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jaycatt7 's review for:
Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI
by Robert K. Ressler
tl;dr: Entertaining and disturbing. I'm not sure I trust all the conclusions.
The perpetrator of this book is a white male in late middle age, well-educated, and recently retired from a long and successful career in government service. His purpose in writing is two-fold: to defend his professional legacy against all comers, and to capitalize on the crime hysteria of the early 1990s.
The writer takes pains to show himself over and over again as the smartest guy in the room. His method is shown to be superior, not only to the machinations of criminals, but to the competing methods of other law enforcement officers. He outsmarts cops rural and urban, novice and sophisticated, foreign and domestic. He even proves his approach in battle with hostile superiors at the FBI, even if he cannot guide all of projects past the treacherous bureaucratic rapids.
Criminals in this scheme come in two flavors: the organized and the disorganized. Organized serial killers demonstrate planning and thought. They bring their own tools to the crime; they choose a victim carefully; they control her with words or with threats and they enjoy consuming her personality. In contrast, the disorganized serial killer chooses at random, in fits of mental illness, using whatever improvised weapons happen to be around, and often sedating and disfiguring the victim to avoid being confronted with the opposition of her personality. My use of “her” is deliberate. If this book has a theme, it is misogyny, or the hatred of women that drives men to kill. Even if there is no rape involved, all of these crimes are sexual crimes. (The couple of exceptions, men who kill boys, seem to follow a similar mechanism, murder as the ultimate overcompensation for masculine inadequacy.)
Still, the author’s poise is notably conservative, so much that I found myself double-checking the book’s 1992 copyright. I don’t mean politically conservative, though he may be, but rather a law-and-order preference for a regimented society that follows the rules and meets expectations. The author’s scientific work, his interviews with hundreds of serial killers to divine their commonalities, has much to say about killers, but there is something in the author’s tone that suggests certain implications for everybody else, too. Would an author who recognized that basically every male within a certain age range masturbates, uses pornography, and engages in sexual fantasy be so keep to include a snapshot of the killer’s porn collection? Likewise possession of detective stories is taken as a clue that the killers are studying policy methodology, looking for tips on how to outwit the cops… when those magazines were sold to thousands if not millions of innocent readers. Likewise he takes BDSM or kink as if it were a sign of murderous potential rather than an adult activity that very many adults enjoy safely.
Sometimes this social politics feels dated and quaint, like when he discusses the necessity of “male bonding” in a healthy young man’s development (and cites its lack as a trait of the killer)—or when he describes the suspect as white because a Black or Latino or “even an Asian” would have been remarkable entering a particular neighborhood. OK, sure, he’s just working with the way the world was at the time. But his discussion of a gang rape in a “bad neighborhood” treats the recanted-confessions of four Black youths as an obvious open-and-shut case for the cops—the recantations are mere lawyerly tricks—instead of recognizing the probability that Chicago cops in the 70s got a couple of 14-year-old kids to say whatever they wanted. The author even cites the Central Park 5 as a similar success, presumably innocent of their later exoneration.
His attitudes toward women are similarly well-intentioned but sometimes chillingly naive. As much as this is a book about protecting women from the worst in men, there was an especially chilling passage. Shortly after describing a serial killer who got his victims’ contact information from his access to a police database, our author is quick to defend that not all cops are serial killers—even if they will often use their authority and resources to get dates. Boys will be boys, and all. This feels dated at best—I would like to think that an officer who pulls over a pretty girl and then calls her later at home for a date would be terminated immediately. But that might be overly optimistic. In any case, the writer’s blindness to that abuse of power is telling.
He does seem to be socially conscious for his day, though. He tempers his descriptions of homosexual serial killers by noting that gay people are capable of loving relationships (perhaps this felt like stepping out on a limb in 1992). He defends schizophrenics by noting that most are not at all violent—but then is clear to mention that when they are, their crimes are spectacular.
The title does not seem justified. While I have no doubt that speaking with and studying so many horrible crimes over the years is deeply stressful, we do not see admissions of monstrousness from the writer or his colleagues. At worst we see criticism of hidebound bureaucracy and a few examples of serial killers who, in the author’s formulation, were drawn to work in law enforcement as cover for the criminality already within them.
What this book makes me want to see is a comparative study of “normal” people: non-offenders. I want to see how many people entertain violent fantasies safely or even act them out in healthy, consensual relationships. I want to see how many effeminate, isolated virgins live out happy, sexless lives. I want to see an analysis of asexuality that doesn’t point to deficiency and resentment and violence. Maybe it’s just the time-travel aspect of reading a 25-year-old book (and from a hard-boiled career fed at that), but it feels like this view of humanity comes from a different world. I’d like to read some context.
The perpetrator of this book is a white male in late middle age, well-educated, and recently retired from a long and successful career in government service. His purpose in writing is two-fold: to defend his professional legacy against all comers, and to capitalize on the crime hysteria of the early 1990s.
The writer takes pains to show himself over and over again as the smartest guy in the room. His method is shown to be superior, not only to the machinations of criminals, but to the competing methods of other law enforcement officers. He outsmarts cops rural and urban, novice and sophisticated, foreign and domestic. He even proves his approach in battle with hostile superiors at the FBI, even if he cannot guide all of projects past the treacherous bureaucratic rapids.
Criminals in this scheme come in two flavors: the organized and the disorganized. Organized serial killers demonstrate planning and thought. They bring their own tools to the crime; they choose a victim carefully; they control her with words or with threats and they enjoy consuming her personality. In contrast, the disorganized serial killer chooses at random, in fits of mental illness, using whatever improvised weapons happen to be around, and often sedating and disfiguring the victim to avoid being confronted with the opposition of her personality. My use of “her” is deliberate. If this book has a theme, it is misogyny, or the hatred of women that drives men to kill. Even if there is no rape involved, all of these crimes are sexual crimes. (The couple of exceptions, men who kill boys, seem to follow a similar mechanism, murder as the ultimate overcompensation for masculine inadequacy.)
Still, the author’s poise is notably conservative, so much that I found myself double-checking the book’s 1992 copyright. I don’t mean politically conservative, though he may be, but rather a law-and-order preference for a regimented society that follows the rules and meets expectations. The author’s scientific work, his interviews with hundreds of serial killers to divine their commonalities, has much to say about killers, but there is something in the author’s tone that suggests certain implications for everybody else, too. Would an author who recognized that basically every male within a certain age range masturbates, uses pornography, and engages in sexual fantasy be so keep to include a snapshot of the killer’s porn collection? Likewise possession of detective stories is taken as a clue that the killers are studying policy methodology, looking for tips on how to outwit the cops… when those magazines were sold to thousands if not millions of innocent readers. Likewise he takes BDSM or kink as if it were a sign of murderous potential rather than an adult activity that very many adults enjoy safely.
Sometimes this social politics feels dated and quaint, like when he discusses the necessity of “male bonding” in a healthy young man’s development (and cites its lack as a trait of the killer)—or when he describes the suspect as white because a Black or Latino or “even an Asian” would have been remarkable entering a particular neighborhood. OK, sure, he’s just working with the way the world was at the time. But his discussion of a gang rape in a “bad neighborhood” treats the recanted-confessions of four Black youths as an obvious open-and-shut case for the cops—the recantations are mere lawyerly tricks—instead of recognizing the probability that Chicago cops in the 70s got a couple of 14-year-old kids to say whatever they wanted. The author even cites the Central Park 5 as a similar success, presumably innocent of their later exoneration.
His attitudes toward women are similarly well-intentioned but sometimes chillingly naive. As much as this is a book about protecting women from the worst in men, there was an especially chilling passage. Shortly after describing a serial killer who got his victims’ contact information from his access to a police database, our author is quick to defend that not all cops are serial killers—even if they will often use their authority and resources to get dates. Boys will be boys, and all. This feels dated at best—I would like to think that an officer who pulls over a pretty girl and then calls her later at home for a date would be terminated immediately. But that might be overly optimistic. In any case, the writer’s blindness to that abuse of power is telling.
He does seem to be socially conscious for his day, though. He tempers his descriptions of homosexual serial killers by noting that gay people are capable of loving relationships (perhaps this felt like stepping out on a limb in 1992). He defends schizophrenics by noting that most are not at all violent—but then is clear to mention that when they are, their crimes are spectacular.
The title does not seem justified. While I have no doubt that speaking with and studying so many horrible crimes over the years is deeply stressful, we do not see admissions of monstrousness from the writer or his colleagues. At worst we see criticism of hidebound bureaucracy and a few examples of serial killers who, in the author’s formulation, were drawn to work in law enforcement as cover for the criminality already within them.
What this book makes me want to see is a comparative study of “normal” people: non-offenders. I want to see how many people entertain violent fantasies safely or even act them out in healthy, consensual relationships. I want to see how many effeminate, isolated virgins live out happy, sexless lives. I want to see an analysis of asexuality that doesn’t point to deficiency and resentment and violence. Maybe it’s just the time-travel aspect of reading a 25-year-old book (and from a hard-boiled career fed at that), but it feels like this view of humanity comes from a different world. I’d like to read some context.