Profiler Roy Hazelwood is the world's leading expert on the strangest
and most dangerous of all aberrant offenders--the sexual criminal. In
Dark Dreams he reveals the twisted motives and perverse thinking that
go into the most reprehensible crimes. He also catalogs the innovative
and remarkably effective techniques--techniques that he helped pioneer
at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit--that allow Law Enforcement agents
to construct psychological profiles of the offenders who comit them.
Hazelwood has helped track down some of the most violent and well known
criminals in modern history; in Dark Dreams he takes readers into his
world--a sinister world inhabited by scores of dangerous offenders for
every Roy Hazelwood who would put them behind bars. These are sexual
sadists, serial rapists, child molesters, and serial killers. The cases
he describes are as shocking as they are perplexing; their resolutions
are as fascinating as they are innovative:
* A young woman disappears from the convenience store where she works.
Her body is later found in a field, strapped to a makeshift St. Andrew's
Cross and mutilated beyond description. Who committed this heinous
crime? And why?
* A teenager's corpse is found hanging in a storm sewer. His clothes
are neatly folded by the entrance and a stopwatch lies in the grime
beneath him. Is he the victim of a bizarre, ritualistic murder . . . or
an elaborate masturbatory fantasy gone awry?
* A married couple, driving with their toddler in the back seat, pick
up a female hitchhiker. They kidnap her and for seven years keep her in
a box under their bed as a sexual slave. The wife had agreed to this
inhuman arrangement in exchange for a second child. Who was to blame?
But as gruesome as the crimes are and as unsettling as the odds seem,
Hazelwood, writing with veteran journalsit Stephen Michaud, proves that
the right amounts of determination and logic can bring even the most
cunning and devious criminals to justice.
Dark Dreams is a 2002 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.
