Like the book Legal Blunders, this is another book that you can read from cover to cover or just dip into as you wish. I dipped it!
Firstly, I found the stories in this book interesting and revealing: there were crimes here that I did not know about before I read the book and there were crimes that I did know of but I learned more from the book.
However, given that my focus was the psychological aspect of the book, I was disappointed. The book is structured according to a variety of classifications such as sex crimes, the profile of a serial killer, the Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome and so on; but I didn't get enough of the psychology out of it that was promised.
I have reviewed books on such murderers as Harold Shipman, the murdering GP from England in which I called for greater insights into the psychology of such people: I really want to know what makes them tick.
As with Legal Blunders, The Serial Killers is a mutli national book in that we are treated to evil people from all over the place. The Fred and Rosemary West utter depravity is documented in greater detail than I have read before: as one comedian in the UK once asked, "How do we breed these people?" Not funny is it? They were perverted people to the nth degree and I can only hope that there like cannot exist again.
The story of Brady and Hindley, the Moors Murderers, gets no easier in the telling; and don't forget that there is still one poor child, tortured and killed by these evil people, still lying unfound out there on Saddleworth Moor: his parents and the rest of his family desperately want the boy home. Brady and Hindley were as evil as the Wests and are rotting in jail as they ought to do.
I'm sure everyone who reads this book will raise an eyebrow or two at the case of the 'girl in the box' who was abducted and then kept 'prisoner' for SEVEN years or so. In the middle of the case, though, the girl was allowed out to work, to shop and even to go home … definitely spooky given that her captor abused her, beat her and goodness knows what else.
Definitely readable, definitely interesting, but some of the stories are just terrible: what one person can do to another beggars belief. If you are looking for psychology, you will find some here and may be partly satisfied.

Duncan Williamson
25 August 2001