Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

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Well, Mr. Ressler, you’re the criminal profiler. You’re the FBI. You figure it out.”– John Wayne Gacy The following post contains a number of insightful interpretations of the aphorism in question: What did Nietzsche mean by monsters and the abyss? That being said, I find it slightly disturbing that my copy of this book, which has been so well-read that it is falling to pieces, has come through inter-library loan from my local prison. My county doesn't have any other copies of this book.

Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters

This is one of the classics - for good reason as it turns out - and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it's held up. First published in 1993, by someone whose career was primarily in the 70s and 80s, there are some things you just don't expect to be handled as well as they were. And though some of the phrasing and the occasional idea have definitely dated, there's also a surprising effort here to discount some old prejudices. All things fall into the abyss. All material things will pass away, biological matter included, brains and apes with opposable thumbs too will succumb to the abyss. The abyss is the only thing that is real when measured against eternity, eternity is the abyss and it sits just beyond our senses as the shapeless, lightless watcher of all things in all peoples, places and events. It’s in the abyss that we are all one. It’s in the abyss that all matter is suspended and observed. The secret watcher of all things is the abyss. The abyss is the entire universe.First, it could have been far better organized. The last 1/2 of the book read/ felt as all over the place for various profiling past cases and proclivities rationalizations. All types of tangent projections that are difficult to connote as "group" too. NOT in the classes of "organized" and "disorganized" murderers. That parsing to description was excellent. And Ressler was one of the first who described each. Ressler's visit to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico to investigate the still-active feminicides occurring there served as inspiration for the character Albert Kessler in Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. [8] Thankfully you don’t need years of meditative practice to experience a realisation of nothingness you can just read this article here and intellectualise the experience. You are nothing doing something. Indeed it can be argued that the entire universe is ‘nothing doing something.’ And probably a similar concept applies to the abyss. One might think of an observer as a neutral position, but actually observing is quite an active activity, where you engage with a thing on it's own terms not trying to insert yourself in the situation but just focusing on what the other is doing. Ressler really knows what he's talking about when it comes to violent offenders. He had a certain way with them that he could build a rapport with a few of them and get information from the as to what motivated them (when they were willing to cooperate, that is). I liked his insights not only into their minds, but his thoughts on the criminal justice system as a whole. I was put off by his unrepentant crowing about being an undercover plant in anti-war groups during the Vietnam War, but was heartened to hear his thoughts on why the Death Penalty doesn't actually do anything constructive. And yeah, I was super fascinated by his personal stories of interactions with people like Gacy, Dahmer, and Kemper. He did a good job of not glamorizing them, while also reminding the reader that the darkness in these men came from somewhere, and that it's a disservice to merely write them off as monsters.

a monster by Why, according to Nietzsche, is becoming a monster by

You see the mind is a very dark place, as limitless as the universe, having no real shape or form, it’s an abyss that we all come from and return to when we die. The abyss is where the quintessential and direct experience of living can be found, it is the bottomless pit that all sensations and thoughts are poured into. It can never be filled and attempts to do so are the root of all human behaviours and patterns of activity. The search for meaning is to try and fill the abyss. Alongside fellow criminal profilers John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood, the experience was being gained in a new method of catching criminals. Upon reflection, police officers and criminal investigators had been using profiling techniques for many years without realizing it. The visual analysis of a crime scene, the logical sequence of events, and the presence or absence of certain characteristics; all have been used to help understand a criminal and their motives.

Ressler pressed forward regardless and continued to focus his attention on serial killers, calling his methods criminal profiling. In 1974 he received a promotion to Supervisory Special Agent and was assigned to the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico. You Think You Know Me: The True Story of Herb Baumeister and the Horror at Fox Hollow Farm (True Crime)“You Think You Know Me is a chilling account of Herb Baumeister and one of the most mysterious true crime stories in American history. Herb Baumeister would be alleged to have killed at least ten men along the Interstate 70 between Indiana and Ohio, and coined the “I-70 Strangler”.” Just before his execution in 1989, Bundy confessed to 30 murders but the true count of his victims remains unknown. There has even been speculation for many years that 15-year-old Ted Bundy may have been responsible for the disappearance of 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr, who lived in the sameTacoma, Washington neighborhood in 1961. He felt Jeffery Dahmer was not of sound mind at the time of his crimes. He lived in a fantasy world where he wanted to have a compliant and submissive partner.