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An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling
by Ron Franscell
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...
"In this exceptional true crime account, Franscell 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...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A thrilling book about the lengths to which investigators went to catch an elusive killer and a pivotal moment in the history of criminal investigation." - Library Journal
"Ron Franscell has written criminal profiling's origin story, an urgent and obsessive true-crime tale that transcends the genre. ShadowMan ramps up to an almost unbearable pitch, Mindhunter crossed with 'American Gothic.' This chilling story has the ghostly unease of a nightmare—as atmospheric and unnerving a story as you'll ever read." - Michael Cannell, author of Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling
"If any modern crime writer should bear the mantle of the late, great Jack Olsen it is Ron Franscell. He's one of our most provocative authors in any genre...Here, he does his usual splendid job of weaving fear, monstrosity, and place into a vivid, harrowing story about an epic moment in forensic history. Nobody does it better." - Dr. Vincent DiMaio, celebrated medical examiner and author of Forensic Pathology
"A thrill ride through the entangled brutality and brilliance that gave birth to one of the FBI's most intriguing forensic tools: criminal profiling." - John Douglas, legendary FBI profiler and author of Mindhunter
This information about ShadowMan was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ron Franscell is the acclaimed author of 18 books and has been hailed as one of America's best narrative nonfiction writers. A journalist who has covered war and natural disasters abroad, he wrote the international true-crime bestsellers The Darkest Night and the 2017 Edgar finalist Morgue: A Life in Death. His debut book Angel Fire—a USA Today bestselling literary novel about two brothers and the wounds of war—was listed by the San Francisco Chronicle among the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century West.
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