Tracking Serial Killers

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A former cop challenges the romanticized FBI "profiler" as a falsehood, showing that psychological profiles of serial killer are largely fictions while the more diversified police work that incorporates environmental psychology, landscape analysis, crime site investigation, and statistics often yields better results. Original.

The author of this book played a major part in the FBI's development of psychological profiles for serial killers, he even invented the term serial killer. Whilst Thomas Harris made Ressler's work famous in fiction, Ressler did it for real.

Philip L. Simpson provides an original and broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. The fictional serial killer, with a motiveless, highly individualized modus operandi, is the latest manifestation of the multiple murderers and homicidal maniacs that haunt American literature and, particularly, visual media such as cinema and television. Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary mythology of violence. Updated and repackaged for mass consumption, the Gothic villains, the monsters, the vampires, and the werewolves of the past have evolved into the fictional serial killer, who clearly reflects American cultural anxieties at the start of the twenty-first century. Citing numerous sources, Simpson argues that serial killers’ recent popularity as genre monsters owes much to their pliability to any number of authorial ideological agendas from both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. Serial killers in fiction are a kind of debased and traumatized visionary, whose murders privately and publicly re-empower them with a pseudo-divine aura in the contemporary political moment. The current fascination with serial killer narratives can thus be explained as the latest manifestation of the ongoing human fascination with tales of gruesome murders and mythic villains finding a receptive audience in a nation galvanized by the increasingly apocalyptic tension between the extremist philosophies of both the New Right and the anti-New Right. Faced with a blizzard of works of varying quality dealing with the serial killer, Simpson has ruled out the catalog approach in this study in favor of in-depth an analysis of the best American work in the genre. He has chosen novels and films that have at least some degree of public name-recognition or notoriety, including Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Manhunter directed by Michael Mann, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer directed by John McNaughton, Seven directed by David Fincher, Natural Born Killers directed by Oliver Stone, Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Explores the modern methods and new technologies used to find some of today's most notorious criminals.

LEARN THE TRUE STORY OF ONE OF THE FBI PROFILERS WHO COINED THE PHRASE "SERIAL KILLER" Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran Robert K. Ressler learned how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us -- and put them behind bars. In Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler—the inspiration for the character Agent Bill Tench in David Fincher's hit TV show Mindhunter—shows how he was able to track down some of the country's most brutal murderers. Ressler, the FBI Agent and ex-Army CID colonel who advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs, used the evidence at a crime scene to put together a psychological profile of the killers. From the victims they choose to the way they kill to the often grotesque souvenirs they take with them—Ressler unlocks the identities of these vicious killers. And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behaviors, Ressler goes behind prison walls to hear bizarre first-hand stories from countless convicted murderers, including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy; Edmund Kemper; and Son of Sam. Getting inside the mind of a killer to understand how and why he kills is one of the FBI's most effective ways of helping police bring in killers who are still at large. Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for the world's most dangerous psychopaths in this terrifying journey you will not forget.

Tracking serial killers is a difficult job, but the men and women who do it help put brutal murderers in jail. As readers explore gripping main text, detailed photographs, and informative fact boxes and sidebars, they discover how the methods used to track serial killers have changed throughout history. They also discover the importance of science and technology in this line of work. Readers interested in pursuing a career in this kind of crime scene investigation are presented with valuable information to help them begin preparing now for such a challenging career path.

Tracking serial killers is a difficult job, but the men and women who do it help put brutal murderers in jail. As readers explore gripping main text, detailed photographs, and informative fact boxes and sidebars, they discover how the methods used to track serial killers have changed throughout history. They also discover the importance of science and technology in this line of work. Readers interested in pursuing a career in this kind of crime scene investigation are presented with valuable information to help them begin preparing now for such a challenging career path.