Confident in his opinions and systematic in his examination of high-profile whodunits, FBI veteran John Douglas proves his worth once again as one of the world's best psychological detectives. You may think you've read all there is about Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, and the Lindbergh kidnapping, but Douglas has a few surprise conclusions in his modern analysis of these gripping crimes. By applying criminal personality profiling techniques he developed while stalking more current killers, Douglas provides a fresh, sage outlook on some disturbing history. He also sheds new light on San Francisco's Zodiac Killer, the Black Dahlia murder, Bambi Bembenek, the Boston Strangler, and the continuing mystery of who killed 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey. Douglas sometimes reveals his chief suspect; other times he simply narrows down who the killer is not. In the JonBenét mystery (in which Douglas was hired by the Ramseys to find the killer), he presents a convincing case for why he believes the girl's parents are not guilty of murder. Douglas is founder of the FBI's Serial Killer Profiling Unit. His method of solving a crime by entering the mind of the killer inspired Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs. In this dissection of our most sensational crimes, Douglas proves that reality can be more horrifying than fiction. --Jodi Mailander Farrell


From Publishers Weekly
FBI veteran Douglas is best known as the inventor of criminal profiling as an investigative tool, and in this superbly written and narratively taut new work, he teams up again with Olshaker, his coauthor on the bestselling Mindhunter, to look at eight murder cases that have transfixed the popular imagination. By systematically applying the most advanced techniques of criminology to the information available, he provides new insights and suppositions, even into cases as well trod as that of Jack the Ripper, in some cases identifying who the murderer is, in other cases only who it is not. The cases involve Lizzie Borden, the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the Zodiac killer (who went on a murder rampage throughout the San Francisco Bay area about 30 years ago), the Black Dahlia Murder, Bambi Bembenek, the Boston Strangler, and the still unresolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas 1996 (Douglas has served as a consultant and an expert witness for the grand jury in this case). In the Ramsey case, although he cannot identify the killer of JonBenet, Douglas is adamant that the parents, John and Patricia Ramsey, did not commit the crime. He profiles the killer as a young man or teen with a personal and specific grudge against John Ramsey. Agent, Jay Acton. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Former FBI agent Douglas and novelist and filmmaker Olshaker (coauthors of Mindhunter) take a stab at solving the cases that continue to haunt us, taking the reader through eight controversial cases that include the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, and the JonBenet Ramsey killing. Each case is exhaustively presented, with coverage of motive, characteristics and "post-offensive" behavior of the UNSUB (unknown subject or perpetrator of the crimes), the victim and why she/he was chosen, witnesses, original correspondence, and prime suspects. Douglas approaches each case as he "would have as a profiler and criminal investigative analyst for the FBI." Using information gleaned from interviews with criminals, he claims to be able to "predict" what action a particular type of criminal might engage in, and he also considers what type of criminal the police are seeking. The authors use this knowledge to reveal the type of criminal responsible for these cases. Sometimes surprising, this unique book is recommended for large public libraries and academic libraries.-DKaren Evans, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haute Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
Us Weekly Absorbing and surprising.

Patricia Cornwell John Douglas is masterful and unrivaled in scientific and gifted probing of the violent mind.


Review
Patricia Cornwell John Douglas is masterful and unrivaled in scientific and gifted probing of the violent mind.


Review
Patricia Cornwell John Douglas is masterful and unrivaled in scientific and gifted probing of the violent mind.


Book Description
America's foremost expert on criminal profiling provides his uniquely gripping analysis of seven of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime -- from the Whitechapel murders to JonBenet Ramsey -- often contradicting conventional wisdom and legal decisions. Jack the Ripper. Lizzie Borden. The Zodiac Killer. Certain homicide cases maintain an undeniable, almost mystical hold on the public imagination. They touch a nerve deep within us because of the personalities involved, their senseless depravity, the nagging doubts about whether justice was done, or because, in some instances, no suspect has ever been identified or caught. In The Cases That Haunt Us, twenty-five-year-FBI-veteran John Douglas, profiling pioneer and master of modern criminal investigative analysis, and author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, the team behind the bestselling Mindhunter series, explore the tantalizing mysteries that both their legions of fans and law enforcement professionals ask about most. Among the questions they tackle: Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, or perhaps a practicing medical doctor? And did highly placed individuals within Scotland Yard have a good idea of the Ripper's identity, which they never revealed? Douglas and Olshaker create a detailed profile of the killer, and reveal their chief suspect. Was Lizzie Borden truly innocent of the murder of her father and stepmother as the Fall River, Massachusetts, jury decided, or was she the one who took the ax and delivered those infamous "whacks"? Through a minute-by-minute behavioral analysis of the crime, the authors come to a convincing conclusion. Did Bruno Richard Hauptmann single-handedly kidnap the baby son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the most famous couple in the world, or was he an innocent man caught up and ultimately executed in a relentless rush to judgment in the "crime of the century"? What kind of person could kill six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas night in her own home? Douglas was called in on the case shortly after the horrifying murder, and his conclusions are hard-hitting and controversial. Why, in the face of the majority of public, media, and law enforcement opinion, including former FBI colleagues, does Douglas believe that John and Patricia Ramsey did not murder their daughter? And what is the forensic and behavioral evidence he brings to bear to make his claim? Taking a fresh and penetrating look at each case, the authors reexamine and reinterpret accepted facts and victimology using modern profiling and the techniques of criminal analysis developed by Douglas within the FBI. This book deconstructs the evidence and widely held beliefs surrounding each case and rebuilds them -- with fascinating and haunting results.


Download Description
America's foremost expert on criminal profiling provides his uniquely gripping analysis of eight of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime--including JonBenet Ramsey--often contradicting conventional wisdom and the courts' decisions.


From the Publisher
11 1.5-hour cassettes


About the Author
John Douglas coauthored, with Mark Olshaker, a celebrated series of nonfiction works, including the number one New York Times bestseller Mindhunter, along with Journey into Darkness, Obsession, The Anatomy of Motive, and Unabomber, and the novel Broken Wings. An Air Force veteran and the author of numerous articles and presentations on criminology, Douglas is known throughout the worldwide law enforcement community for his unsurpassed expertise in the realm of criminal-personality profiling and modern investigative analysis.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Jack the Ripper In the dark realm of serial killers, this is ground zero: the point from which virtually all history and all discussions begin. By modern standards, the ghostly predator who haunted the shadowy streets of London's East End between August and November of 1888 was nothing much to write home about. Sadly, many of his successors -- people I and my colleagues have had to hunt -- have been far more devastatingly productive in the number of lives they took, and even the gruesome creativity with which they took them. But none other has so quickly captured and so long dominated the public's fascination as Jack the Ripper: the Whitechapel Murderer, the personification of mindless brutality, of nameless, motiveless evil. Why this one? Why him (although some still steadfastly maintain it was a her)? There are several reasons. For one, the crimes -- a series of fatal stabbings that escalated into total mutilation -- were concentrated in a small geographic area, directed at a specific type of preferred victim. For another, though there had been isolated sexually based killings in England and the European continent in the past, this was the first time most Victorians had ever faced or had to deal emotionally with such a phenomenon. Add to this a social reform movement and a newly energetic and outspoken press eager to call attention to the appalling living conditions in the East End, and you have all the ingredients for what became, literally, one of the biggest crime stories of all time. The reasons why these murders continue to fascinate above all others, even in this modern age with our seemingly endless succession of "crimes of the century," are equally strong, though, as we will quickly learn, often based on misimpression. In spite of their barbarism, they represent a real-life mystery from the era of Sherlock Holmes -- the bygone romantic era of high Victorian society, gaslights and swirling London fog, though where the killings actually took place had little real relationship to Victorian splendor, and each crime was actually committed on a night without fog. On only one of the nights was it even raining. In fact, at the same time the Ripper murders were terrorizing the desperate East End, a melodrama based on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was thrilling audiences at the Lyceum Theatre in the fashionable and comfortable West End. Together these two events, one safely fanciful and the other horrifyingly real, gave many their first dawning awareness of the potential for inherent evil in so-called ordinary or normal people. And despite a tremendous allocation of manpower and resources on the parts of two police forces at the time, and the efforts of countless "Ripperologists" in the more than 110 years since then, the crimes remain unsolved, tantalizing us with their profound mystery (though if we were working them today, I feel confident we could crack them in relatively short order). Some of the suspects and motives are very "sexy" -- far out of the range of the normal serial killer -- including not only the royal physician but also the two men in direct line to the throne! And as important as any other reason for the continuing fascination is that powerfully evocative and terrifying name by which the unknown subject -- or UNSUB, as we refer to him in my business -- was called. Although here again, I maintain that this was not the identity he chose for himself. But whatever the misconceptions or qualifications, we have to acknowledge that Jack the Ripper created the myth, the evil archetype, of the serial killer. As a criminal investigative analyst and the first full-time profiler for the FBI, I'd often speculated about the identity of Jack the Ripper. But it wasn't until 1988, the hundredth anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, that I actually approached the case as I would one that was brought to me at the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico from a local law enforcement agency. The occasion was a two-hour television program, The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper, set to be broadcast live from Los Angeles in October and hosted by British actor, writer, and director Peter Ustinov, with feeds from experts in London at the crime scenes themselves and at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police. When the producers approached me about participating in the program and constructing a profile of the killer, I decided it was worth a try for a couple of reasons. First, I thought the profile might be useful in training new agents. Second, it's difficult to resist matching wits, even a century later, with the most famous murderer in history. And third, since it was a hundred years after the fact, no negative consequences were possible other than making a fool of myself on national television, a fear I'd long since gotten over. Unlike with the scores of "real" cases I was dealing with every day, no one was going to die if I was wrong or gave the police bad information. More than a decade later, I still believe in the analysis I did, with an interesting and important addition, which we'll get to later. I captioned the profile the way I would an actual one that would become part of a case file: UNSUB; AKA JACK THE RIPPER; SERIES OF HOMICIDES LONDON, ENGLAND 1888 NCAVC -- HOMICIDE (CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS) The FBI, like most government agencies, is addicted to acronyms. The one on the last line, NCAVC, stands for National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the overall program established in 1985 and located at the FBI Academy to encompass a bunch of other acronyms including, but not limited to, the BSU, or Behavioral Science Unit (teaching and research); ISU, the Investigative Support Unit, which carries out the actual consulting, profiling, and criminal investigative analysis; and VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer database on multiple offenders. During my tenure as chief of ISU, we and other operational entities, such as HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, were pulled in under the umbrella of CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. And after I retired in 1995, my unit was, for a time, absorbed into a new group, CASCU, the Child Abduction and Serial Crimes Unit. Anyway, you get the idea. I cautioned the producers the same way everyone in my unit had been trained to caution the police and law enforcement agencies around the United States and the world with whom we dealt: our work can only be as good as the case information provided to us. Many of the tools we'd have to work with today -- fingerprints, DNA and other blood markers, extensive crime-scene photography -- were not available in 1888, so I'd have to do without them in developing my analysis. But then, as now, I would still begin with the known facts of the crimes. Like most serial murders, the case is complicated, with multiple victims and leads that go off in many directions. It is therefore useful to go into the case narrative in some detail, just as we would if we were receiving it from a local law enforcement agency seeking our assistance. So we'll relate the details -- anything that might be important to the profile -- and analyze each element at the proper point in the decision-making process. In that way, we can see something of how the analytical decisions in mindhunting are made and on what they are based. By the time we present the profile, you should have some background and perspective for understanding the choices and conclusions I've come to. We can then apply this process to all of the subsequent cases we'll consider. The more a profiler knows of the story of what happened, the better able he or she will be in putting together the why and the who. Whenever we construct a profile or offer analytical or strategic assistance to a local law enforcement agency on a series of unsolved crimes, a critical part of the case materials we request is a map with crime scenes indicated and a description of what each area is like. And in this case, geography is a particularly important consideration because it so carefully defines the type of victim selected and type of offender who would feel comfortable here. "THE ABYSS" I always stress the importance of understanding the victimology and social context of the crime. And you can't understand this case without some comprehension of what life was like in the East End of London, specifically Whitechapel and Spitalfields, in the final decades of the Victorian era. Adventure novelist Jack London would characterize this area as "the Abyss" after spending seven weeks living there during the summer of 1902. The nonfiction book that emerged from this experience, The People of the Abyss, would become just as much of an instant classic in its own circles as The Call of the Wild, published the same year. And the conditions and situation described were little different in 1902 than they had been fourteen years earlier. The most extreme areas of the East End -- the region bordering Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road, just north of the Tower of London and the London Docks -- was a strange, distant, and fearful place to those fortunate enough to live elsewhere within the metropolis. Though it was but a short cab or railway journey away from central London, the virtual capital of the Western world when it was true that the "sun never set" on the richest and most economically productive empire in history, this district was a teeming, Dickensian area of factories, sweatshops, and slaughterhouses. Dominated by poor cockneys, it was increasingly populated by immigrants straight off the docks, particularly Eastern European Jews escaping persecution and pogroms, with their strange languages, insular customs, and wariness of gentiles. Many of them joined their fellow countrymen in the tailoring and leather trades centered around Brick Lane. Middlesex Street, better known as Petticoat Lane, became a bustling Sunday marketplace of Jewish goods and culture. Here in Whitechapel, skilled jobs were scarce and disease was rampant. Those lucky enough to have a place to live were crammed into dirty and primitive accommodations without even the semblance of privacy. The rest, figured to be about 10 percent of the East End's total population of nine hundred thousand, lived a day-to-day existence -- on the streets, in the grim and notorious public workhouses, or in the hundreds of filthy "doss-houses," which offered a bed for around fourpence a night, paid in advance. Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was a prostitute, one of about twelve hundred in Whitechapel at the time, according to Metropolitan Police estimates. She was five feet two inches tall, forty-five years of age, and had five missing teeth. Many, if not most, of the women like Nichols were not prostitutes by choice. Existence for them (and often, their families) was so desperate that turning cheap tricks might mean the difference between eating and not eating, between having a place to sleep and taking their chances on the dark and dangerous streets. Add to this the chronic alcoholism through which many women tried to forget their hopelessness, and we see a segment of society living on the very fringe. Polly Nichols was the mother of five children and the survivor of a tempestuous marriage that had finally broken up over her inability to stay away from the bottle, a situation initially caused, she claimed, by her husband William's philandering. He was given custody of the children. At a little after 1:00 in the early morning hours of Friday, August 31, 1888, Polly was attempting to finesse her way into a doss-house on Flower and Dean Street, where she'd been sleeping for about a week. She'd spent most of the last month in another doss-house one block over on Thrawl Street, in a room she shared with four other women. But this evening, she didn't have the required fourpence for her bed, having just spent money she'd earned earlier in the day on liquor at the Frying Pan pub down the block where it intersected with Brick Lane. The deputy lodging housekeeper would not let her stay without payment. Polly told the man not to give her bed to anyone else and, giddy with drink, declared, "I'll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I've got now." Apparently, the hat had been bought for her by a customer and made her feel more attractive. At about 2:30 A.M., she met up with her friend Ellen Holland, also known as Emily. In the East End, multiple names were apparently common. Holland, who had previously shared the Thrawl Street room with Polly, had come out to watch a large fire, a common form of entertainment for those too poor to afford any other. She reported Polly to be extremely drunk and leaning against a wall for support. Ellen urged her to go back to Thrawl Street, but Polly confessed, "I've had my lodging money three times today and I've spent it. It won't be long before I'm back." Then she wandered off in the direction of Flower and Dean Street. That was the last time anyone saw Polly Nichols alive. About 3:40 that morning, two carmen, or wagon drivers, Charles A. Cross and Robert Paul, were walking to work along Buck's Row, about a block from London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, when Cross thought he saw a tarpaulin on the other side of the street near the entrance to a stable. He went over to examine it more closely and see if it was usable. But when he neared the tarp, he realized it was the body of a woman, her eyes wide open, hands by her side, skirts hiked up to her waist, and legs slightly parted. Next to the body was a black, velvet-trimmed straw bonnet. Cross called Robert Paul over. He felt the woman's face, which was still warm, leading him to believe she might still be alive. He listened intently and thought maybe he detected a faint heartbeat. But Cross felt her hands, which were cold, and concluded she was dead. The two men left to find a policeman. They found Metropolitan Police constable Jonas Mizen walking his beat on nearby Hanbury Street and told him what they'd found. Mizen hurried back with them to Buck's Row, where Constable John Neil had just come upon the body on his own. With his lantern, Neil signaled another passing police officer, Constable John Thain. He directed Thain to go find Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the nearest general practitioner, then told Mizen to secure an ambulance, which in those days meant a two-wheeled wagon long enough to hold a stretcher. Thain awakened Llewellyn, who arrived on the scene to examine the victim. By this time, two local slaughtermen, Henry Tomkins and James Mumford, were also on scene, though whether they had just happened to show up or had been passing the time with Constable Thain prior to his being called in on the case is unclear. Dr. Llewellyn noted severe lacerations to the victim's throat, but little blood on or around the body. At about ten minutes to 4 A.M., he pronounced the woman dead, estimating that, since the legs were still warm, death had occurred no more than thirty minutes previously and that she had been killed on the spot. The body was taken to the mortuary at the Old Montague Street Workhouse Infirmary. By the time Inspector John Spratling arrived around 4:30 A.M., a crowd was already forming, and the news of the murder started filtering through Whitechapel. Spratling told the other officers to search the scene and surrounding area, then went to join Dr. Llewellyn at the mortuary to record the official description of the corpse. At the mortuary, Spratling discovered some even more disturbing information than what he'd expect from the "routine" murder of a prostitute -- though, strictly speaking, her status had not yet been confirmed since no identification had been made. Still, the circumstances and the fact that she was out on the street at that hour strongly suggested the vocation. Unfortunately, then as now, prostitute murders were not unheard of, often involving simple robbery or a customer who believed he'd contracted a disease. Once clothing had been removed from the body, Spratling could plainly see that in addition to the neck wounds, the abdomen had been ripped open and the intestines exposed. The following morning Dr. Llewellyn returned to do a complete postmortem. He noted bruising on the face and neck and a circular incision on the neck that completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae as well as the major blood vessels of the neck. The deep cuts appeared to have been made with a sharp, long-bladed knife. Llewellyn believed the killer had at least some rough anatomical knowledge and, from a thumb bruise on the right side of the neck, thought he might be left-handed. BEHAVIORAL CLUES Looking at this case today with a body of knowledge and experience unavailable to the Victorian investigators (it would be several years before even fingerprinting was available), we could already start putting together some behavioral clues from the wound patterns. The severe bruising about the face suggests to me an initial "blitz-style" attack. In other words, the UNSUB attempted to neutralize his potential victim quickly and unexpectedly before she could put up a defense. This, in turn, suggests an offender who is unsure of himself and has no confidence in his ability to control her or get her where he wants her through any kind of verbal means -- an inadequate personality as opposed to one with the confidence to think he can easily dominate women. This, as we'll see, gives us even more clues to his personality and emotional background. The neck bruising indicates an attempt to choke the victim and further render her incapable of resistance. Then we see the multiple deep stab wounds, which suggest a frenzy of anger and, generally, released sexual tension. That the face suffered no other significant wounds after the initial blitz makes me think that the UNSUB did not know the victim. If this had been a more personally directed attack, I would have expected to see more obliterating wounds to the face, which would represent her persona or humanness. Like just about everything else in profiling and criminal behavioral analysis, this is not a hard and fast rule, as we'll see in the next chapter. But in cases in which the motivation for the crime is essentially power and control -- a power and control unavailable to the UNSUB in any other aspect of life, as I would believe it to be here -- facial attack is a common phenomenon. Then we have the deep, circular incision around the neck. This seems clear to me -- an attempt to take the head off the victim. Those who have read any of our previous books will know that one of the ways we categorize killers and other sexual predators is according to whether we consider them organized, disorganized, or mixed -- that is, a combination of the two types. A killer who wants to decapitate his victim, especially out on the street, which is always a high-risk environment, is someone who I would suggest is "not all there." This is further underscored by the ripping open of the belly and the exposure of the intestines. That doesn't mean he can't mentally form criminal intent, and it doesn't imply that organized killers are normal, socially integrated individuals. It does, however, tell me that this UNSUB's motivations and fantasies are so aberrant that they would interfere with his routine functioning, even his ability to pull off an efficient crime. This is someone who both hates women and has a bizarre and perverse curiosity about the human body that I can only characterize as demented. While we're on this subject, let's clarify one thing. All killers and sexual predators, in my opinion, have some degree of mental illness. By definition, you can't willingly take another life in this manner and be mentally healthy. However -- and this is a big however -- though you may be mentally ill, that does not mean that (a) you do not know the difference between right and wrong and (b) you are unable to conform your behavior (not your thoughts necessarily, but your behavior) to the rules of society. This is the essence of the M'Naghten Rule, the original codified British legal test of criminal responsibility, which had already been in effect for more than half a century by the time of the Whitechapel murders and which still serves as the basis for the tests of insanity we use today. The rule is named for Daniel M'Naghten, who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert Peel, the organizer of London's Metropolitan Police Force. So someone can be mentally ill but still criminally responsible -- they do what they do because they want to rather than because they have to. Some psychiatrists refer to this problem as a character disorder, a description that I think is pretty accurate. But are some offenders so far gone that they really do not know what they're doing is wrong? Sure, there are some, and from my experience they also tend to be delusional or hallucinatory. But we can often pick out this type rather quickly, and because they're so disorganized and "crazy," we usually catch them before long. Was the Whitechapel killer one of these? Had he gone over the edge from character disorder to total nutcase? We need more evidence before we can make that determination. The murder victim was wearing several layers of clothing, which she would have had to do if she was homeless. Her only other personal possessions were a comb, handkerchief, and broken mirror. But on one of her petticoats, police noticed the laundry mark of the Lambeth Workhouse. By process of elimination, the victim was determined to be Mary Ann, or Polly Nichols, although the initial attempt to have her body identified failed, possibly because of the mutilation. She was eventually identified by Mary Ann Monk, who had been at the Lambeth Workhouse at the same time. On September 6, 1888, she was buried in a pauper's grave in the City of London Cemetery at Little Ilford, Essex. PATTERN CRIMES? There was little to go on in solving the crime. Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson admitted that detectives were stumped by the "absence of motives which lead to violence and of any scrap of evidence, either direct or circumstantial." In fact, Swanson and his colleagues just didn't understand the motive. They'd have had no reason to; they'd never seen it before. However, despite the lack of experience with this type of crime, both Dr. Robert Anderson, assistant Metropolitan Police commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), and CID assistant chief constable Melville Leslie MacNaghten said that it was obviously the work of a sex maniac. It was possible, though, that the Nichols killing was related to an earlier prostitute murder in the East End; no one was certain. In fact, they're not sure to this day. Martha Tabram, also known as Emma Turner, was the estranged wife of a warehouseman, Henry Tabram. After the estrangement, she lived on and off for a number of years with William Turner, who, though a carpenter by training, worked as a street hawker. This accounts for her two surnames. As in the case of Polly Nichols, each man eventually left her because of her excessive drinking. On the evening of August 6, 1888, a bank holiday, Martha went out with her friend Mary Ann Connolly, known locally as Pearly Poll. Connolly later testified that the two of them had visited several pubs, including the Two Brewers, where they were picked up by two members of the Grenadier Guards, a prestigious unit of the army. They went to other pubs, including the White Swan on Whitechapel High Street, before finally parting company around 11:45 P.M. Poll and her guardsman then went into Angel Alley for stand-up sex against a wall. She saw Martha go into George Yard, presumably with similar intentions. At around 3:30 the next morning, taxi driver Alfred Crow returned to his tenement flat on the northeast side of George Yard and saw what he thought was a derelict sleeping on the first-floor landing. About an hour and twenty minutes later, another tenant and dockyard laborer, John Saunders Reeves, came downstairs and saw what he realized was a body. Dr. Timothy Killeen, who examined the body for the police at about 5:30 A.M., estimated that the approximately forty-year-old woman had died about two hours previously, or shortly before Crow first noticed her. Altogether, the victim had suffered thirty-nine stab wounds, with the breasts, abdomen and genitalia being the primary targets. Most of the wounds were unremarkable in terms of the likely weapon used, with the exception of a wound in the center of the sternum, which appeared to have come from a dagger or bayonet. This suggested that perhaps the crime had been committed by the guardsman with whom Martha Tabram had been seen earlier in the evening. With two unsolved murders in the same area in the same month, uneasiness settled over Scotland Yard. But apart from those who knew either of the unfortunate victims, London as a whole, and even the East End, did not really take notice. After all, homeless prostitutes were the throwaways of society, and even though both crimes were exceedingly brutal and seemed without apparent motive, this was not something with which proper folk had to be overly concerned. That all changed on the morning of Saturday, September 8, and in a sense, the world of criminology has not been the same since. ANNIE CHAPMAN Just before 6 A.M., carman John Davis finally got up after having spent a restless night. He left the third-floor flat he'd occupied for about two weeks with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury Street and went downstairs to go to the outside privy. To the left of the back-door steps, he suddenly saw a body. A woman was lying on her back between the steps and the fence of the property's yard. Her dress had been pulled up over her head, her belly had been ripped open, and her intestines were not only visible this time, but pulled out and draped over her left shoulder. Other residents and passersby quickly assembled. Some of them and Davis each went off in search of a policeman. One, Henry Holland, found a constable a couple of blocks away at Spitalfields Market, but the officer told him he could not leave his fixed point. This was but one example of the procedural rigidity of the law enforcement of the day, which would hamper many attempts at bringing the UNSUB to justice. The first senior police officer on the scene was Inspector Joseph Chandler. He was on duty at the Commercial Street Police Station when he saw men running up Hanbury Street. When he realized what had happened, he rushed to the murder site, covered the body, then sent for Dr. George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon for H Division, the area where the crime had occurred. Phillips examined the brutally butchered but ritualistically arranged corpse. At the inquest, he described what he had seen: The left arm was placed across the left breast. The legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side. The tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips. The tongue was evidently much swollen. The front teeth were perfect as far as the first molar, top and bottom, and very fine teeth they were. The body was terribly mutilated.... The throat was dissevered deeply; the incisions through the skin were jagged, and reached round the neck.... On the wooden paling between the yard in question and the next, smears of blood, corresponding to where the head of the deceased lay, were to be seen. Phillips went on to observe that all of the wounds appeared to have been made by a sharp knife with a narrow blade and that the evisceration indicated some medical knowledge. He speculated that all of the mutilations may have taken as long as an hour, though with what I've seen from even moderately experienced serial killers, I would suspect less time. As in the case of Polly Nichols, there was no evidence of a struggle. Apparently, the UNSUB had also attacked this one suddenly, neutralizing her before she could fight back. A message was sent to Inspector Frederick George Abberline of Scotland Yard's H Division, and he quickly showed up on the scene. Abberline, who was forty-five years old and married for the second time (his first wife died of consumption the same year he married her), is something of a legend in police circles, though details of his personal life are rather sketchy. He had risen quickly through the ranks from constable (patrolman) to sergeant, to undercover operative and detective, and then to inspector. Abberline would come to take charge of all the detectives in the Whitechapel investigation. As he waited for Abberline and other Scotland Yard officials to arrive, Inspector Chandler had the crime scene thoroughly searched. The woman's pocket had been slit open and its contents included such ordinary items as two combs, a piece of muslin, and a folded envelope containing two pills. About two feet away, they found a bloodstained leather apron, of the type worn by slaughterhouse workers or possibly cobblers or leather workers. Since the apron was not wet with blood, it was highly questionable whether it was related to the crime. And since in those days there was no scientific means of typing blood, or even determining for certain whether it was from a human being or an animal, a bloodstained garment from one of the many slaughterhouses in the area would have been easily explainable. Still, any potential clue was likely to have a "life of its own," as this one certainly did. Dr. Phillips told the inquest he believed the three personal items had been placed with some care -- the muslin and the combs at the victim's feet and the envelope by her head. Two farthing coins were also near the body, though this detail was kept secret by the police to help qualify suspects. If this description is accurate, it's another indication of a particular psychosis and mental instability. We often find this in disorganized or mixed offenders -- that is, a brutal frenzy of attack, together with careful, ritualistic elements that indicate a need to control or master small, discrete components of the crime scene or victim. One of my earliest major profiling cases involved the murder of a twenty-six-year-old teacher of handicapped children who was mildly handicapped herself with curvature of the spine. She was found strangled, severely beaten, and sexually abused at the top of the stairwell of the apartment building where she lived with her parents on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, New York. She had been spread-eagled and tied with her own belt and nylon stockings around her wrists and ankles, though the medical examiner determined she was already dead when that was done. The cause of death was ligature strangulation with the strap of her pocketbook. The NYPD photos showed a scene of appalling gore and cruelty, and this told me a lot about the offender. What told me even more was that her nipples had been cut off after death and placed on her chest, her comb was set in her pubic hair, and her earrings had been placed symmetrically on the ground on either side of her head. This type of compulsiveness and strange ritualism amidst such a frenzy of disorganized mayhem said to me that my prey had some deep and long-term psychological problems. The method of sexual assault, with the victim's umbrella inserted into the vagina, told me that this guy had real problems with normal sexual functioning and, even though he'd be in his twenties, was still very much in the pre- or early adolescent stage of sexual fantasy, experimentation, and curiosity about the female body. Taken together with his obvious sociopathic hostility, it didn't take much imagination to see that we were dealing with a very dangerous individual. I was therefore extremely gratified that we were able to help in hunting down and catching the offender, who, as I'd predicted, lived in the neighborhood, was underemployed, without a car or meaningful job, and had close relatives in the victim's building. Based at least in part on Dr. Phillips's description of the murder scene at Hanbury Street, I believe the police were dealing with a similar type of offender there, but, of course, they would not have had sufficient comprehension to realize it. Though all the evidence was not yet in, I would have begun honing my profile to reflect a fairly unsophisticated offender, like the killer ninety years later in New York, a combination of a violent and sexually immature and inadequate personality. Dr. Phillips had the unidentified body removed to the Whitechapel Infirmary Mortuary on Eagle Street, and in the afternoon he conducted a full postmortem, which confirmed some of his earlier observations, including facial bruising as we have discussed previously. Laceration wounds of the neck showed that the killer had tried to separate the various bones of the neck after death, the type of perverse anatomical curiosity I would liken to the attempt to remove Nichols's head. But there was more. Not only had the intestines been severed from their attachments within the abdomen and placed over the shoulder, the uterus, half of the vagina, and most of the bladder had been entirely removed, apparently cut out with some care. They were not found with the body. The murder of street prostitutes, as we've suggested, was not uncommon. But the postmortem mutilation was essentially unknown to the Victorians. Not so, unfortunately, to us. What we see here is not only a fevered overkill, but a man who may be taking anatomical souvenirs. The removal of the uterus and vagina suggests to me someone who hates women and probably fears them. By removing the victim's internal sexual organs, he is, in effect, attempting to neuter her, to take away that which he finds sexually threatening. Since, along with this, there is no evidence of traditional rape, the fear of women and their sexual power is a pretty strong bet. The victim was identified as Annie Chapman by a washerwoman friend named Amelia Palmer. Chapman, born Eliza Anne Smith, was a stout five feet two with brown hair and blue eyes. Of all the victims, she was the most pathetic. In her late forties, her autopsy showed signs of malnutrition and chronic diseases of the lungs and membrane surroundimurder of street prostitutes, as we've suggested, was not uncommon. But the postmortem mutilation was essentially unknown to the Victorians. Not so, unfortunately, to us. What we see here is not only a fevered overkill, but a man who may be taking anatomical souvenirs. The removal of the uterus and vagina suggests to me someone who hates women and probably fears them. By removing the victim's internal sexual organs, he is, in effect, attempting to neuter her, to take away that which he finds sexually threatening. Since, along with this, there is no evidence of traditional rape, the fear of women and their sexual power is a pretty strong bet. The victim was identified as Annie Chapman by a washerwoman friend named Amelia Palmer. Chapman, born Eliza Anne Smith, was a stout five feet two with brown hair and blue eyes. Of all the victims, she was the most pathetic. In her late forties, her autopsy showed signs of malnutrition and chronic diseases of the lungs and membrane surrounding the brain, which might have killed her before long if the UNSUB hadn't. She had been married to John Chapman, who'd made his living as a coachman for wealthy families in Mayfair. They had three children, one of whom was a girl who died in infancy and another who was physically handicapped. This was not unusual for the poor. Her marriage, like those of Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols, was said to have broken up over her drinking, but since John died four years later of cirrhosis, one might suspect the problem was not one-sided. In any event, she was living by her wits, supplementing whatever small amounts of money she could earn on the streets from selling matches, flowers, and her own crocheting with even smaller amounts from prostitution, working the area right around Spitalfields Market. At the time of her death she was living in Crossingham's Common Lodging House on Dorset Street, where she'd earned a reputation for a violent temper through brawls with other prostitutes. She was also alleged to be a petty thief, and her late former husband had lost at least one job in Mayfair because of her thievery. Chapman had been wearing three cheap rings, which were not found on her hand. The killer -- or some desperate soul -- must have taken them, either for their monetary value or as souvenirs. The accounts of her last night are tragically similar to that of Polly Nichols. Earlier in the afternoon, she had told her friend Amelia Palmer that she was too sick to work but would have to do something to get money for her bed that night. Another resident at Crossingham's saw her in the kitchen, already drunk and taking two pills from a box she kept in her pocket. She dropped the box, which broke, and at that point, she put the remaining pills in a torn piece of envelope lying on the floor. She spent the late night and early-morning hours of Friday, September 7, to Saturday, September 8, drinking, then returned to the lodging house about 1:35 A.M., where John Evans, the night watchman, demanded the fourpence doss money. She replied, "I haven't got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary." But, like Nichols, she added, "Don't let the bed. I'll be back soon." She then went upstairs to convey the same message to deputy manager Timothy Donovan, asking him to let her stay on credit. He refused and escorted her off the premises and out to try to make the doss money. As she was leaving, she called out to Evans, "I won't be long, Brummy. See that Tim keeps the bed for me." It's likely that all of the witnesses who reported they saw Chapman drunk that night probably mistook the fact that she was actually very sick. The autopsy showed little alcohol in her body. From this point on, the narrative gets a little fuzzy. Someone thought he saw her in the Ten Bells pub across from Spitalfields Market soon after it opened at 5 A.M., but this seems to be a case of mistaken identity. A half hour later, Elizabeth Darrell, also known as Elizabeth Long, saw a woman she thought was Annie Chapman on Hanbury Street, talking to a man slightly taller than herself. Darrell characterized the man as foreign-looking, which at the time in the East End was often a euphemism for someone who appeared to be a Jewish immigrant. According to Darrell, the man asked, "Will you?" Chapman replied, "Yes." Albert Cadoche, a young carpenter who lived at 27 Hanbury Street, thought he heard a fierce struggle and someone yelling "No!" in the next-door backyard at number 29. But police weren't sure what he'd heard, and like so many other facts about the case, this one remains ambiguous. Among Inspector Abberline and his colleagues at Scotland Yard, the conclusion was inescapable. The man who had murdered Annie Chapman had also killed Mary Ann Nichols. Panic spread throughout the East End. Someone was murdering women and the police seemed unable to stop him. Everything was coming together. Did the same fiend who killed Nichols and Chapman also murder Martha Tabram? At first, it had seemed likely that her guardsman escort had done it. But if two other murders had taken place within such a close time and proximity, then that first one could have been done by the same man, too. I would also not discount the possibility that the killer of Polly Nichols was actually attempting to copycat the murder of Martha Tabram. And some thought maybe that wasn't even the first. On April 2, 1888, another prostitute, Emma Elizabeth Smith, who lived in Spitalfields, had been robbed and raped and a blunt instrument, possibly a bottle, forced into her vagina. Three days later, she died of peritonitis at London Hospital. At the time, police believed she had been the victim of a local gang, though no arrests were ever made. Now, it looked to the terrified residents as if she was merely the Whitechapel killer's first tune-up. "LEATHER APRON" AND OTHER THEORIES Suddenly, this forsaken area of London was on everyone's mind. Newspaper reporters flooded in, describing the East Enders as if they were some strange foreign species. The sites of each murder became tourist attractions. The Home Office was advised to offer a reward for information leading to the killer's arrest, but the home secretary decided against it, believing that the locals were so desperate for money that they'd give false information and make the police department's job even more difficult. Though he might have been reacting to his own experience with the local newspapers, for whom playing fast and loose with facts for the sake of a more sensational story was a way of life, he was actually following official Home Office policy. His esteemed predecessor, Sir William Harcourt, had prohibited rewards when he found that they led to false accusations and even deliberately inspired crimes. The East End was rife with rumors. At least one of the doctors who'd examined the bodies thought the killer showed some medical or anatomical knowledge. Did that mean he was a depraved physician? Perhaps a medical student? London Hospital and its medical college were just across Whitechapel Road from where Polly Nichols was murdered. Were they the killer's training ground and refuge? The poor East Enders were a cynical and mistrustful lot, used to either being ignored or getting the worst of everything. It certainly wasn't beyond the realm of imagination that a healer could be perverted into a brutal taker of lives. One of the most prevalent suspicions arose from the leather apron found near Annie Chapman's body. When police began questioning Whitechapel street hookers, one of the stories that kept coming up concerned a local bully and hustler known as Leather Apron for the article he was always seen with, supposedly because he was a slipper-maker. According to reports, Leather Apron, who was often seen around Commercial Street, would shake down women and demand money from them. He was generally described as a short, thickset man in his late thirties or early forties, with black hair, a black mustache, and an unusually thick neck. The word on the street was that Leather Apron might well be the Whitechapel killer. One individual who apparently met this description was a Jewish boot-finisher named John Pizer. A sometime resident of Hanbury Street identified him as the man he had seen threatening a woman with a knife in the early morning hours of September 8. Pizer had a reputation for getting into fights, as well as abusing prostitutes. He was arrested at his residence on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Whitechapel, on Monday morning, September 10. Five long-bladed knives were found there. He was taken to the Leman Street police station and placed in two police lineups. In one, a female witness was unable to identify him. In the other, a male witness confirmed he was the one seen on September 8, and that Pizer was known around the neighborhood as Leather Apron. Pizer expressed astonishment and outrage at the charge, claiming he didn't know what the police were talking about. In spite of that, he was a likely suspect, at least for a couple of hours. Then the case began to fall apart. The man who identified him could not identify Annie Chapman's body at the morgue as the woman he had seen being threatened. Then Pizer's alibis for the nights of the Nichols and Chapman murders were checked out and proved ironclad. After a day and a half, he was released. The John Pizer story provides us with a cautionary tale. Pizer sure looked good for the crimes, and a lot of the surface details fit. Only after police investigated his circumstances was he exonerated. Why am I mentioning this here? Because most of the suspects who've emerged as candidates to be the killer, particularly those who've emerged long after the events, fit with just such convenient circumstantial evidence, as we shall see. Now there's nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. Sometimes, as we'll further see, it's all we've got and it can be compelling enough for a solid conviction. But the important point to remember here is that anyone we consider as a suspect whom the police at the time could not examine and alibi out in the way they did Pizer is not getting a "fair trial" from us. Of course, no one can, this many years later, but it's something to keep in mind when you hear some of the more interesting, often outlandish, claims. The police and the press both made a concerted effort to find the "actual" Leather Apron, without any success, while hysteria about the identity of the "Whitechapel fiend" continued to grow. And a strong undercurrent was emerging as to who he might be. The Jews, emigrating to England to escape persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, had become a prominent force in the East End. But they spoke a strange language and kept largely to themselves and their own community, maintaining a wary, distrustful distance from gentiles -- in other words, "real" Englishmen. When you combine the general resentment of whoever is the most recent immigrant group with the quiet but long-standing strain of anti-Semitism that had been a part of English culture for almost a thousand years, you've got a ready-made scapegoat population. Then add two other factors: Whatever scanty evidence there was suggested that the killer worked in either the local livestock slaughtering industry or shoe and leather trade, both of which were dominated by Jewish immigrants. Just as important, no one believed a true Englishman could do such a horrible thing, so it had to be someone from the largest non-English group evident -- the Jews. And such a horrible thing as what? Who kills and eviscerates just for the hell of it, not for robbery, not for revenge, not even to make a political statement? This was something people hadn't seen before. Was it possible that the character of Mr. Hyde had gone out the stage door of the Lyceum and taken up residence in Whitechapel? THE LUST MURDERER In April 1980, my Behavioral Science Unit colleague Roy Hazelwood and I published an article in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin entitled "The Lust Murderer." We wrote: The lust murder is unique and is distinguished from the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack or displacement of the breasts, rectum, or genitals. Further, while there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit the lust murder. These individuals will be labeled as the Organized Nonsocial and the Disorganized Asocial personalities. We've moved away from such terms as nonsocial and asocial because they're difficult to understand and differentiate, but it is fair to say that the organized type tends to be someone who may interact well with society; he just has no regard for or interest in the welfare of anyone other than himself. He understands the implications of his crimes and commits them because they give him a feeling of satisfaction and empowerment not present anywhere else in his life. Though he will have a deep-seated sense of personal inadequacy, this sensation will be warring within him with an equally strong sense of grandiosity and entitlement that has nothing to do with his own highly limited accomplishments. He will plan his crimes and is smart enough to commit them some distance from where he lives or works and to take measures to keep them undetected (e.g., hide the body) for as long as possible. The disorganized offender, on the other hand, is the traditional loner who feels rejected by society. He is not sophisticated enough to commit an organized, well-planned act or to think to hide the body. The crimes, particularly the early ones, will likely be committed close to his home or workplace, where he feels some measure of comfort and familiarity. While we expect some sort of rape or penetration with the organized offender, we often see none from the disorganized one. And as we suggested earlier, while the organized type may mutilate the body as a sign of his contempt or to hinder identification, mutilation by the disorganized type may represent not only his fear, but a basic sexual curiosity about what goes on below the body's surface. What connects the two types of lust murderers is an obsessive fantasy of the act, beginning long before it is committed. In just about every case of lust murder we've seen or studied, the fantasy comes before the act. Particularly in the case of the disorganized offender, the victim may simply present herself or become available at a time and place at which the subject is ready to act, ready to forcibly draw a human being into his fantasy world. Seldom will the murder weapon be a firearm, because it affords too little interpersonal, psychosexual gratification. More likely, the killer will use his hands, a blade, and/or a club or blunt object of some sort. If an anatomical souvenir is taken, it is often symbolic of wanting to totally possess the victim, even in death. The term lust inevitably brings up the idea of sex, and indeed, sex is a key component of the crime. But as we've already suggested, the motivation for the act, the psychological need it addresses, can be summed up in three words: manipulation, domination, and control. These are the elements that give the perpetrator a heightened satisfaction that he does not achieve from anything else in his life. So where does the sexual component come in? Clearly, for the lust murderer, sex is joined in his mind and fantasies with power and control. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to use the definition of rape proposed by my friend Linda Fairstein, head of the New York County District Attorney's Office Sex Crimes Unit and one of the great heroes in the constant war against these predators. In the ongoing debate over whether to classify rape as a crime of sex or violence, Linda calls it a crime of violence in which sex is the weapon. Though in the Whitechapel crimes we're not dealing with rape per se, the distinction is still instructive. In our 1980 article, Roy Hazelwood and I proposed that the formation of a lust murderer personality happens early in life, and subsequent research has given us no reason to alter that opinion. There will be a pattern of behavior leading up to the violence, usually starting with voyeuristic activities or the theft of women's clothing, which serve as a substitute for his inability to deal with women in a mature and confident manner. The organized type will be aggressive during his adolescent years, as if he is trying to get back at society for perceived wrongs or slights. He has trouble dealing with authority and is anxious to exert control over others wherever he can. If I were examining these cases today, by the Chapman murder I would already be suspecting a lust killer, which will be important when we finally get to our list of possible suspects. Though the crimes largely represent a disorganized UNSUB, mixed aspects suggest a personality somewhere along the continuum. Did lust murderers exist before the Whitechapel murders? Probably, though for one reason or another they were overlooked as a pattern or misinterpreted as robberies or revenge killings, particularly if the mutilation involved was too extreme. And keep in mind that prior to Victorian London and the Industrial Revolution, cities were smaller and communities more homogeneous. We've speculated that stories and legends about witches, werewolves, and vampires (blood-drinking, or anthropophagy, is a not-uncommon trait of the disorganized offender) may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend such perversities. THE DOUBLE EVENT The police sent hundreds of extra officers into the East End each evening -- one of them reportedly disguised as a woman -- trying to catch the killer in the act. This was one of the few effective means of catching a killer of random strangers. If the victim knew the killer, police could follow a trail of relationships and reliable witnesses. If the killer was a robber who followed a pattern in his criminal enterprise, any of a number of casual witnesses or snitches might give him up. But with no precedent for this type of crime, the best strategy seemed to be to use manpower to prevent him from having the opportunity to kill or, if that failed, to have the mechanism in place to stop him as he fled. About 1:00 in the morning of Sunday, September 30, after a long afternoon and evening of selling, a street jewelry merchant named Louis Diemschutz was returning to the International Workingmen's Educational Club on Berner Street, a fraternal organization founded by immigrant Jewish socialists and intellectuals. He heard Yiddish or Russian singing coming from the open windows of the club. He was driving a small pony cart. As he turned off Berner Street into the entrance to Dutfield's Yard, the animal suddenly stopped and wouldn't move forward. Diemschutz noticed a bundle against the gate and prodded it with his long-handled whip. He struck a match and saw that it was actually a woman, who appeared to be drunk. This would have been a common sight in this neighborhood at this time of night. Concerned that the drunk might be his wife, he got down from the cart and went into the club, where she worked. It wasn't she, and he soon returned with several club members. They examined the woman more closely and realized her throat had been slashed. Quickly, two of them ran off to find a policeman, on the way meeting another acquaintance, Edward Spooner. He was talking with a woman, probably a prostitute, outside the Beehive pub on Fairclough Street, which intersected Berner at the first corner. The three of them found Constable Henry Lamb on the corner of Fairclough and Grove Street and brought him back with them to the scene. Lamb sent for Dr. William Blackwell, who arrived at 1:16 A.M. by his own watch. He pronounced her and stated she had been dead for less than twenty minutes, which meant only a few minutes or less before Diemschutz happened upon the body. The time he took to go into the club in search of his wife may have afforded the lurking killer the opportunity to escape. Dr. Blackwell believed she'd been killed standing up, her head forced backward by the silk kerchief around her neck, and her throat cut. A lot of blood was at the scene, and unlike in the previous murders, defense wounds on the victim's hands indicated a struggle. A hysterical woman, Mary Malcolm, married to a local tailor, was convinced the victim was her sister Elizabeth Watts Stokes and identified the body by an adder bite on the leg. She claimed she'd had a ghostly premonition that Elizabeth would be murdered that night. At 1:30 the same morning, thirty minutes

FROM OUR EDITORS

Though his reign of terror was more than 100 years ago, debate over the true identity of Jack the Ripper continues today. What if the police had had modern tools of detection at their disposal in 1888? Would they have brought the mysterious Ripper to justice? Certain criminal cases, whether officially solved or not, continue to fascinate and challenge us years, decades, even centuries later. In The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI profiler and master criminal investigative analyst John Douglas and author/filmmaker Mark Olshaker, the team behind the bestselling Mindhunter series, tackle the Jack the Ripper murders, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and five other cases that have so long gripped our collective imagination.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

America's foremost expert on criminal profiling provides his uniquely gripping analysis of seven of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime -- from the Whitechapel murders to JonBenet Ramsey -- often contradicting conventional wisdom and legal decisions.

Jack the Ripper. Lizzie Borden. The Zodiac Killer. Certain homicide cases maintain an undeniable, almost mystical hold on the public imagination. They touch a nerve deep within us because of the personalities involved, their senseless depravity, the nagging doubts about whether justice was done, or because, in some instances, no suspect has ever been identified or caught.

In The Cases That Haunt Us, twenty-five-year-FBI-veteran John Douglas, profiling pioneer and master of modern criminal investigative analysis, and author and filmmaker Mark Olshaker, the team behind the bestselling Mindhunter series, explore the tantalizing mysteries that both their legions of fans and law enforcement professionals ask about most. Among the questions they tackle:

Was Jack the Ripper actually the Duke of Clarence, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria, or perhaps a practicing medical doctor? And did highly placed individuals within Scotland Yard have a good idea of the Ripper's identity, which they never revealed? Douglas and Olshaker create a detailed profile of the killer, and reveal their chief suspect.

Was Lizzie Borden truly innocent of the murder of her father and stepmother as the Fall River, Massachusetts, jury decided, or was she the one who took the ax and delivered those infamous "whacks"? Through a minute-by-minute behavioral analysis of the crime, the authors come to a convincing conclusion.

Did Bruno Richard Hauptmann single-handedly kidnap the baby son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the most famous couple in the world, or was he an innocent man caught up and ultimately executed in a relentless rush to judgment in the "crime of the century"?

What kind of person could kill six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas night in her own home? Douglas was called in on the case shortly after the horrifying murder, and his conclusions are hard-hitting and controversial. Why, in the face of the majority of public, media, and law enforcement opinion, including former FBI colleagues, does Douglas believe that John and Patricia Ramsey did not murder their daughter? And what is the forensic and behavioral evidence he brings to bear to make his claim?

Taking a fresh and penetrating look at each case, the authors reexamine and reinterpret accepted facts and victimology using modern profiling and the techniques of criminal analysis developed by Douglas within the FBI. This book deconstructs the evidence and widely held beliefs surrounding each case and rebuilds them -- with fascinating and haunting results.

SYNOPSIS

America's foremost expert on criminal profiling provides a gripping analysis of seven of the most notorious murder cases in the history of crime.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

FBI veteran Douglas is best known as the inventor of criminal profiling as an investigative tool, and in this superbly written and narratively taut new work, he teams up again with Olshaker, his coauthor on the bestselling Mindhunter, to look at eight murder cases that have transfixed the popular imagination. By systematically applying the most advanced techniques of criminology to the information available, he provides new insights and suppositions, even into cases as well trod as that of Jack the Ripper, in some cases identifying who the murderer is, in other cases only who it is not. The cases involve Lizzie Borden, the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the Zodiac killer (who went on a murder rampage throughout the San Francisco Bay area about 30 years ago), the Black Dahlia Murder, Bambi Bembenek, the Boston Strangler, and the still unresolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas 1996 (Douglas has served as a consultant and an expert witness for the grand jury in this case). In the Ramsey case, although he cannot identify the killer of JonBenet, Douglas is adamant that the parents, John and Patricia Ramsey, did not commit the crime. He profiles the killer as a young man or teen with a personal and specific grudge against John Ramsey. Agent, Jay Acton. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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