Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K Ressler is a true crime book about several of the serial killers caught by the FBI’s profiling unit. Ressler was one of the founding members of this unit along with John Douglas.
0 out of 10 stars. I wanted to like this book. True crime interests me, not for the gore, but for the inciting incidents and why men choose to kill. But this author has a chip on his shoulder and it’s a really huge one.
One of the first paragraphs in this book is the following: “Many people often think of the police as rather tough and heartless men who like to shove the public’s nose into the dirt so taxpayers will know what the cops themselves have to deal with every day.”
Well, that’s because most women in this country have at one point or another faced domestic abuse or rape by someone they knew and were treated heartlessly by the police. It’s called karma.
The book also starts out with a lot of vomited backstory, mainly the history of the FBI’s profiling unit and Robert Ressler’s involvement. Like most men in this field, he assumes that it was mostly him that got all of this done. 🙁
Most of the cases in this book were prominent cases like Bundy and Gacy. Those have been done to death. There’s nothing new here and it’s been done better elsewhere.
Ressler also includes a lot of gruesome details in his book which were completely unnecessary and offered little to no insight into the case or the killer at all. So why include them and put the victims’ families through that? For money, honey.
One of the worst things about this book is the way Ressler blames the families of the killers. When Ressler and Douglas went around to prisons interviewing serial killers they made a very dumb assumption: that everything they told them was fact and not fiction. So when these serial killers blamed their mothers or fathers, Ressler and Douglas took it as fact when it was most likely fiction. That makes me wonder if there is any truth in their profiling techniques at all. Ressler himself states “this view has fallen out of favor with current psychologists”. Well of course it has.
In the middle of the book are about eight photos which include two photos of victims that were needlessly graphic. Shame on the author for doing that and shame on the publisher for publishing it.
0 out of 10 stars. I wouldn’t recommend this trash to anyone.
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