BKMT READING GUIDES
Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI
by Robert K. Ressler, Tom Shachtman
Mass Market Paperback : 304 pages
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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 ...
Introduction
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.
Editorial Review
This book is an overview of the career of the FBI man who nearly single-handedly created the system for personality profiling of violent offenders. If there's a big-time multiple murderer from about 1950 until now who hasn't been interviewed by Robert Ressler, he probably refused the honor. Indispensable reading for serial killer mavens, and better written than John Douglas and Mark Olshaker's Mindhunter, this book is packed with fascinating details from dozens of cases: The killer John Joubert, for example, started his life of cruelty as a kid one day when he was riding his bike with a sharpened pencil in his hand. He rode up next to a little girl who was walking, and stabbed her in the back with the pencil. Ouch!Discussion Questions
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