NCJ Number
176697
Date Published
1998
Length
311 pages
Annotation
This book explores the workings of the criminal mind in an attempt to discover why some people become killers.
Abstract
The book includes observations based on interviews with Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross and Mark David Chapman, among others. In addition, it contains data drawn from the public record, including police reports, newspaper accounts, defendants' statements, witnesses' statements, psychiatric and medical records, and reports of other examiners. The cases clearly illustrate how the disparate elements of brain damage, paranoia, and family brutality combine to create a killer. There is no known genetic abnormality associated specifically with violent crime. No particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group has proved itself to be innately and enduringly more violent than another. And there appears to be a lack of interest, on the part of the public as well as criminal justice and corrections personnel, in determining why people kill. The book concludes, "In a given murder, our desire to learn its causes, and the time we are willing to spend doing that, are inversely proportional to the grisliness of the crime and the pleasure we anticipate deriving from the execution." Index