How to Make a Serial Killer: The Twisted Development of Innocent Children Into the World's Most Sadistic Murderers

It showed how there really can't be one profile that shows that an individual will become a serial killer, but the life histories of some of the famed killers do contribute to their delinquency. The killers were assessed at the end of their stories they are reviewed in a special scale to predict if they would be likely to become a killer. Very interesting reading.

The authors spend each chapter focusing on a serial killer, making an effort to determine what factors made them psychopaths. They were fairly good about including a variety of serial killers--not all of the examples were the standard lust killers. They even included a woman, which not all authors bother to do. However, I would have liked more depth from this book, particularly when it came to the killers' motives. I also felt that the authors did relatively little to answer their own question of what causes people to become serial killers. They included charts that compared each example to the FBI's list of factors that predict someone may kill (having a criminal history, alcoholism, domineering father, etc.). But they did little to incorporate that data into the actual text, and they offered no explanation for why some of the killers had few (or none!) of the FBI warning signs. This book is a good overview for beginners, but I was expecting more.