Few criminal acts give rise to such stark repulsion and such associations to evil as those of the serial killer, whose cruelty often stretches way beyond the wildest imagination of most people. They exhibit a total lack of empathy for other people. F ...
Few criminal acts give rise to such stark repulsion and such associations to evil as those of the serial killer, whose cruelty often stretches way beyond the wildest imagination of most people. They exhibit a total lack of empathy for other people. For a serial killer, ten minutes of pleasure can be worth more than another person’s life. In this book, the author wants to describe what lies behind the acts of these people, to make it possible for us to understand how it can happen.
How and why does a person grow up to become a serial killer? Which mechanisms steer his or her behaviour, and how can we learn to ‘read’ the early warning signals that these damaged individuals actually send out before they commit their hideous crimes? It has been shown from interviews with these perpetrators that for the greater part of their lives they have been pre-occupied with thinking about and imagining raping and killing, finding new victims, new places and new methods to commit acts of cruelty.
The book is based on case studies and interviews with perpetrators of extreme sex crimes and crimes of violence. The author is one of the most famous forensic psychologists in Sweden, and he has interviewed most of the country’s most dangerous criminals who have been classified as serial killers. For several years, he has given the police expert advice with so-called criminal profiling. He is also often asked to assist in interrogations of these perpetrators.
Sven Å. Christianson is a registered psychologist as well as being a professor at the University of Stockholm. He has served as an expert advisor in national and international contexts in a number of notorious legal cases and he often provides expert commentary on TV, radio and in the press.