Profiling: The Psychology of Catching Killers

The true stories of how professional profilers help catch serial killers.

Profiling reveals the confidential arsenal of tactics that real-life FBI investigators used to solve some of the most horrific murders in modern history. It begins with an overview of how profiling was first developed as a viable technique, followed by illustrated chapters that describe the specific parts of the profiling process:

• The FBI's crime scene analysis procedure
  
• Crime scene facts and evidence
  
• The organized and disorganized classifications of violent serial offenders
  
• Geographical profiling
  
• Types of rape and the clues they leave
  
• A serial killer's crime signature
  
• Identifying child abductors and abusers
  
• Profiling criminals through written documents
  
• How profilers work with other investigators and interrogators

Profiling focuses on 50 notorious true crimes to explain profiling, describing how crime scene evidence is processed and revealing the psychological clues and how the profilers helped to solve the case. Some of these headline-grabbing cases are:

• The Black Dahlia murder investigation
  
• David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer
  
• Robert Hansen, a highly organized killer who abducted prostitutes and left them in the Alaska wilderness so he could hunt them with a rifle
  
• Ted Bundy
  
• Jeffrey Dahmer

Profiling is the gripping behind-the-scenes story of a topic that has had fans of Criminal Minds and the CSI series glued to their television screens for many years.

David Owen has written about military deception, air accident investigations, electric intelligence and computer crime. He is the author of Hidden Evidence, Hidden Secrets, Police Lab and Spies, all published by Firefly Books.