Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders

This book should be required reading for anyone who aspires to go into police work. In these days of CSI, Profiling, Clairvoyants and nervous municipal administrators who hope it never happens in their jurisdictions. the book gives more insight into the variables that although boring to some, can affect the final outcome of the entire investigation. The keyword to the failure of any investigation of this sort is "linkage blindness". This impaired the investigation from start to finish and contributed to the effect that a guy with an IQ of 82 could continue to kill in his own "backyard" for 22 years and not be apprehended by a $30,000,000 Task Force comprised of all of the best "experts" at the time? Those included the FBI, media-generated experts,administrators along with those who wrote "God, I'm great" books all telling their individual stories about their involvement with self-emulating biases and ghost writers.Always be skeptical of "experts". Smith and Guillen almost got a Pulitzer for their work on THE SEARCH FOR THE GREEN RIVER KILLER and the investigators would probably have had a better chance of solving it sooner if they would have had the same advantages of having had the same resources and employed some the same techniques as the authors. If you are looking for a blood,guts,gore and TV version get Jerry Springer to write a book about it. Every TV version about this case is pure crap written for advertising ratings and for the "heroes" to record their "legends". If you are seriously considering reading about the truth of the investigation more than for any other reason this is the book to read. For the cost you can't go wrong. If anyone is interested about the victims and their families read Ann Rule's book "GREEN RIVER, TURNING RED". "SERIAL KILLERS-ISSUES EXPLORED THROUGH THE GREEN RIVER MURDERS" This is a good critique that can only contribute to making fewer mistakes in future investigations of serial crimes. Some of the "heroes" are seriously deflated that only the truth has a way of doing.

i purchased this book as a resource for a research project / poster presentation for a forensic science course in my undergrad work. this book provided valuable, unbiased insight as to the things that went wrong during the green river murder investigation. there were things in the book that provided great insight as to the mistakes and shortcomings of the entire investigation. if information is required as to the true things that went wrong and you require information as to why the apprehension of gary ridgway took so long, this is a great reference.

After co-writing the Search for the Green River Killer, Tomas Guillen sums this case up expertly. Even if you haven't read the earlier book, you'll understand the dynamics that allowed Gary Ridgway to get away with these crimes for 22 years. I highly recommend this book.