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april_does_feral_sometimes 's review for:
Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI
by Robert K. Ressler
‘Whoever Fights Monsters’ by Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman, while a True Crime genre detailing the lives and crimes of a few famous serial murderers, is really a history of how Ressler came to believe profiling serial killers would be important to do and how he slowly convinced the FBI to create a profiling department.
Difficult as it may be to believe, almost all police and justice forces never examined perpetrators psychologically or thought it at all important to solving whodunnit until recently. A crime is committed, nearby people are interviewed, suspects are rounded up and questioned based on their likelihood of having a reason to kill - money, jealousy, sex, rage, especially past convictions involving violence - done. Police had no interest in profiling. Indeed, most police were suspicious of profiling, even today. Crime scene facts and physical evidence are what matters, along with witness statements, if any.
Who cares why killings happen if the perpetrators can be convicted by physical evidence and/or confessions?
Serial murderers are a different kind of killer than with whom the police usually deal. Even the FBI, the agency Ressler worked for as an agent, could not grasp how different serial killers are for a long time. Or that even though serial killers are individually quirky, there are psychological categories and subset categories that they each can be fit into. Or that by identifying a killer’s psychological style could help in identifying a serial killer. But most important, knowing how to talk to a serial killer can lead them to confess. Many serial killers have psychological twists that normal people are not able to believe a person could possibly have. Police have allowed serial killers to walk free out of sheer disbelief of their confessions or even the evidence of their own eyes, as in the Jeffrey Dahmer case.
There is the issue that many serial killers move their killing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, state to state. Police hate sharing cases with other police agencies, and they are reluctant to discuss active investigations with others. If murder A was exactly like murder B in another town, in the past cops would never know it. It still happens today cops in town A are unaware cops in town B have the same kind of crime with the same physical evidence discovered at the scene of the crime.
A lot of new ideas about detecting and collecting evidence, and computers, and police-friendly for-profit genealogical research companies which process DNA kits, have met the challenge of identifying similar styles and physical evidence in murders, as well as tracking cases across state lines from different jurisdictions. But cooperation between police departments, from what I’ve read in newspaper exposés, is sometimes still a problem. Although computers can compile cases with similar attributes from a national or regional database, police departments have to pay to buy access, and not all can afford to buy access. Police also need to hire extra employees to fill out and send in the paperwork forms regional and national databases require to input cases. Police in many small jurisdictions still refuse to participate in sending local crime information to regional or the national FBI and other criminal justice databases.
But how did police agencies begin to accept profiling? That is what this book is about.
I copied the cover blurb below. It is an accurate description:
”Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us--and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he is able to track down some of today's most brutal murderers.
Just as it happened in The Silence of the Lambs, Ressler 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 of the police to capture.
And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behaviors, Ressler's gone behind prison walls to hear the bizarre first-hand stories countless convicted murderers. 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 today’s most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.”
Well, ok, the blurb is a little bit more breathlessly dramatic than the book is, actually. The tone of ‘Whoever Fights Monsters’ is closer to a flattened ‘just the facts’ voice of an academic professional. Nonetheless, I thought it fascinating.
There is an Index.
Difficult as it may be to believe, almost all police and justice forces never examined perpetrators psychologically or thought it at all important to solving whodunnit until recently. A crime is committed, nearby people are interviewed, suspects are rounded up and questioned based on their likelihood of having a reason to kill - money, jealousy, sex, rage, especially past convictions involving violence - done. Police had no interest in profiling. Indeed, most police were suspicious of profiling, even today. Crime scene facts and physical evidence are what matters, along with witness statements, if any.
Who cares why killings happen if the perpetrators can be convicted by physical evidence and/or confessions?
Serial murderers are a different kind of killer than with whom the police usually deal. Even the FBI, the agency Ressler worked for as an agent, could not grasp how different serial killers are for a long time. Or that even though serial killers are individually quirky, there are psychological categories and subset categories that they each can be fit into. Or that by identifying a killer’s psychological style could help in identifying a serial killer. But most important, knowing how to talk to a serial killer can lead them to confess. Many serial killers have psychological twists that normal people are not able to believe a person could possibly have. Police have allowed serial killers to walk free out of sheer disbelief of their confessions or even the evidence of their own eyes, as in the Jeffrey Dahmer case.
There is the issue that many serial killers move their killing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, state to state. Police hate sharing cases with other police agencies, and they are reluctant to discuss active investigations with others. If murder A was exactly like murder B in another town, in the past cops would never know it. It still happens today cops in town A are unaware cops in town B have the same kind of crime with the same physical evidence discovered at the scene of the crime.
A lot of new ideas about detecting and collecting evidence, and computers, and police-friendly for-profit genealogical research companies which process DNA kits, have met the challenge of identifying similar styles and physical evidence in murders, as well as tracking cases across state lines from different jurisdictions. But cooperation between police departments, from what I’ve read in newspaper exposés, is sometimes still a problem. Although computers can compile cases with similar attributes from a national or regional database, police departments have to pay to buy access, and not all can afford to buy access. Police also need to hire extra employees to fill out and send in the paperwork forms regional and national databases require to input cases. Police in many small jurisdictions still refuse to participate in sending local crime information to regional or the national FBI and other criminal justice databases.
But how did police agencies begin to accept profiling? That is what this book is about.
I copied the cover blurb below. It is an accurate description:
”Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from them how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us--and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how he is able to track down some of today's most brutal murderers.
Just as it happened in The Silence of the Lambs, Ressler 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 of the police to capture.
And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behaviors, Ressler's gone behind prison walls to hear the bizarre first-hand stories countless convicted murderers. 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 today’s most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.”
Well, ok, the blurb is a little bit more breathlessly dramatic than the book is, actually. The tone of ‘Whoever Fights Monsters’ is closer to a flattened ‘just the facts’ voice of an academic professional. Nonetheless, I thought it fascinating.
There is an Index.