SOC 2220 Criminology (Assignment)

After twenty-five years of investigating, analyzing, and interviewing serial killers, their family members, neighbors, and even surviving victims, Jack Levin has become one of the world’s most respected experts on the motivations and modus operandi of dangerous criminals. In this gripping book, he taps his wealth of experience with the criminal mind to offer lessons for law enforcement and the general public about how serial killers think, as well as the conditions under which hideous murders typically occur.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the confidante of a serial killer? Herman Martin had the odd fate of living next to Jeffrey Dahmer in prison. Dahmer killed 17 people but, when he moved in next to Martin, he became a neighbor, not a killer. Step inside the mind and the soul of a man the world called a monster; a killer so famous he received more mail than any other inmate in history. Those letter writers were seeking what Herman became privy to. They wanted to know how the killing machine was built. They wanted to know if he was remorseful and whether he had tried to stop. They wanted to know his worries as a human being. Herman Martin became a confidante to all these answers as he crawled to the edge of an open vent that connected their cells and talked with Dahmer. Patricia Lorenz is the spiritual writer who helped him make sense of it all and, 15 years later, reveal the answers.

In 1974, Dennis Lynn Rader stalked and murdered a family of four in Wichita, Kansas. Since adolescence, he had read about serial killers and imagined becoming one. Soon after killing the family, he murdered a young woman and then another, until he had ten victims. He named himself "B.T.K." (bind, torture, kill) and wrote notes that terrorized the city. He remained on the loose for thirty years. No one who knew him guessed his dark secret. He nearly got away with his crimes, but in 2004, he began to play risky games with the police. He made a mistake. When he was arrested, Rader's family, friends, and coworkers were shocked to discover that B.T.K. had been among them, going to work, raising his children, and acting normal. This case stands out both for the brutal treatment of victims and for the ordinary public face that Rader, a church council president, had shown to the outside world. Through jailhouse visits, telephone calls, and written correspondence, Katherine Ramsland worked with Rader himself to analyze the layers of his psyche. Using his drawings, letters, interviews, and Rader's unique codes, she presents in meticulous detail the childhood roots and development of one man's motivation to stalk, torture, and kill. She reveals aspects of the dark motivations of this most famous of living serial killers that have never before been revealed. In this book Katherine Ramsland presents an intelligent, original, and rare glimpse into the making of a serial killer and the potential darkness that lives next door.

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was "a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer." She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania,