My Washington Times Review Of 'The Killer Across The Table: Unlocking The Secrets Of Serial Killers And Predators With The FBI's Original Mindhunter'

The Washington Times published my review of The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and predators With the FBI’s Original Mindhunter.

Who knows why a person rapes, tortures and kills countless men, women and children without empathy or remorse?

Well, former FBI profiler and author John Douglas has a fair idea, having studied and interviewed numerous serial killers and other murderers for nearly 50 years, often sitting about three feet across the table from the killers in a prison interview room.

In “The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter,” Mr. Douglas and co-author Mark Olshaker take a close look at four predatory killers while detailing the profiling process and strategies used to solve some of the country’s most complicated and heinous cases.

Mr. Douglas, an FBI profiler who became famous as the inspiration for the film “Silence of the Lambs,” the network TV series “Criminal Minds” and the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” has been involved in thousands of violent crime cases over the course of his 25-year-career as an FBI special agent and later as a private consultant. Along with Mr. Olshaker, he previously published “Mindhunter,” “The Anatomy of Motive” and “Law & Disorder.”

Although the four murderers interviewed and analyzed in “The Killer Across the Table” are not as infamous as Ted Bundy and other more notorious serial killers, Mr. Douglas reflects on his past encounters with some of the country’s most notorious murderers, such as Ed Kemper, Charles Manson, the “BTK Strangler” Denis Rader and David Berkowitz, known as the “Son of Sam” killer, and compares their actions and motives with the four lessor known killers covered in this book.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/10/book-review-the-killer-across-the-table-by-john-f-/

John Douglas On His Life's Work: Talking With Killers

Lisa Levy at CrimeReads.com offers an interview with John Douglas, a former FBI profiler, author of Mindhunter, and his current book, The Killer Across the Table.

John Douglas is the OG of criminal profilers. As the lead profiler at the FBI, and now as a consultant, he has helped apprehend some of the worst serial killers and predators in history. As a young agent, he hit upon the idea to do extensive interviews with the worst society had to offer: the evolution of this program is traced in Douglas’s book Mindhunter, which was made into a Netflix series last year. To further his investigation into why criminals do what they do, he’s interviewed the most horrifying murderers in recent history: Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, the Green River killer, BTK—the list is depressingly long.

His new book, The Killer Across the Table, talks about some of the lesser known (but still frightening) criminals Douglas has interviewed, as well as describing some of his techniques for getting people to open up—one of the topics we discussed below, along with how his work affected his health, what profilers do to help police, and the advent of forensic evidence.

You can read the interview via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/john-douglas-on-his-lifes-work-talking-with-killers/