History's most notorious and brutal killers still enjoy fame as public fascination with their lives and their crimes continues to grow. Stone Cold Souls is a detailed examination of the most brutal killers in history. Moffatt does what he does best by looking at historical accounts of events, analyzing them from a psychological perspective, and presenting his assessment in captivating fashion. He examines different types of killers, offers case studies and historical context, and describes what sets these cases apart from other kinds of killings. Even in a day and age where pop culture has made serial crime a mainstay of movies and books, the depravity of the killers profiled in this work will still shock even a desensitized reader.
Men, women, and children alike have committed crimes so atrocious that it is hard to imagine that these events are not works of fiction. Moffatt examines the difficult questions that inevitably arise when one reads cases of unthinkable torture and cruelty. Why? Were these people simply evil or is it possible that, given other circumstances, they could have redirected their energies into more productive outlets? The author answers these questions and others and reveals the lives and crimes of these ruthless killers.
Stone Cold Souls features such well-known cases as: Andrei Chikatilo, Marc Dutroux, Herman Webster Mudgett, Charles Ng, Leonard Lake, Lawrence Bittaker, Roy Norris, Ed Gein, Edmund Kemper, Henry Lee Lucas, Gilles de Rais, Ivan the Terrible, Richard Ramirez, Holly Ann Harvey, Sandy Ketchum, Mary Bell, Jesse Pomeroy, Josef Mengele, Marshall Applewhite, Jeffrey Lundgren, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Father Oliver O'Grady, Charles Cullin, Harold Shipman, Michael Swango, Myra Hindley, Karla Homolka, Aileen Carol Lee Wuornos, Elizabeth Bathory, Charles Sobhraj, Albert Fish, Donald Harvey, and Dennis Rader.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Chapter One The Quest for Reasons
Chapter Two Ghost Stories and Torture Chambers
Chapter Three Murder for Sport: Serial Killers
Chapter Four Running With the Devil
Chapter Five Tainted Virtue: Young Killers
Chapter Six Primum Non Nocere: Josef Mengele
Chapter Seven Treasonous Guardians
Chapter Eight Beauty Becomes the Beast
Chapter Nine A Deadly Claim To Fame: Media Seekers
Chapter Ten The Margins of Existence: The Search for a Coherent Theory of Malevolence
Bibliography
About the Author :
Gregory K. Moffatt is a college professor, author, newspaper columnist and public speaker. He is a licensed therapist who is Nationally Board Certified in Traumatic Stress, specializing in child sexual abuse and trauma. Dr. Moffatt has served as a regular lecturer at the FBI Academy, a profiler with the Atlanta Cold Case Squad, and a consultant to numerous airlines, businesses, and schools. He has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX news, as well as America's Most Wanted. He is the author of The Parenting Journey (Praeger, 2004), Wounded Innocents and Fallen Angels (Praeger, 2003), A Violent Heart (Praeger, 2002), and Blind-Sided (Praeger, 2000).
Review :
Moffatt successfully mixes a series of comprehensive overviews of homicide, and integrates examples from both the 'celebrity' killers and from his own work and reflection. The author usefully begins with a relation of standard applications of human motivation to extreme crime, neatly linking the popular conceptions of true crime in the media with actual, profound human motivation. This element of people-watching and objective analysis proves to be most worthwhile when Moffatt warms to his theme and recounts the life and work of several killers through the centuries. Stone Cold Souls is a fascinating and enlightening read for all kinds of reasons, and will be of interest across several academic disciplines, as well as for the general reader.
