John Lennon's death

[CptColumbo]

FBI profiler John Douglas is also interesting, even if he's a bit full of himself and not the greatest wordsmith. Roy Hazelwood is another profiler worth reading, if you can stomach it.

I found Douglas' last book Anyone You Want Me to Be, to be his best work to date. This might be because he didn't write it with Mark Olshaker (I may have gotten the spelling wrong). Douglas does seem to recap his career, and his importance to the FBI and Profiling in his earlier books. He keeps telling the story of when he nearly died tracking the "Green River Killer." However, I think some of that may be an attempt to make a book where you don't have to read his first (Mindhunters)to learn about his qualifications and his experiences.

The Cases That Haunt Us is a good read for any skeptics of conspiracy theories.

 

[Piggy]

In some investigations, the investigators themselves become prone to CT explanations, if their biases are strong enough.

Take the Wayne Williams case. There were many involved in the case (which, btw, was recently re-opened and had to be closed again when no new evidence was found) who believed that the killer must have been white, and the Klan was likely involved.

Yet this made no sense. Given the locations and circumstances of these kids' disappearances, and the fact that they continued even after the community had been alerted, it was extremely unlikely that a white man was (or white men were) walking off with these boys.

But race relations being what they are/were, and given a strong popular feeling that a black man would not be kidnapping and killing black kids, plus the even-then-predominant public image of a serial killer as a white man, many investigators remained highly resistant to the theory that the killer could be black. And there are some who still hold to this bias.

In the case of Danny Harold Rolling's murders, which occurred in Gainesville Florida while I was living there, early suspicion focused on a mentally unstable young man named Ed Humphrey. Even after Rolling was apprehended, his campsite searched, and his self-recorded audio tapes listened to, there were some investigators who were reluctant to let go of the Humphrey theory, to the extent that they conjured up a totally unsupported two-man theory which posited that these loners -- one local, one a transient; one mildly disturbed, one obviously psychopathic -- somehow teamed up for the crimes.