The Cases That Haunt Us; John Douglas & Mark Olshaker

I won’t lie, I got this book because I am fascinated about true crime; particularly the mindset of these offenders and serial killers. So, of course, I wanted to read the famed “Mindhunter’s” take on a series of cases that are, for all intents and purposes, unsolved to this day.  The authors do a great job of analyzing the facts available for these cases, and provide a brief overlook on the kind of person and criminal who would perpetrate such a crime, along with what a law enforcement official would need to do, or look for, before and after the case in order to apprehend the offender. And, for the most part, this book did not disappoint in that regard. I found the authors straight forward—if sometimes dry—presentation to be illuminating when it came to the kind of behaviors and motives that particular killers would show, or how police could have found them “back in the day” had things been different. But, sometimes, one of the authors does let his bias and ego show too much for my tastes.

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This bias mainly shines in the final case of the book. Out of all the other crimes the author discussed, this was the only one they were personally brought in on to investigate long before it was a cold case. One of the authors met with the victims/accused families and interviewed them, and often spent large sections personally debunking other named officials on the case. While I understand the authors ego—for many years they had to fight to be taken as a serious science in the FBI—this was the only case where I found it to be overbearing. The rest of the cases (outside of a brief chapter where they go over multiple serial killers and don’t give a clear profile) didn’t have the overabundance of ego that this final case did. I still enjoyed the book, but it does read more like a textbook then some of the other true crime books I’ve read that focus on a single case/perpetrator. Which works very well for research purposes, which is what I was mainly using this book for. So, while I did enjoy deep diving into some of these famous cases, because I found one chapter to be fairly unnecessary and the final case to be too much of an obvious bias and ego for my liking, I’m giving this book 3.5 stars.