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Signature Killers
by William J. Birnes
ISBN: 0671001302
Amazon.com
Signature Killers is a peculiar yet valuable book--repetitious, brilliant,
turgid, passionate, and indispensable for understanding serial killers.
Those who persevere through the prolix writing style will be rewarded
by compelling insights into the psychological needs, and evolution over
time, of a specific type of murderer, one whose key characteristic is
not so much that he kills multiple people, but that he leaves a signature
behind at every crime scene. Robert Keppel knows what he's talking about:
He's been involved in more than 2,000 murder investigations, including
50 high-profile serial cases. The topics he covers in exhaustive and
harrowing detail (Signature Killers is not for the faint of heart) include
"the essence of torture," "the anger-retaliation signature,"
"the picquerism signature," "the psychological imprint
of a sadist," "the retaliation-to-excitation continuum,"
and why Jeffrey Dahmer is "the black hole at the end of the continuum."
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