When I became a hostage negotiator at the FBI in 1980, it was still a fairly rudimentary process. We ran along the lines of: “If you give me a hostage, I will give you some food.”

But in 1982, I got called into a big case that made me start to see things more broadly. The hostage-taker was a drug-runner who used his sister and her children to transport drugs by train. After a row, he had killed her and taken the two children hostage.

When I arrived, our primary objective was to open up a dialogue so we could identify his needs and build a strategy, but the man wouldn’t speak. Hostage-takers often try to compel the police to take a certain course of action – they’ll say: “I will kill this bank hostage unless you give me a getaway car.” So you bargain. But this man didn’t appear to want anything.