Here is another solid entry in the bourgeoning genre of FBI profiler memoirs. A killer by design: murderers, mindhunters, and my quest to decipher the criminal mind (Hachette 2021) is by Ann Wolbert Burgess.
In an informal, at-the-next-barstool tone, she relays stories of the early days of the development of formal psychological profiling of violent sex offenders. [Amazon B&N Goodreads]
Burgess, with a background in psychiatric nursing, made a name for herself in the 1970s with groundbreaking research on rape victims and rape trauma syndrome. She was recruited by the FBI to study sexual homicide alongside such pioneers as Roy Hazelwood, John Douglas, and Robert Ressler (who in turn were building on the work of Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany, who helped found the Behavioral Science Unit in 1972, which in turn was inspired in part by early 'profiling' such as in New York's Mad Bomber case from 1956).
Burgess tells behind-the scenes stories relating to the infamous cases of John Joseph Joubert IV, David Mierhofer, Bernadette Protti, Brian James Dugan, Jon Barry Simonis, Edmund Kemper, the BTK killer Dennis Rader, and Henry Louis Wallace.
I appreciated the author making it clear in her introduction that "I have remained faithful to the reality of events as they occurred."
There is no discussion of some of the controversies around profiling or miscarriages of justice that occasionally result, nor much discussion of the retired profilers' habit of taking up defense work. Regardless, it is an interesting collection of anecdotes for armchair G-men.
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