Reddit reviews Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

Well, Dahmer was homosexual, and his victims were all young men to whom he was physically attracted. Most of them were ethnically non-white; however, Dahmer did hold that race was not a factor and considering that his interest was primarily in corpses and bones that may be true. Regardless, he wasn’t robbing graves or mortuaries, but rather selecting men he found attractive and murdering them in order to have sexual contact with their dead bodies. Bundy had a clear preference for attractive young women with long dark hair. He was not exclusively or even primarily a necrophile, but he would often return to dump sites to groom and dress the corpses or engage in necrophilic acts. There's lots of books and articles written about both men; I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the mindset of serial murderers.

As far as pedophiles go, this is an interesting book regarding the mindset of sexual predators. Again, it seems like many people with a sexual proclivity towards children have a "type"--i.e., girls in their early teens, or prepubescent boys, etc.

> Not to mention they had a guy listening to his dog, who told him to kill people.

According to Ressler (coined the term SErial killer, worked for FBI for 20 years, interviewed hundreds of incarcerated Sks) in his book, Berkowitz admitted to him that he was lying when he said the dog was speaking to him, in an attempt to plea not guilty by reason of insanity.

I recommend these all the time, they are great:


Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit Its by John Douglas who founded the profiling unit for the FBI. Jack Crawford from the Silence of the Lambs was based off of him. Goes into all sorts of gory details and psychological analysis of well known and lesser known serial and spree killers.

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI Written by the guy who coined the term "serial killer." Advised Thomas Harris when writing the Silence of the Lambs. Similar book with a different perspective. Has a few more first hand interview accounts with other serial killers.

Hi Susan, and thank you for doing this AMA!

Many years ago, I read Robert K. Ressler's book "Whoever Fights Monsters" and I never forgot the warning (borrowed from Nietzsche) that "he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster, and when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

My question for you is: are you cognisant of "the abyss gazing back", and do you think writing about crimes such as these has an effect on other parts of your life?

>Why serial killers that are caught are allowed to live until they die of old age?

Simply put, in states that have (and still use) the death penalty, they are often put to death, although many plead guilty or make deals to avoid the death sentence.

In states or countries that don't have the death penalty, they stay in prison until they die.

Now, although these people are horrible human beings, keeping them alive is a much better alternative than killing them. Why? Because normal people don't become serial killers. A serial killer is the result of multiple childhood traumas (lack of love, humiliation, violence, absence of a mother during the first years of life, etc.) that, left untreated, can evolve into full blown mental illness, and allowing medical and law enforcement professionals to study them by interviewing them at length is considerably more useful than just pulling the switch.

This has nothing to do with the validity (or lack thereof) of the death penalty, it's simply a practical conclusion.

Special Agent Robert Ressler, the father of the modern FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (popularized by the Silence of the lambs movie) interviewed many of the most notorious serial killers in the US and abroad (Ted Bundy, Jerry Brudos, David Berkowitz, Richard Chase, Juan Corona, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Edmund Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, Sirhan Sirhan, etc.) and this helped him and his colleagues understand serial killers much better, which has in turn enabled the FBI to train law enforcement forces all over the world to better deal with them, and this includes educating the medical profession on how to better recognize the signs in troubled offenders that an indicators of potential future crimes.

If you're interested in serial killers, there's two books you need to read that will educate you in no uncertain terms about how these people come to be, what triggers them and the different types of killers.

The first one is Robert Ressler's "Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI"

The second one is Gavin de Becker's "The gift of fear"

Edit: by the way, if you have a wife, a girlfriend, a daughter, a mom or a female friend, the book by Gavin de Becker is one that could genuinely save their life one day. Seriously. You'll thank me later.

You know, I used to read a shit ton of books from people who worked at Quantico about serial killers and the like. Ressler stated that serial killings were usually preceeded by those exact types of break-ins. Stealing shoes or underwear
EDIT: They are called "Fetish Crimes"

Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas

The Anatomy of Motive : The FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals by John Douglas

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI by Robert K. Ressler

Signature Killers by Robert Keppel

The following list are books from retired members of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit - Jack Crawford's real-life equivalents:

Sexual Homicide - Patterns and Motives

Journey Into Darkness

Mindhunter

Anatomy of Motive

Whoever Fights Monsters

Dark Dreams

All of them go into detail in describing how cases were analyzed to develop profiles of unknown killers, the different categories of killers, and how the thought processes of a serial killer work. It's not that they are evil incarnate or unpredictable violent beings - there is usually some kind of logic there that makes perfect sense once you realize that they just aren't playing with the same set of rules as everyone else.

If you just want to talk about manipulation:

Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking

Great read

https://www.amazon.com/Whoever-Fights-Monsters-Tracking-Killers/dp/0312950446

self pimping here.
http://www.redbubble.com/people/resonanteye/collections/191441-serial-killer-and-true-crime-portraits

nonself pimping: encyclopedia of serial killers, or http://www.amazon.com/Whoever-Fights-Monsters-Tracking-Killers/dp/0312950446