The first dead body Carlo Schippers ever encountered was a man floating in an Amsterdam canal. He was still a young officer then, fresh from the academy, learning the city through the calls that came in day and night. What stayed with him from that moment weren’t the gruesome details but the questions. He recalls how he immediately wondered who the man was, how long he had been in the water, and what story had led him there.
It wouldn’t be the last time these questions came up. They ended up becoming a throughline in his career, one that, as he puts it, leaves tiny scratches in the soul. Over the next decades, Carlo moved from uniformed patrol to homicide investigations, and eventually to Quantico, where he trained with the FBI as the Netherlands’ first profiler. Once home, Carlo worked as a forensic behavioral consultant, supporting investigators with their cases of homicide, rape, arson, stalking, and missing persons, just to name a few. Week after week, case after case, what stayed constant was his wish to understand what had happened, and why.
Around that drive, the practical demands of the job began to pile up: the long days, irregular hours, and a flow of cases that rarely slowed. Alongside the practical strain, there was the emotional weight of work that deals with people’s lives and deaths. That Carlo managed to do this work for decades while watching others burn out raises an unavoidable question: who can handle this job, and who can’t?
The workload
During his years as a homicide detective, the pace was relentless. There were months with weeks of sixty to eighty hours. When a major case came in, no one went home. And major cases often turned up in the evening hours. “In homicide, the phone rings more at night than during the day,” he says. Carlo enjoyed that rhythm, though. Heading out at half past three to some street in Amsterdam felt “fantastic”.
He now calls those workweeks madness, but at the time, they were part of the job. When overtime was later cut back due to budget constraints, detectives were frustrated: “We had serious issues with it, because we thought: well, that means we’ll solve fewer cases.” For Carlo, solving the case always mattered more than the organizational rules. If the job doesn’t keep to office hours, neither can he. Carlo recalls a tense moment where, during an interrogation, a suspect had finally started confessing when a supervisor knocked on the door. It was time to wrap up as the unit was out of overtime hours. Carlo refused to stop. If he had, he says, they likely wouldn’t have gotten the confession to the second murder.
Years later, as the country’s only profiler, the hours did not quiet down. Rather than the night work, Carlo now spent countless hours on the road, traveling from Groningen to Heerlen and everywhere in between. At home, there was often more work waiting for him. “I’d be sitting at home with the miracle of the laptop on my lap,” he says. The advice not to bring work home didn’t apply in his world.
Later, when he helped establish the Dutch Amber Alert system and worked as its coordinator, the night work returned. This time not at crime scenes, but in his own living room. He would regularly get up after a phone call in the middle of the night to coordinate a search. It was demanding, but when a case ended well, the sleepless night was worth it. “At least someone had been found,” he says.
Emotional weight
Over the years, the toll wasn’t measured only in hours. Emotionally, the work demanded just as much as he had seen throughout his career. Being confronted daily with “death and destruction” is not something everyone can handle. The term PTSD wasn’t used in this context back then, but the symptoms were certainly there for some of his colleagues.
He also saw it clearly during his FBI training back in 1990. The Behavioral Science Unit was hugely popular among agents, drawn by what he calls “the glamour of serial killer cases.” Some lasted only a few months. After weeks of lying awake with crime-scene photos burned into their minds, they requested transfers. Sometimes just in time after realizing it wasn't for them, sometimes only once a burnout had already become unavoidable.
“I think some people have it in them to deal with this, and others don’t,” Schippers says. “It’s maybe not as black and white as that sounds, but that’s what it comes down to.”
Keeping distance
Carlo is convinced that a certain distance is necessary in this line of work. But for him, that distance was never a conscious choice. “It’s hard to explain because it’s not a deliberate process,” he says. Besides being essential for good judgment, since emotional involvement often undermines objectivity, the distance also meant he could handle the horrors he witnessed. He half-jokingly explains: “I find someone who’s still alive with a serious injury scarier than someone dead.” This doesn’t mean there is a lack of empathy. In conversations with families, he could be deeply moved. Sometimes he felt tears welling up. “Not because the case affects me so much,” he says, “but because I see their emotions, and I react to that. I can’t help it.” He adds: “It would be almost abnormal to sit there like some machine filled with ice.”
The gruesome details of a case, however, affected him far less. Curiosity and the drive to uncover what had happened tended to take over. He uses the example of a case where a woman had been raped and murdered. He never thought of his own mother at the time, who could have suffered the same fate. Not having children helped too: “That link simply wasn’t there.”
Driving force
Perhaps the distance is what kept him functional through all of that. But seeing the impact of his work is what kept him going. When a team solved a case with his help, they often returned months later with a new one. “They don’t even have to say you did a great job last time,” he says. “That, in itself, is hugely important positive feedback.”
Appreciation from families mattered just as much to Carlo. After his book was published, he received a message from a woman whose relative had been murdered thirty years ago. She congratulated him and emphasized how grateful her family was at the time. He notes that these types of interactions with relatives were his driving force.
The same was true for missing persons cases. Finding someone, alive or dead, meant an end to unbearable uncertainty. The gratitude he received, as well as the difference you could make in someone’s life, motivated him. “Job satisfaction” may sound strange in this context, but that is exactly what the work gave him: “I do it for a reason, and I can see what I’m doing it for.”
Soft edges of a hard profession
One might expect that someone who spent thirty years dealing with the darkest sides of humanity would become hardened. But Carlo says he hasn’t changed as a person: who he was before, he still is now. Over the years, something in him did shift, though he calls it small adjustments. A bit more cynical perhaps, a different way of looking at the people around him. Yet his worldview also became less black-and-white. Through close contact with perpetrators, he saw how crimes are a small part of long histories of behaviors, relationships, and circumstances. A more nuanced view of the person behind the act is necessary. Without understanding the people involved, the act itself can’t truly be understood.
He hasn't come through entirely unscathed, though. With some cases, he says, you do end up with "quite a few scratches on your soul, little scars." But there was always something to balance it out, from the detective who called back to the grateful families and finally the cases that got solved. "As long as you can see the positive effects of it." Carlo Schippers has now been retired for almost five years and lives with his wife in Canada. Yet he hasn’t fully let go of the work. When something about one of his old cases appears online, he still digs through regional newspapers to see what has surfaced. Some cases are etched into his (working) memory.
What remained after the conversation was the image of a man who approached his work, day after day, with deep curiosity and interest. Forty-five years without ever feeling the need to do something else. “For me, it was important to have a job where I could fully develop myself, where I recognized myself, where I could keep the interest alive,” he says, “and where, for all those forty-five years, every day I started with the thought: hey, what a good new day, what are we going to experience today.” Not everyone may be suited for this work, but Carlo Schippers proves that some people seem to find exactly the kind of work that is suited for them.
Bruna Costa is a master’s student in International Crimes, Conflict and Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and in Cultural Psychology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Bruna currently works as a student researcher at Project Gerede Twijfel (VU), analyzing a closed criminal case file in which there seem to be indications that the defendant has been wrongly convicted. From September onwards, Bruna will work at Centrum Kinderhandel en Mensenhandel as a research intern.