Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 352 pages
- Published by: Jossey-Bass September 28, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0787984841
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0787984847
-
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Legendary profiler and bestselling author Douglas (
Mindhunter), who pioneered the FBI's systematic study of serial killers, offers his insights into one of this country's most chilling killers—Dennis Rader, a seemingly innocuous family man and municipal employee, whose brutal murders terrorized Wichita, Kans., for three decades. Identifying himself by the initials BTK (for Bind, Torture, Kill), Rader (who in 2005 pled guilty to ten murders and is serving consecutive life sentences) taunted the press and law enforcement, striking at random in savage attacks that often decimated families, and then confounded his pursuers with long dormant periods. With the aid of
People magazine writer Dodd, Douglas nicely weaves the story of his own development as a profiler with the history of BTK's crimes and his own role in the investigation, drawing on analyses he developed early on in the rampage; he noted, for instance, the razor sharp control the killer maintained after his crimes. While the stomach-turning story of BTK's crimes has been told by others, Douglas's unique professional experience and his exclusive personal access to Rader offers a different perspective, even as the answer to the question of how such a monster comes to be remains elusive. (
Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
"It's an unforgettable portrait of a guy most of us are glad we never met." (
Bloomberg.com, November 8, 2007)
Legendary profiler and bestselling author Douglas (
Mindhunter), who pioneered the FBI's systematic study of serial killers, offers his insights into one of this country's most chilling killers—Dennis Rader, a seemingly innocuous family man and municipal employee, whose brutal murders terrorized Wichita, Kans., for three decades. Identifying himself by the initials BTK (for Bind, Torture, Kill), Rader (who in 2005 pled guilty to ten murders and is serving consecutive life sentences) taunted the press and law enforcement, striking at random in savage attacks that often decimated families, and then confounded his pursuers with long dormant periods. With the aid of
People magazine writer Dodd, Douglas nicely weaves the story of his own development as a profiler with the history of BTK's crimes and his own role in the investigation, drawing on analyses he developed early on in the rampage; he noted, for instance, “the razor sharp control” the killer maintained after his crimes. While the stomach-turning story of BTK's crimes has been told by others, Douglas's unique professional experience and his exclusive personal access to Rader offers a different perspective, even as the answer to the question of how such a monster comes to be remains elusive. (
Oct.) (
Publishers Weekly, August 20, 2007)
Reader Reviews
This book is simply outstanding. Douglas is the epitome of his craft, the "profiler's profiler" of serial killers. Because of my academc background in linguistics and psychology, I appreciate Douglas's profound grasp of how serial killers create and maintain their interior dialogue, their mental drama that follows a patterned plot sequence of desired elements in each murder. Douglas has studied the typical psychological profile of this kind of psychotic personality, evolving from childhood fantasies that take the form of fire setting or animal torture and the like. Dennis Rader, self-labeled as the BTK (bind, torture, kill) murderer, typifies this type of psychopath, needing the domination of helpless victims to gain emotional stability by "owning" the final minutes or hours of a victim's life, planning and controlling various levels of detail. Rader would engage in "down-time" fantasy skits (one-man) donning his past victims' clothing, wearing a mask to imitate the victim while looking in a mirror, sometimes while lying in a self-dug grave, photographing himself in that position, relishing the projected feeling of being the victim in order to relive the crime. In this, Rader was somewhat typical in that while maintaining a normal life to earn a living, his preferred mental life, the one that provided him his most exciting sense of identity, was reliving past murders and inserting his sense of identity into his idea of the mind of the victim, while also fantasizing about expanding this secret life by acquiring additional victims. Thus this book presents, in effect, the serial killer as suffering from (while enjoying, in his own way) a multiple-personality disorder. I know of no book that so competently deals with this kind of subject, and I know of no one better qualified for this task than John Douglas. I don't know how this book could have been better written (though Douglas himself didn't do most of the actual writing per se).
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