ShadowMan
An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling
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4.0 • 23 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Mindhunter crossed with American Gothic. This chilling story has the ghostly unease of a nightmare."—Michael Cannell, author of Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling
The pulse-pounding account of the first time in history that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit created a psychological profile to catch a serial killer
On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of their tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow.
The largest manhunt in Montana’s history ensued, led by the FBI. As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea: What if criminals left a psychological trail that would lead us to them? Patrick Mullany, a trained psychologist, and Howard Teten, a veteran criminologist, had created the Behavioral Science Unit to explore this new "voodoo" they called “criminal profiling.”
At Dunbar’s request, Mullany and Teten built the FBI’s first profile of an unknown subject: the UnSub who had snatched Susie Jaeger and, a few months later, a nineteen-year-old waitress. When a suspect was finally arrested, the profile fit him to a T...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exceptional true crime account, Franscell (The Darkest Night) tells the fascinating story of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit's early days and the very first psychological profile used to catch a killer. In the summer of 1973, six-year-old Susie Jaeger was taken from her tent at a family campsite in a Montana state park. Nine months later, FBI special agent Pete Dunbar and his team discovered human remains near the park of a missing young woman and a small girl. Dunbar went to Quantico to ask two agents who taught a course in profiling to create a profile of the unknown suspect in the Jaeger case. Using clues from the crime scene and the investigation, they predicted he would be a white male, a military veteran, a loner—and that Susie wasn't his first kill. One suspect who fit the bill was David Meirhofer, known as an "oddball," but he passed three lie detector tests, and it wasn't until body parts were found in his freezer that he confessed to four kidnapping and killings, including Susie's. The profile also predicted he could be suicidal. In September of 1974, Meirhofer died by suicide while in jail. Franscell's portrait of rural Montana will remind many of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and the way he weaves together the threads of the different killings is spellbinding. This is a must for Mindhunter fans.
