarre stuff today.”

How does she leave work at the end of the day without a totally bleak view of the world? She concentrates on the technical parts of the job, such as advising police how to talk to suspects--and she always remembers to laugh.

Every interview is different, O’Toole said.

“I’m always surprised,” she said. “I had an interview once where the person I was interviewing was not necessarily a suspect in the case, she was giving information. She went down on the floor in the fetal position, and I just got on the floor with her and continued the interview.

“I interviewed a person who began to hallucinate on my face, they began to have hallucinations with my face as a television screen, and it was very difficult to pull him out of it.”

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She has never been attacked by an interviewee, but she has had disturbing interviews.

O’Toole interviewed one man who murdered about 20 women, and another convicted of five murders. “And the murders were not quick, they were over a period of time, hours,” she said.

“I found those to be kind of difficult, because these women who were killed were maybe very similar to me in background growing up. Those kind of things could happen to me or somebody I know.”