Into the Minds of Madmen: How the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit Revolutionized Crime Investigation.

Into the Minds of Madmen: How the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit Revolutionized Crime Investigation Don DeNevi and John H. Campbell Prometheus Books www.prometheusbooks.com 483 pp., $28

Why are we fascinated with stories of serial killers and other bizarre criminals, flocking to movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal? Is it to experience, briefly, a world of evil and madness before going back to our normal lives?

In Into the Minds of Madmen, we meet people who have spent their lives studying this world but do not have the luxury of escaping it when they go home at night. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) used psychology, psychiatry, and other disciplines to capture this country's most prolific and horrific criminals, including murderers, rapists, child molesters, and arsonists. Clarice Starling, the plucky heroine of The Silence of the Lambs, was a BSU agent.

The FBI asked these authors--Don DeNevi, a former criminal justice professor, and John H. Campbell, a former BSU chief--to write the official history of the BSU. In tiffs book, the authors have condensed the 600-page history they prepared for the bureau to a briefer version for the general public.

Do not expect a recounting of the captures and trials of the most infamous serial killers, such as Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. This book focuses on the profilers--the agents whose job is to t enter the minds of these madmen. Using mostly primary sources, such as personal recollections from past and present BSU agents, DeNevi and Campbell demystify their work.

In the early 1970s when murder rates, especially serial killings, were soaring, J. Edgar Hoover established the BSU as a teaching and research center to train local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in using the behavioral sciences to identify criminals and determine their motives. Profiling--or "criminal investigative analysis," as it is now called--began informally as a teaching tool. Students brought unsolved cases to class, and the instructors created psychological profiles of the killers.

Some of these profiles helped catch murderers, and the BSU faculty began receiving requests from around the country and the world to assist law enforcement. Soon, the unit was nationally and internationally recognized as the premier investigative and research facility for solving "unsolvable," motiveless, serial murders.

The authors describe the gruesome and incomprehensible, but "garden variety," cases the BSU faced every day: two women, four houses apart, both shot in the head and mutilated, the bodies showing evidence of cannibalism; a rural Virginia housekeeper, shot three times in the head and handcuffed, found dead in a motel room; a disabled young woman strangled, beaten, mutilated, and posed suggestively, found on the roof of her apartment building; five women, similar in appearance, stabbed and drowned, found several months apart in a wooded area outside a Baltimore apartment complex.

Among the BSU agents we meet is Howard "Bud" Teten, an ex-Marine and Korean War veteran, who is considered the "godfather" of criminal profiling. He combined crime-scene analysis and psychology to create the FBI training course "Applied Criminology," which expanded the theoretical bases of psychological profiling and led to its current form.

We also get to know the unit's premier profilers, who took profiling from theory to FBI discipline. Robert Ressler, a man described as having a herculean constitution for dealing with a constant barrage of horrific crime-scene images, helped create the criminal personality profiling program and computer software to assist BSU agents in collecting and analyzing violent crimes. Both are still in use today. He also inspired characters in novels by Mary Higgins Clark, the films Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs and the TV shows The X-Files and Profiler. Ressler and his partner John Douglas conducted the first survey of criminal minds and interviewed the most infamous murderers of the 1970s and 1980s, including Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, and John Wayne Gacy.

There is also the requisite office jokester. Russell Vorpagel, who used levity to deal with the stresses of BSU work. Of his many pranks, his most memorable in elude faking slitting his own throat, with a real knife and fake blood, and pretending to drop nitroglycerin on the floor in front of a classroom full of police officers.

An FBI reorganization in 1986 moved criminal profiling out of the BSU to the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime. Today, the unit is still an instructional component of the FBI's training division. However, the authors write, until profiling is returned to the BSU's core mission, the unit is incomplete.

The lives and work of these unsung heroes are compelling. Unfortunately, the book lacks narrative cohesion, and poor editing distracts from the profilers' stories. In some places, transitions are poor or nonexistent, and the authors introduce people and events without elaborating.

That is a pity, but it is not fatal. If you are a fan of movies and TV shows that delve into the minds of serial killers, you will forgive the book these faults. I recommend it for a rainy day--with a nice Chianti and some fava beans, of course.

BOBBIE S. NEAL is a legal research attorney with the ATLA Exchange.