Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

Interesting book for those interested in why serial killers do what they do. It goes through the childhood and into the formal years of these people (about 10) and examines their childhood, murders, and why they did it. I've read another of this guy's books and it too was great. The books are pretty gruesome and shouldn't be read by young adults w/o the parents looking at it first. Based off of interviews with the killers themselves.

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.

I liked the book, it was a very easy read and went by much too quickly. I enjoyed it.. it could have been longer and included even more about the case files than it did. It felt very condensed. It did have many cases I expected to see but much to my suprise a few I did not expect.
a good book, not great, but worth a look :)

Please, if you are looking for accurate information, do not rely on this book! It is full of inconsistancies and inaccuracies. It's unfortunate that the authors and editors made so many obvious errors, since researching these crimes is quite easy.